by Jeff Kitchen
Seeing other movies is a great form of research. Studying everything within your genre can help you begin to “speak the language” of that type of movie. Video Hound’s Golden Movie Retriever is a great resource for finding movies on a particular topic. Movies are sorted into categories with headings such as (in the Rs) Roaring ’20s, Robots/Androids, Rock Stars on Film, Rodeos, Role Reversal, and so on. If you’re writing, say, a spy story and want to see other films in the genre, the book list hundreds of them, and even indicate those considered to be the best.
Focus Your Research
Do some work with the 36 Dramatic Situations, Dilemma, Crisis, Decision & Action, Resolution, and Theme before getting into serious Research. Then you’ll have more of a sense of what you’re up to as a storyteller, allowing you to target the research rather than taking a scattershot approach. This is not only time-efficient but also more focused. William Thompson Price said, “The Theme points like a finger post to the Material, to the field from which you are to supplement your experience and philosophy.”
Hold Your Story Ideas in Suspension
One of a trained dramatist’s habits of mind is to be plastic and flexible, always on the lookout for something that might enhance, complete, or crystallize a story. Think of the possibilities that might fall in your lap as you explore your material. Pouring the story’s structure in concrete too soon can cut you off from unforeseen and vibrant alternatives. Price’s words on this topic provide excellent guidance. Here he discusses research in The Philosophy of Dramatic Principle and Method:
Sound your Theme and Material to the bottom before determining upon your play. If you gain the idea for it, hold it in reserve, awaiting the possible chance for something better. The idea will inevitably be modified or improved in some manner. There may be hundreds of plays in that Material so why take the first thing that occurs to you? You may get a great drama instead of a superficial one by questioning and cross-questioning everything. At least you will get substance rather than shadow . . . nothing in details, or absolutely in outline can be fixed until you have taken all your bearings and sounded all the possibilities. . . . The deeper you go, the more suggestive the facts.
This wise advice speaks to holding all in suspension as you develop a script by trying on various combinations and configurations. You’re not married to any one path until you’ve tried them all and found what truly works for your plot. In his book The Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle, Price gives the following advice on gathering together your research material:
The real dramatist goes to real life. He will find everything there waiting for him; he does not create everything, he adapts it. . . . Go back, then, to nature for your Material, and trust to your art to make use of it. The minerals in the mines have to be delved for. No miner can manufacture gold, and no dramatist can create human nature. Your play must have substance. . . . What a trivial vanity it is that some authors have that they must “create” everything, spin it out of their brains without recourse to the facts of the world. . . . Cease mere dreaming and empty imaginings and reach out your hand for the Material that lies about you in abundance. . . . The trained dramatic mind is occupied much longer in gathering the Material and in constructing the play, shaping his material, than in the actual writing. How long or short it requires to “write” a play is immaterial, but if we assume that a year is given to it, three fourths of that time had best be applied to the preliminary research and thought.
Price isn’t saying you ought to spend nine months out of that year researching, but that you can spend this much time working out, planning, developing, and structuring a script. Part of that time includes research. He emphasizes that you can take all the time that normally goes into rewrites and put it into engineering your script properly before you write it.
Know When to Stop
Research can be utterly crucial to developing a story, but don’t fall into the trap of endless research, which can become a means of avoiding the writing itself. You may love your material so much that you don’t want to stop steeping yourself in it. You may even establish lifelong fascinations through research on subjects in which you previously had no interest—that’s another exciting thing about writing. But sometimes you just have to wrest yourself out of the research stage and get on with building your script. You can always go back to reading later on.
Bear in mind that some stories require little or no research. Stephen King says he often needs just enough information to lie colorfully. Gather information if you need it, but don’t get too caught up in it. You’re the creator, so do whatever you want—bend or twist anything you need. It’s just a movie. Remember the great old saying, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
Don’t Limit Yourself to “Write What You Know”
Good research also leads you away from the fallacy that you should write only what you know. Such thinking is a cruel trap. We write because we want to create. Don’t let some writing teacher steer you back to your own closed loop for story material. You may have lived an interesting life, but don’t get stuck rehashing it. You can learn virtually anything you want or need for writing outside your personal experience, especially now that information is more readily available than ever before. If you want to write about building rockets and you don’t know the first thing about it, then go out and learn. Read for months if that’s what it takes. Peruse the Internet. Talk to experts. If you can, go to a lab that builds rockets. Make it into an adventure. This is not being stuck with the same old stuff or breathing the same old air—it’s the ecstatic freedom of creating.
Be passionate about refusing these limits, as is the author of the following article on this very subject. One of my former students, a vice president at a Hollywood film studio, thought this article should be reprinted every month in Variety to remind the industry of its point. It’s called “Doom Eager: Writing What We Need to Know,” by Seattle-based director and playwright Steven Dietz.
PETEY (broken): Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!
—Harold Pinter,
The Birthday Party (1958)
“Write about what you know.” The words echo down from above us with the authority of soldiers. The words sit on our laps as we stare at our typewriters. They fester inside us like a computer virus left over from a well-meaning mentor. “Write about what you know.” A cunning phrase, which takes a moment to utter and can take a lifetime to overcome.
Obviously, every playwright writes out of personal experience in either a direct or oblique manner, whether consciously or unconsciously. At its most innocent, the “stick to what you know” admonition provides a sort of creative comfort. It is a way of saying, “Yes, there are interesting, important things about your life that you can relate to others. Trust that and tell your stories.” I am not worried about the harmless, cheerleading use of this phrase. But I hear it used in the theatre with increasing regularity for a different purpose. I hear it used to censor playwrights.
If you’ve been present at discussions of new plays, or involved in the developmental process in any way, you have heard statements not unlike the following: “Who are you, a heterosexual man, to write about the love between two women?” “Who are you, a black woman, to write about the patriarchal Native American culture?” “Who are you, a well-to-do kid from Seattle, to write about the struggles of immigrants in the Rio Grande valley?” “Who are you, an aging white man, to write about the experiences of inner-city black youth?” Stick to your own life is the implication. Your life is the sole palette from which you may draw your material. So learn that. Learn to stay on your side of the creative yellow line. In our bohemian smugness, it never occurs to us that this is, in any way, censorship. Far from it. In fact, we’ve become experts at making this attitude a virtue. Instead of censorship, it is called “sensitivity.” It is called “multicultural awareness.” Most frighteningly, it is called “politically correct.” And, as often as not, these who-are-you-to-be-w
ritingthat comments are not coming from audience members who find something unpleasing or offensive about the given play—these words are coming from workers in the profession, from directors, dramaturges, actors and incredibly, other playwrights. I believe that uttering these words to a playwright is tantamount to becoming the small-minded, censor-happy goons that we so vocally abhor.
We cannot have the ethics of our creativity both ways. We cannot on one hand support and pursue the long overdue call for nontraditional casting, and on the other hand tell playwrights that their sex, age, race, creed, sexual preference and physical condition determines the kind of plays they can write. We cannot, belatedly, rail against the politics of the National Endowment for the Arts, and in the same breath tell a writer that a given topic is the exclusive province of someone else. We cannot wear Rushdie on our sleeve and Helms in our heart. That is not “awareness.” That is fear. What we fear is that we may be surprised by what we find buried in the unfamiliar; that our cherished and entrenched beliefs may be put in danger; or, perhaps, that we may discover, in others, similarities to ourselves. We must remember that the theatre only shines when it pries at the locked door, when in dares to look fear in the face.
What better way to begin to close the distance between our various communities (ethnic, religious, political, sexual) than by opening doors and venturing in? Where is the long overdue call for nontraditional playwriting? What value is there in taking refuge in the idea that “I’ll never know how a woman/man thinks. I’ll never know how a black, or a white, or an Hispanic or an Asian person thinks. I’ll never know how a gay, or a straight, or a lesbian, or a bisexual person thinks. I’ll never know what it’s like to be a veteran, or a Native American, or a mother, or a white supremacist, or a brain surgeon, or a spy, or an Olympic athlete, or a communist, or a dock worker, or an anti-abortion activist, or Jewish/Catholic/Muslim, or a disabled person, or a southerner, or an orphan, or a high-fashion model, or an eighteenth-century poet, or a feminist, or a foreign visitor, or the Amish, or a Republican, or a person with a terminal illness, or a father, or the homeless.” No, perhaps you won’t. But be advised that you have chosen a profession in which it is your mandate to be an explorer, not a curator, of your society. A profession which is to be questioned, as Brecht said, “not about whether it manages to interest the spectator in buying a ticket, but about whether it manages to interest him in the world.”
Our integrity, not merely as artists but as citizens of the world, centers on engaging in dialogue with the “out there,” probing the parts of our world that are foreign to us. Only through this sort of active engagement will we begin to approach “awareness.” Only through dialogue, and not entrenchment, will we arrive at a truly “multicultural” art form. We will get nowhere by waiting for others to address our burning questions, with the cunning rationalization that the topic is better served by someone else. That doesn’t wash. Never did, never will. We learn only when we lean into, not away from, our questions.
The signal we must send is this: Yes, certainly, “write about what you know,” but, should the spirit move you, be brave enough to “write about what you need to know.” Write about cultures that mystify you, write absolutely everything you think about the opposite sex, write about strangers who intrigue you, write with gusto about the people you will never meet, write with abandon about anything outside of your experience that fascinates, frightens, inspires, angers or seduces you. “But how do I know what they’re thinking?” You’re a writer. You guess. You invent their lives and action with as much truth and passion as you can summon. You make your case and you await the verdict of the audience, of critics, of your peers. At that point is when they should have their say about the value of your attempt, and not before. At that point they should have every opportunity to question, praise, denounce, inform, trash, prize, badmouth, bless, boycott, emulate or burn your work. At that point you may bask in the realization that you have broadened your horizons and those of your community. Or you may find out that you were just dead wrong. And that, too, will teach you something. Attempts, not results, are the only sacred things in the theatre.
So be “doom eager.” Wrestle with what is uncertain to you. Venture into those places that the world tells you belong to someone else. Did you get into theatre to think small? Did you become a writer so other people could tell you what to do? Do not let anyone, no matter their title or position, no matter their notoriety, no matter the cause or people they are championing, tell you what you are allowed to write. We risk the greatest loss when we allow our questions to be made smaller.
“Nothing can stop progress in the American theatre except the workers themselves,” Robert Edmund Jones wrote in 1941. Nearly fifty years later, those words shine like a beacon.
It’s so easy these days to allow yourself to be told what you can or cannot do to succeed, and the film industry is full of people eager to do both. Take the time to get in touch with your own voice as a writer and then stick to it—a distinct voice is highly prized in screenwriters. Skill and confidence make for an unbeatable army. Figure out what you really want in the world—many people are frightened to acknowledge their deepest desires—and go for it with all your energy. Find the stories that you’re moved to tell and don’t let anybody steer you away from them, no matter what. And remember: There’s no better research than a life lived fully.
USING BRAINSTORMING TO EXPLORE POSSIBILITIES AND SHATTER STORY LIMITS
At the end of your research you should feel super-saturated, as though you’re loaded with great material and you’ve really covered the territory. This is a good time to get into Brainstorming. Brainstorming is the vigorous and explosive exploration of all the various possibilities in a plot. While in some ways you’re brainstorming at any given point in the development of a story, once you’ve acquired a specialized knowledge your brainstorming can really take off. How can you brainstorm about a rocket-building story without any concept of what’s involved?
Stretch the envelope as far as you can. Explore each idea in every possible direction, no matter how farfetched it may seem. Experts in creativity say that people who solve age-old problems often try out a crazy idea that works unexpectedly. Other people may have had the idea before but never went all the way with it. As a writer, you should have a healthy imagination. Give it free reign. Remember, the key word in the entertainment industry is outrageousness.
The trick to brainstorming is to let your brain explode like popcorn. Does certain music kindle your inner fire? Do certain writers inspire you? Does watching a favorite movie set your mind racing? Whatever gets you going, light that rocket and let it run rampant. Don’t edit yourself to death, but let it flow, let it erupt. If you force it to come out clean and organized, then you’re slowing that creativity down to a trickle. Just get it all down on paper—you can sort it out later. The emphasis is on freedom, inventiveness, spontaneity. Let new ideas and untried possibilities bubble up, even if they don’t make sense. It can be like surfing a giant wave. Just get on it and ride. If you’re lucky, you may have ten ideas per second pouring out of your brain for hours on end.
Why not go out dancing to live music when you’ve got a new story in your head. The movement and physical violence of wild dancing stokes your energy and charges your spirit. It can bring both you and your story to life so that your story becomes alive, breathing, challenging, moving, ecstatic. It’s so rare to be roaring wild in this modern, domesticated world! (I write to hardcore punk music, and it pumps me up in a way that nothing else even comes close to.) Music and movement can make you see things in a whole new way. It’s the total opposite of sitting in a chair and trying to think wild. Some people say they can’t create unless they move—they have to dance an idea into existence.
INCUBATING IDEAS AND LETTING YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS PERCOLATE
At a certain point in brainstorming, you burn out. This signals a good time to give your brain a rest. Let the ideas settle in your mind. Escaping from the intensity
of your work, both mentally and physically, is an important part of the creative process. Get away from your desk and take a bike ride or a walk on the beach. Use your body and rest your mind, and solutions will simmer and steep until ready. The conscious mind can be like a radio voice that just yammers on endlessly. Switch it off and let things incubate.
Your subconscious mind is a powerful creative entity, and when it gets some computing time to itself it can offer up amazing poetic results. Give your subconscious a chance to think. Ideas can bubble up that you might never have thought of consciously. For this to happen, you must be able to get out of your own way, so to speak. Because you’ve focused so much attention on your story, the lyrical genius of your subconscious knows what you’re trying to create. Given a chance, it will feed you ideas. You may have a dream, a random thought percolating up from nowhere, an auditory hallucination, or coincidental things appearing before you in print. This is your subconscious providing you with solutions. Learn to relax and open up to it. Being receptive is essential to developing a creative vision.
DOUBLE-CHECKING WHAT YOU’VE CREATED SO FAR
After using all the tools mentioned so far in this book, step by step, your script has probably come light-years from where it started. But as a story grows, evolves, and morphs, it’s critical to reevaluate and make adjustments, or to entirely revise your plot as needed.