The Art of the Pageplay II

What novelists and story writers can learn from film techniques, Part II

As promised, here is the second post on the Fred Leebron seminar titled, “Narrative Techniques from Film,” from the QueensMFA Professional Development Weekend, which I attended in mid-September. (See The Art of the Pageplay I, which covers the films “Pulp Fiction” and “Vertigo,” for Part I.)

The third film scene Fred covered was from “Hidden Figures:” the pivotal, wrenching bathroom speech delivered by the mathematician Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) when she is confronted by her director at NASA, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) about intermittent absences during the day.

The advice here: As a fiction writer, you have the option to allow your characters to say what they would never allow themselves to say, so do it. And when you do, employ dramatic scene construction, something like a lone African-American woman rushing soaking wet into the middle of a roomful of white men in identical white shirts and black ties, and tonal variation in the dialog, or in this case, monolog, which begins as a panicked confession, then quickly rises to a soulful condemnation of the institutional injustices heaped on women and people of color—of which, of course, Johnson is both—during the 1960s.

The visual power of a scene like this certainly cannot be reproduced in text, but the essential elements can be emulated.

Similarly, we can learn from techniques employed in a haunting scene in the film “Cabaret,” in which innocent and devoted Germans, led by a particularly earnest young man in a Hitler Youth uniform, burst spontaneously into song on a beautiful day at an outdoor café.

The song, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” was written to emulate the patriotic “fatherland” anthems of the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s, and is thus laden with a sense of dread that lies in wicked contrast to the pearly white skin, pressed uniform, and blonde hair of the lead singer and many of the extras who join in.

These unspeakably high stakes are the key to the scene, which reaches its apex in a foreboding chorus of unspeakable tragedy to come. Fred’s message here, that “any good scene reaches beyond itself,” can be buttressed further by an aftermath: in this case, the characters of Brian Roberts (Michael York) and Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) departing the café with Brian asking Max, “Still think you can control them?”

In calling out the utility of film techniques in prose writing, Fred is not alone: This is something Benjamin Percy—among others, I’m sure—did consistently and to great effect in his workshops for years. So take it to heart, and have fun with it.

The Art of the Pageplay I

What novelists and story writers can learn from film techniques, Part I

Read the book, or wait for the movie? An age-old question, to be sure, with an obvious answer: Always do both, and it doesn’t matter what order, because the book will always be better.

(Okay, maybe I’m a little biased, but anyway…)

As promised, here is the first of several posts recounting craft tips from the Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend, which I attended in mid-September. Fred Leebron, the martini-drinking spiritual captain of the Queens program, delivered a seminar he called “Narrative Techniques from Film,” during this year’s weekend, and it was a good one. Bringing the vividness and immediacy of film techniques to your writing practice can be both incredibly powerful and a lot of fun, which is a good way of generating badly needed energy when you’re losing your pep.

Fred showed clips from familiar movies and then talked through the narrative techniques that can be applied to prose writing, particularly fiction writing. In this post, we’ll cover two of those examples, and save two more for a follow-on post.

His first example was the opening scene of the Quentin Tarantino film “Pulp Fiction,” during which the characters of Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and his girlfriend Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) sit in a diner discussing human nature and plotting a crime. 

The action within a fixed space—in this case, a booth in a coffee shop—drives the frenetic tension between the characters by containing it, squeezing it, in a sense. And as the tension grows, the camera angle shifts, first to contrast these criminals with the cherubic vision of the waitress, then to show us the characters’ eyes and contorted faces as they look at each other, all of it reinforcing their strange bond.

All of this can be reproduced in text, as can idiosyncratic dialog. “Syntax causes emotion,” Fred told us, and the syntax of the characters’ lines as they reach the climax of the scene drives not just emotion, but confusion, the ideal combination in a prelude to violence:

Pumpkin: “Bars, liquor stores, gas stations, you get your head blown off sticking up one of them. Restaurants, on the other hand, you catch ‘em with their pants down. They’re not expecting to get robbed. Not as expecting, anyway.”
Honey Bunny: “I bet you could cut down on the hero factor in a place like this.”
Pumpkin: “Correct. Same as banks, these places are insured. Manager. He don’t give a fuck. He’s just trying to get you out the door before you start plugging the diners. Waitresses, fucking forget it. No way they’re taking a bullet for the register. Bus boys, some wetback, getting paid a dollar-fifty an hour, really give a fuck you’re stealing from the owner? Customers sitting there with food in their mouths, they don’t know what’s going on. One minute, they’re having a Denver omelet, next minute, someone’s sticking a gun in their face.”

Create tension by containing the characters, create contrast by shifting the camera angles, drive emotion through syntax—all techniques a writer can employ in text as well as on screen.

From here, we moved on to the Hitchcock classic, “Vertigo,” and the bell tower scene where Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) chases the mysterious Madeleine (Kim Novak) up the bell tower stairs. The scene is, of course, famous for the “Dali counterzoom,” which “stretches” the bell tower visually to inject the reality of Scottie’s vertigo into the viewer. 

While this effect is all but impossible to emulate in print, other aspects of the scene are not, and in fact, are highly suitable to text.

The strength of Scottie’s vertigo in the scene, and the reason Hitchcock felt the need to show it in such a stark fashion, is that it renders Scottie helpless to stop Madeleine from charging up the stairs and plunging to her death. A character incapacitated in this way is the height of drama.

As the scene rolls, and tragedy unfolds, Scottie’s horror—and the horror of what has actually transpired—is corroborated through shifts in point-of-view and the sudden presence of additional characters: a pair of nuns running up the walk, then a priest and groundskeepers scaling a ladder to Madeleine’s body, then the final shift in point-of-view, where the priest appears on one side of the bell tower as Scottie emerges on the other, escaping the scene undetected. Sensory detail within the characters and in the wider scene, and shifts in point of view to make all of it more vivid, are techniques that translate nicely to text.

The next post in the series continues the recap of Fred's seminar on film techniques, taking us through scenes from the Oscar-winning hits "Hidden Figures" and "Cabaret."

Craft and Inspiration – Second Installment

Dispatches from Poets & Writers Live San Francisco, January 2017, Part 2

In the first installment of notes from Poets & Writers Live San Francisco, which I attended the weekend of January 14th and 15th, and which carried the theme Inspiration, we talked about poems on skyscrapers and lycans in the basement. We also passed on a few notes of poetic inspiration and some practical advice to help you enrich and intensify your fiction.

This time, we’ll pass along advice from literary agents, and in a brief, final installment, we’ll share some thoughts from poet and activist Ishmael Reed.

Danielle Svetcov

Danielle Svetcov – Want the Agent? Be the Agent | The Perfect Pitch (Panel)

The millions of us with books in the can who are trying like hell to get them read, we love sessions like this, where insiders—agents in this case; sometimes editors and publishers, too—give us the inside scoop. Because the fact is, almost every published writer will tell of a path to publication that includes a session just like this one, where the connection is made with the gatekeeper face-to-face, and that few minutes of the gatekeeper’s time leads to an hour, and that hour leads to interest, passion, and the sale of a manuscript.

Jennifer March Soloway

The thrust of these two PW Live sessions, a breakout with Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary and a general session with Svetcov, Jennifer March Soloway of Andrea Brown Literary and Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary, was the pitch—the query letter the author painstakingly crafts to sell the project. The formats of both sessions were innovative: Svetcov took identifying information off of three successful query letters and had the breakout attendees rank them, leading to a fruitful discussion of what was good and what wasn’t, and ultimately a list of do’s and don’ts for all us struggling query letter authors in attendance. For the general session, the conference planners at Poets & Writers solicited query letters from early registrants, then chose three that were shown and read to the audience by their authors, then discussed by the three agents on the panel. As always, some of the guidance that came out was old news for me, given that I’ve been to a number of these industry insider sessions before. But much of it was new and illuminating, so here are the highlights, in those two categories:

Heard a million times before:

• A good query has three essential elements, which can be thought of as answers to three questions the recipient will certainly want answered:
  
1. Why this particular agent? The agent (or editor) will want to know why you’re contacting them instead of the many hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of others out there in the industry. And if your answer is Because you are next in my painstakingly assembled alphabetical list, you’ve got some homework to do (see below).
2. What is the book about? Agents and editors are human beings just like you, with specific interests and disinterests that govern the finite real estate in their brains. They will therefore want to know the essence of your story and/or the themes of your book, because they’ll want to know if they should allow it space alongside cars, kids, mortgages, and Donald Trump.
3. Who are you? Theoretically, you’ve done something in your life that uniquely qualifies you to write the book you have written. Maybe it’s just writing—MFAs, publication credits, literary prizes, etc.—or maybe it’s other professional accomplishments specific to your book—a decades-long career as a master spy, for instance. Whatever it is, your recipient will want to know about it—and you should want to brag about it, too, so, win-win!
   



Anna Ghosh

• Pursuant to No. 1 above, the first guideline that each and every agency, publisher, and litmag places prominently on its website is Do your research and know who we are before contacting us. This means researching authors and stories and books you admire, and works that are similar to your own, finding out who the agents were who sold them, who the editors were who bought them, and who the publishers were who published them, and directing your queries accordingly. While doing this is no guarantee that most of your queries won’t still disappear into the stone-cold silence for which the literary world is infamous (most of them will), my operating assumption is, there is very good reason that agents and editors the world over are blue in the face from repeating this advice—as the agents at Poets & Writers Live did once again.

• Advice that is sort of a logical extension to doing your research is, Don't go in cold. Wherever possible, take the time beforehand to establish or discover some sort of connection between you and the recipient of your query. My thesis advisor when I got my MFA, for instance, is a Pulitzer-Prize–winning author whose work has greatly influenced mine, meaning her agent could well be a natural fit for me. But before I contacted the agent, I first wangled an entrée from the prize-winning author. And while this didn’t end up leading to a gold strike, it did mean the agent took much more time reading and considering my work—and giving me valuable advice—than she otherwise would have. Your connection might be an author you took a workshop with, a fellow student in writing school, or, dare I say, a face-to-face meeting with the agent at a Poets & Writers Live event.

• My old teacher Fred Leebron—who is actually a year younger than I am—used to say “writing is a game of attrition…don’t attrit.” This is the final longstanding advice one hears from agents and editors, which is, Persist. Understand that, if you get a response of any kind—even a polite rejection with a few words of encouragement tacked on—to any of your first 20 queries, you 1. Are one of the lucky ones, and 2. Have probably written something very, very good. So hang in there, go out into the world and encourage and seek encouragement from fellow writers, and figure out a way to find contentment in the process.

Never heard or expected to hear:

• Okay, so a query has three essential elements, but which is the most important? Which should I put first? Before Poets & Writers Live, the conventional wisdom I’d heard was, lead with the story you’re selling (No. 2 in my list above) because that’s what the agent cares about the most. However, in Svetcov’s breakout, I heard different (and confirmed it with her in a follow-up e-mail): she responds more to what she called the opening gambit, the connection you have with her (essentially No. 1 above). It’s one of the many matters of personal preference you’ll be up against when querying an agent, but yet another to be aware of.
  
• The highlight of the Svetcov breakout was the phrase “Nancy Drew meets Dirty Harry,” which came from the author Lisa Lutz’s pitch letter for what became The Spellman Files, the first in Lutz’s highly successful Spellman series. The surprising and eye-catching phrase described Lutz’s Spellman protagonist, Isabel, and pointed up a piece of advice from Svetcov that was roundly seconded by Ghosh and Soloway in the Pitch Panel: Illuminate your work with the glow of something familiar. It could be contrasting protagonists, Lutz’s choice, or perhaps two works with styles, stories, or plots that reflect your own, or it could just be a successful author whose style you emulate. The obvious caution, of course, is to avoid putting yourself on the same plane with a bestselling prizewinner. Best to avoid arrogance if you can manage it.
  
• If you land an agent, that agent will seize the commercial possibilities of your work, find a home for it, do everything in their power to make sure it sells and sells big. But in your pitch, you’ve got to help her along, give her whatever kernel you can to get her started. In fact, you’ve got to convince the agent that your work has commercial possibilities. This, of course, is intuitive to most writers, who obviously want people to read their books, which of course requires that people buy their books. It’s also advice that feels like it runs in direct opposition to advice almost every agent will give you, which is don’t think about whether it will sell or not, just write the book you want to write. But, in fact, it’s not in opposition at all. While you’re writing, don’t think about selling; once you’re finished, start thinking about it. Do what Svetcov called “putting a tight circle around what you're doing.” Encapsulate it in words, phrases, and comparisons that will 1. spark the agent’s interest, and 2. give her something she can build on when she falls in love with your work. This is why my old teacher Fred Leebron will always tell the writer to create a logline, that one-sentence jewel you can spit into the face of an agent or producer in ten seconds in a coffee shop. This is nearly impossible to do very well, but there’s no question, it’s worth the effort.
  
• And finally, a few rules of thumb that were a surprise to me but probably won’t be to many of you out there:
  
• I write literary fiction, and I say that in my query letters, but I struggled with how, exactly, to say it, and I still get a little queasy feeling when I reread that line in the letters. Well, queasy no more, because there was strong advice from all the agents present to announce your genre if you have one, and do it prominently in your pitch. Is it romance, mystery, crime, horror, or literary? Say so. (And you cross-genre people, well, I just don’t know what to say to you people.)
  
• We all come from somewhere, and invariably, where you’ve come from has both informed your work and inspired you to write. Agents, in turns out, want to know it, too. It not only gives them confidence in what you’ve written and your ability to write it, it also gives them yet another kernel they can use to sell you and your work to publishers. So if you have experience in writing or editing, or any experience whatsoever relevant to the content of your work, say it in your pitch.
  
• And last but not least, there is the simple rule of thumb that a reasonable length for a first novel or nonfiction book is 80,000 words. (And you can imagine how I took that, being that I’ve been pitching a 160,000-word manuscript for the better part of two years now. Ugh. But of course, all that tells me is…Revise! Revise! Revise!)

Okay, enough with the practical stuff. In the next installment, we move back to inspiration with some thoughts from the second-day appearance of poet, songwriter, author, and activist Ishmael Reed.

Andrew Sean Greer on Transport and Grandmothers

Fred Leebron, one of my favorite writing teachers at Queens University of Charlotte, talks sometimes about the idea of transport in fiction writing. Now I often don’t know what the hell Fred is talking about, but I love him anyway because his passion for the craft is infectious. As for this transport thing, you may know very well what it is, and if so, good on ya, but I’ve had to struggle with it a bit—until now.

In Andrew Sean Greer’s novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, I have discovered an author who masterfully and relentlessly transports us through time, space, emotion, and consciousness while at the same time keeping us firmly anchored in the story, and more specifically, in the scene, the interaction, the emotion he wants us to see and feel. He keeps us right where he wants us, but takes us everywhere at the same time.

Being the incorrigible suck-up that I am, I told Greer this (well, not all of it, but the gist of it anyway) when he appeared at Booksmith in the Haight last Thursday night. The following is an excerpt from the reading he did that night, which was from his new novel, The Story of a Marriage. The setting is San Francisco, 1953, and in this scene, the first-person protagonist, Pearl Cook, is in the backyard chatting with Buzz, an old army buddy of her husband, Holland. Pearl and Holland have a son they call Sonny, who is sickly, and a dog named Lyle. Buzz is helping Pearl hang out the laundry, and he has just called her attention to his nose, which has obviously been broken before.

I nodded. “It’s a beauty.”

“Thank you.”

“How did you get it?”

“Holland.”

The sun flashed across the billowing sheets. I blinked, turned toward Buzz, and saw him raising a hand to his face just as the sunlight stained him white all along his arm.

“Holland hit you?”

Buzz just cocked his head and watched me. Holland never raised his voice except at the radio, never hit a thing except the couch pillows before he sat down, grinning, with his cigarette. But once, of course, he’d been a different man, a man trained to shoot other men during the war, who drank, who sang with soldiers and hit a friend across the nose.

At last I asked, “Was it over a woman?”

He handed me a pair of trousers. “Yes.”

I pulled out the trouser dryer and began to stretch the pants onto it. “Tell me.”

“Pearlie,” he said. “We were born at a bad time.”

“I don’t know what you mean. It’s a fine time.”

I didn’t know what he meant by “we.” I couldn’t imagine what might bind me together with a man like Buzz, as likable as he was. I couldn’t draw any kind of line around the two of us.

“You’re proud of your house. You have a nice touch.”

“It belongs to Holland’s family.”

“It can’t be cheap,” he said to me. “I mean Sonny being sick and all.”

“Holland’s aunts help out. With the bills, the braces, it is a lot. It keeps me inside a good deal, I tell you, taking care of him,” I said without thinking. “Of course it’s no trouble,” I added hastily.

“Now what would you do if you had all the money you needed?”

I had no answer to that. It was a thoughtless question to ask a poor woman with a sick son, something only a rich man would ask. Like wondering aloud to a freshly brokenhearted girl: “What if it turns out he loved you after all?” It was something I had never allowed myself to think about. What would I have done? I’d have moved my family away from a house like that, with glaring neighbors, and stains on the basement walls from the ocean creeping in, with crickets sifting in under the doorsills with the sand…to Egypt, to Mali, to some fantasy destination I only knew from books. My God, I’d have flown to Mars with Holland and Sonny and never come back. That was the only answer I could think of. A woman like me, I couldn’t afford to name my real desires. I couldn’t even afford to know them.

All I said was, “I’ve got everything I need. I’m happy.”

“I know, but just imagine…where would you live?”

“This house is better than anything my parents had.”

“But just say…an apartment high above the city? A cliff over an ocean, with a view from your bed? Five hundred acres with a fence all around?”

“What would I do with five hundred acres?” I said without thinking.

Then he looked right at me, not a shy man at all, and I think for a moment I understood.

I stood there, staring at him, with the metal dryer contraption in my hand and the damp trousers over my arm. The sun came in full and lit the world from top to bottom; you could almost hear the jasmine reaching up for it. Then we heard the sound of Holland’s car returning and Buzz turned away.

In a moment, Holland shouted “Hey there!” from the house. I heard a bicycle bell, and Sonny heading down the hall in pursuit of love.

And Buzz said nothing else, touching his nose as if touching the memory of pain. He was half to the sun, and the shadow of his ruined hand fell across his long face in the form of another, younger hand cradling his cheek. The wind burrowed into his hair like a living creature. I didn’t say a word to him as he went inside, just continued stretching the trousers in the sun to dry. And down I went—into the green deep, flecked with gold and draped with waving plants, endless, bottomless—and forgot what I had glimpsed. I was a careful woman, a good gardener, and I pruned away the doubt. But you know the heart: every night, it grows a thorn.

So after this reading, and after I mustered the cojones to raise my hand, I mentioned this idea of transport to Greer and told him his work had helped me to better understand what it meant. I pointed out that in the excerpt he had just read, we were taken to the war, where two friends had an altercation, to the couch, where Holland grins and whacks the pillows, to Mali, to Egypt, to Mars, to the hallway of the house, forward and backward in time, and through a huge range of emotions, but we were never taken out of that tense, powerful, revealing moment between Pearl and Buzz. I then asked him about the process: I asked if the story just came out of him that way (not mentioning that if he had answered “yes” to that, I would have hunted down a straight razor and slit my wrists), or if he focused on a particular dimension of the story for a time and then did multiple passes, interleaving the various dimensions into the final, complete whole…or what?

His answer, in essence, was that a story like this one, which is essentially about a housewife who rarely leaves her house, needs a broader dimension to hold the reader’s interest. He said he feels it’s his responsibility to give the reader that broader dimension, so when he revises, when he is adding metaphors to color in the lines, he looks to do it in a way that broadens the reach of the story—taking the reader, for instance, out of the backyard and all the way to Mars. In this particular case, the book is only 198 pages, so he said he felt that these wider glances and forays have added meat to the book, making it a more satisfying read in the end.

I know that I, for one, intend to find out for myself.

Greer on His Grandmothers – and Strong Women Everywhere

As mentioned above, The Story of a Marriage is a first-person tale narrated by a protagonist who is a housewife in San Francisco in 1953. In response to a question about his use of the first person, Greer explained that he used it because wanted to deeply explore the feelings of women who had strong personalities, but were constrained by the customs and social mores of the time. This idea grew out of his experiences with and memories of his own grandmothers, both of whom were strong women who must have had to live with these kinds of constraints. He told the story of one grandmother who, when she died, left behind a bottle of Vodka hidden in the flour canister, $5,000 in bills wrapped in tinfoil, a handgun hidden in the freezer, and a box of correspondence she had written—apparently without the family’s knowledge, or at least without it becoming general knowledge in the family—to every president who had sat during her adult life.

Not sure if it was the same grandmother, but he told another story that had to do with the time he came out as a gay man to his grandmother. (“Not her favorite subject,” he said.) Shortly after he had done this, the Atlanta Olympics were about to start, not far from his grandmother’s home in Greenville County, South Carolina. Learning that Greenville County had just passed a resolution declaring homosexuality "incompatible with the standards to which this community subscribes," Greer’s grandmother wrote a letter to the Olympic Committee protesting the fact that the Olympic torch was about to be run through the county. She pointed out that Olympic rules specified that the torch could not be run through any area that had laws violating basic human rights. The Olympic Committee took action, and the torch was shrouded in a van as it passed through Greenville County. (True story. Check it out: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2003/10/05/in_south_episcopal_schism_pondered/)