The Writing Center

We were out of town for a week and missed the big news of Miss Snark’s retirement. Anyone who has read her blog knows that this is terribly sad news … the only good news (aside from the fact that she is alive, well, and retiring only her blog) is that she will maintain the archives for anyone looking for information about agenting and publishing, as well as gin and George Clooney. On behalf of Metro Writing and all writers, we thank her for all that she’s done to demystify a very confusing industry in a most human way.

For fans, there’s a lovely tribute to Miss Snark on YouTube. Enjoy.

To follow up on a previous cliffhanger post (in which we announced that Metro writer and San Diego Writers board member Victoria Melekian was a finalist in the Best Unpublished Short Story category in the San Diego Book Awards Association’s annual contest) — we now have a winner! Victoria was awarded first place for her short story, “Looking for Stars,” at the awards ceremony on May 19. Congratulations, Victoria!

Today’s Wall St. Journal has a piece on Simon & Schuster’s newest marketing strategy — an Internet book channel, Bookvideos.tv, to be hosted on YouTube and other sites, on which authors will talk for two minutes (”about as long as you can watch something on your desktop before your boss catches you,” says the chief executive of the corporation producing the videos) about their lives, how they became writers, and other such behind-the-scenes topics. The channel will focus on only Simon & Schuster authors, though the company seems open to expanding in whatever direction viewers take the most interest.

The channel will launch next month and has committed to 40 author videos, with featured authors including bestselling authors from Sandra Brown and Mary Higgins Clark to Ursula Hegi and Marianne Wiggins. You can check out the videos here as well as on the Simon & Schuster web site.

Here’s wonderful news for all you local writers — San Diego Writers, Ink, is accepting submissions for its first anthology of local work. Editor Thomas Larson is looking for poems, stories, essays, and novel and memoir excerpts.

Here’s the catch: All writing must be associated with SDW, Ink, whether it’s material written in classes and workshops, or something read at First Friday. The good news for any of you who haven’t yet discovered SDW, Ink, is that the submissions deadline is August 1, and you still have plenty of time to become a member and/or to sign up for one of SDW, Ink’s many classes, workshops, and events.

For complete details about the anthology, as well as info on programming, registration, and membership, visit San Diego Writers, Ink.

We have some exciting writing news: longtime Metro writer and San Diego Writers, Ink, board member Victoria Melekian has just been named a finalist for Best Unpublished Short Story in the San Diego Book Awards Association’s annual contest. Her short story is one of three finalists, and Victoria will be awarded either first, second, or third place at the awards ceremony on May 19. Congratulations, Victoria!

Today’s New York Times article on Deborah Rodriguez’s memoir Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil brings up an all-too-familiar topic: allegations of fabrications in what the author and publisher have presented as a “true” story.

Rodriguez, an American who traveled to Afganistan and eventually set up a beauty school in Kabul, relates this story and other adventures in her book, co-written with Kristin Ohlson. Yet the Times reports that the book has “raised the ire of six women who were involved at the founding of the Kabul Beauty School [who] say the book is filled with inaccuracies and inconsistencies. They argue that events did not unfold the way Ms. Rodriguez depicts them, and that she exaggerated her role in the formation of the school.”

A note in the book confirms that some details have been changed for privacy reasons — but those involved believe that some of Rodriguez’s stories are misleading (”It makes Debbie out to be Mother Theresa,” one woman told the Times. “And it’s wrong.”), and some even question whether certain events actually happened (writing about one character in the memoir, the Times reports that “none of the women recalled ever having met anyone fitting her description”).

Like most other authors faced with such allegations, Rodriquez stands by her story — so we may never know what’s true and what’s not. Meanwhile, with every bestselling book that is challenged by sticklers for truth, the memoir genre is slowly but surely becoming something else entirely: fiction.

For any of you who may feel as though you’re too old to become a successul writer, check out this AP story about a man who began writing his first book at age 93 and now, at age 96, is a published author.

Harry Bernstein’s memoir, The Invisible Wall, about his childhood in northern England, grew out of the loneliness he encountered after the death of his wife. As he says in the article, “You know when you get into your 90s like I am, there’s nowhere else to think except the past. There’s no future to think about. There’s very little present…So you think of the past.”

But now he has quite a lot of future to think about. A Random House editor in London picked up his book and couldn’t put it down, and now, in addition to being published in England and Sweden, it will be released in Germany, Italy, Finland, and Norway. Bernstein is already at work on a second book, slated to be published in the U.S. by Ballantine.

I think all writers can learn a little from Bernstein’s wisdom. He reports that he writes when inspired rather than forcing deadlines, and he also says, “I’m not satisfied until I finish what I start. And I will not be satisfied until I start something new.”

The New York Times ran a story last week on the Bellevue Literary Press, which will publish its first title next month. The article calls attention to Bellevue Hospital’s former reputation as a psych ward for the “criminally deranged,” which indeed sounds tough to overcome. Yet neither authors nor publishers seem worried about the past.

Bellevue Literary Press grew out of the success of the Bellevue Literary Review, founded in 2000 and described by the Washington Post as “a journal of humanity and human experience — a well-regarded magazine featuring fiction, nonfiction and poetry by Bellevue’s doctors and well-established writers.”

Yet, like most small presses, Bellevue Literary Press is all about the love, not the money. Financed by private donors, the imprint’s first four titles are medical or scientific books written for a general audience, and editorial director Erika Goldman told the Times that authors would be paid advances in the $5,000 range, adding, “We’re in it for love and art.”

Which sounds perfectly sane to me.

With our Writing for the Screen class coming up — as well as the Academy Awards! — we wanted to get Metro screenwriting instructor Garrett Chaffin-Quiray’s take on a few things about film and film writing…

Q: What are your picks this year for Best Film/Best Adapted Screenplay?

A: “Little Miss Sunshine” will likely win best original screenplay, both because it’s the “deserving little picture that could” and because it’s often a consolation prize for best picture. On the adapted screenplay front, the field is wide open with every nomination worthy of recognition. Even so, I have particular fondness for “Borat,” which is as insightful and offensive as has been noted, and “Children of Men,” a film we’re likely to continue watching for years to come while many of the showier, more commercially successful awards front runners will be forgotten. Naturally, this has to do with the P. D. James source novel, but the screenwriters did their homework and created a world equal to that of the original.

Q: What is the first thing a screenwriter should know about writing a script?

A: Writing for the screen is concerned only with what an audience can see and hear, and nothing else. We must be able to see characters behave and take action, as a way of describing internal states like emotion, memory, and symbol, but we shouldn’t rely on being told things the way we would if reading a novel. This simple point isn’t the way we’re generally taught to write or tell stories, though, and it requires training, along with a good eye for what an audience most wants to see and hear in a dramatic story.

Q: What’s your favorite film?

A: I have trouble answering “best of” questions, but a few standout titles always bubble to the surface: widely respected, “serious” titles like “Once Were Warriors” (Lee Tamahori, 1994), “Unforgiven” (Clint Eastwood, 1992), “Blade Runner” (Ridley Scott, 1982), “All About Eve” (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950), “Rear Window” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), “Nashville” (Robert Altman, 1975), “The Piano” (Jane Campion, 1993), “Lone Star” (John Sayles, 1996), “Taxi Driver” (Martin Scorsese, 1976), and “Reservoir Dogs” (Quentin Tarantino, 1992), versus “pop” titles like “Cocktail” (Roger Donaldson, 1988), “Dumb and Dumber” (Farrelly Brothers, 1994), and “The Matrix” (Wachowski Brothers, 1999). I’ll watch any of these titles right now.

Q: Nora Ephron once said that for her, the best preparation for becoming a screenwriter was being a reporter — this background, for example, helped her write some of the scenes in “Silkwood.” What sort of background do you think would be useful for screenwriters (i.e., acting, directing, journalism)?

A: Any career that forces a person to interact with lots of other people is a good start for screenwriting. Much of what we do when we write scripts is raid our memory. We then fit anecdotes inside our plots that take life when peopled by idiosyncratic flesh-and-blood characters. You can’t possibly fill in those plots with ordinary people if all you’re ever in contact with are a few incurious types with monotonous lives and no ambition. So it makes sense to read books and periodicals of all sorts; to employ techniques of journalism when meeting people (inquiring as to their background, what they do, where they live, what they like to eat, etc.); to keenly observe the world and fill in gaps of knowledge with imaginative leaps of creativity (I may not know much money is in that guy’s bank account, but he’s probably a millionaire, which is why he’s not buying a Coke at McDonald’s but drinking water to save $1.59); to see as many movies as materially possible; to take note of why you think particular screen stories work and emulate that success in your own projects.

Q: What books and scripts would you recommend to writers as good references and examples of the genre?

A: The old joke says that the only screenplay most Hollywood executives have ever read, cover to cover, is “Chinatown.” Update that to include “Pulp Fiction,” and you might be on to something. I try and make a loose habit of familiarizing myself with all best original screenplay winners (both on screen and, if available, in print), along with seeking out titles I like to listen to while sitting in a theater. For professional guidance, I’ve been recently reading “The Understructure of Writing for Film and Television,” “Story Sense,” Robert McKee’s “Story,” and “The Screenwriter’s Bible.”

Q: There are software applications that help with screenplay formatting. Do you use these and/or recommend them?

A: I recommend any software that helps a writer remain productive. But since software is great at automating formats, and since most software is relatively easy to learn, I prefer focusing on fundamentals. For me, this means I tend toward low-tech writing tools: often a spiral-bound notebook with a ballpoint pen will do, but as a laptop user I am partial to using Microsoft Word for just about everything.

Q: What’s the most common mistake beginning screenwriters make?

A: In order of frequency, and this isn’t just true of new screenwriters: describing how a character feels or what a character remembers without figuring out how to put those intangibles into behavior, action, setting, costume, or dialogue; using script pages to describe, in great detail, exactly how an environment looks when simple remarks will do; not remembering that a script is a blueprint that requires a tremendous number of collaborators to transform the story into a finished TV show or movie; writing dialogue no breathing person would actually say.

Q: With Hollywood making fewer films these days, are students better off writing scripts that they can produce themselves?

A: Yes, but … it’s important to recognize that writing and producing your own work is often only going to be a brilliant education without much commercial upside or a very big audience. Still, becoming better at the craft of storytelling is always a good idea. In the end, though, most all of us aspire to big bucks, fame, popularity, and great success — and this isn’t likely to come from producing one’s own work. Knowing how to translate a script into a winning screen story is important, but the mass media are not presently set up to help unknown parties succeed, aside from the web, which is a good way to present work but not to make money or enter the system.

Q: As a film professor and workshop leader, what is the most important thing you hope your students learn?

A: Screen storytelling is a craft, like plumbing or cooking. Everyone can learn the basic components of good storytelling and that sensitivity makes for better audiences, consumers, writers, and people. The catch is screen storytelling isn’t natural, and not everyone has an aptitude for its conventions and requirements.

Q: How has being a writer/film reviewer changed the way you view films?

A: I discovered an industry and art form strongly suited to my needs and sensitivities when I went to film school. Fortunately, that form requires stories, which I’m accustomed to building through my “other” career as a novelist. Being familiar with the craft of movies is therefore a lens I frequently employ when writing fiction of any sort.

Garrett Chaffin-Quiray’s screenwriting class begins on March 7, 2007. Click here for complete information, including registration.

Our latest exciting news is that we will be offering a new class in the spring — Writing for the Screen. This class is for anyone out there who wants to write for film or television, whether you’re already in the process of writing a script or are still in the idea stage. The class will feature detailed instruction on how to put your work into the proper script format, how to write for viewers as opposed to readers, and will give you a chance to study films and television programs as well as share your own work.

Our screenwriting instructor, Garrett Chaffin-Quiray, has earned degrees from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television, has worked in Hollywood, and has written and published extensively on film (his reviews and essays have appeared in dozens of books and newspapers). He’s a wonderful addition to Metro Writing, and we’re so glad he’s joining us.

Check out our web site for more info on Writing for the Screen as well as to read Garrett’s bio. If you have any questions, feel free to write or call, as always. (And keep in mind we’re offering an early registration discount for Writing for the Screen.) We hope to see you in the spring!