Wednesday, April 09, 2003
Lesson 8: accept the gift: little writers have big ears.
There’s a line from Gertrude Stein: messages are being sent all the time. She wasn’t wrong or paranoid. All around us, people are speaking. And that means they are speaking story into the air.
If you are in the beginning stages of writing your screenplay…or if you know that you want to write a screenplay, but do not yet know what your story is, don’t despair.
Don’t despair. Go eavesdropping.
Go to a local restaurant. It could be a Wendy’s or an Olive Garden, but it should be eavesdroppable. Meaning that you should be able to hear at least some fragment of a conversation, preferably a lot of fragments.
Listen big, and listen hard. Being able to hear other people may not do much for your meal, but it will do wonders for your creativity. It will teach you the ways people really speak, not the way people talk on t.v. It will teach you to love pauses and slurs and incomplete phrases and mispronunciation. Today I was thinking so hard about these issues, it must have read on my face: a guy at another table at the Wendy’s asked me to spell “depict.”
The writer/director of “Clueless” spent days and days eavesdropping on teenage girls at upscale malls, and the result was not just a good movie, but an entire Clueless lingo. You should be so lucky.
There’s a line from Gertrude Stein: messages are being sent all the time. She wasn’t wrong or paranoid. All around us, people are speaking. And that means they are speaking story into the air.
If you are in the beginning stages of writing your screenplay…or if you know that you want to write a screenplay, but do not yet know what your story is, don’t despair.
Don’t despair. Go eavesdropping.
Go to a local restaurant. It could be a Wendy’s or an Olive Garden, but it should be eavesdroppable. Meaning that you should be able to hear at least some fragment of a conversation, preferably a lot of fragments.
Listen big, and listen hard. Being able to hear other people may not do much for your meal, but it will do wonders for your creativity. It will teach you the ways people really speak, not the way people talk on t.v. It will teach you to love pauses and slurs and incomplete phrases and mispronunciation. Today I was thinking so hard about these issues, it must have read on my face: a guy at another table at the Wendy’s asked me to spell “depict.”
The writer/director of “Clueless” spent days and days eavesdropping on teenage girls at upscale malls, and the result was not just a good movie, but an entire Clueless lingo. You should be so lucky.
