Category Archives: Internal
Writing Tips to Make Story Revision Easier & More Effective
Revision is a task all writers must master. But it’s often seen, particularly among inexperienced writers, as something to dread.
Don’t dread revision. Embrace it. It is one of the biggest gifts writers are given – the opportunity to re-work our work to allow it to more fully grow into its deepest self. This is where Story meets up with Craft in its most intense relationship.
Here’s some tips to make it easier:
1. Start by realizing that revision requires you to let go of the Story as you currently perceive it.
It’s the Story that matters most. By Story I mean the journey toward a particular spiritual/emotional/physical realization for the main characters. How they go about this is malleable. Your Characters know their Story, but you have say in how to best reveal that journey to the audience.
2. Realize that there is more to bring out.
In the first draft, the Story pours out (and if it’s not pouring out, you may be tugging at it before it’s ready) – the first draft is the core material of the Story. It’s in its purest form – where theme, characters, dialogue – reveal themselves, undisturbed yet by the writer’s hand. It is raw, malleable material that is never meant for anyone elses’ eyes and always meant to be shaped and nurtured and tended to by the writer.
3. Take on the role of director when revision begins.
Particularly for scripts, but also for novels, your job as a writer includes the role of director when you start revision. Why? Because while you are writing, you are also directing the Story – and you have decisions to make. Director’s decisions – not just writing decisions. That means you start to take the Story apart and look at it structurally. You look at character development, you decide what best serves the Story and you get rid of or change what doesn’t. You keep the big picture in mind and you get tough with what’s working and what’s not. You also start to really get to know your characters and deal with their issues in a supportive, caring manner. You take command of the page and accept responsibility for what’s on it and what’s not.
4. Partner with your characters and let them inform your decisions.
Characters trust you with their story and that’s not an easy thing to do. They deserve respect. They also know far more than we do when it comes to who they are, what they’re after and what they’re not telling you. You have to be a very good listener. They are invested in the success of your work and they will give you what you need. Ask them. They’ll surprise you. They’ll also reveal more when you let them have a say in how their Story is told.
5. Bring in a second set of professional eyes when it’s ready.
No one will ever know your Story as well as you do, but we lose our ability to accurately perceive whether or not we have expressed the Story as well as we intended. That’s where having a second set of professional eyes provide feedback is invaluable.
6. Revise again.
After you get feedback, take what makes sense for the Story (not for your ego) and revise again. Chances are some of the suggestions made to you will take your work to a higher level. Some won’t fit and you’ll leave those behind.
7. Take responsibility for the final completion of the Story.
It’s easy to wallow in a never-ending state of revision. But that won’t move your Story to its next stage of development. You have to accept responsibility for deciding when you’ve brought the Story to the highest level you can, at this stage, with the information, feedback and understanding that you have right now. Part of this is something you’ll just know. Part of it is an actual decision to stop revising and declare it ready to stand on its own in the world. You have to determine if you’ve given it everything it needs to sustain its life. If you have, then make the decision. Declare it done at this stage.
How to Put ‘the Magic’ in Your Writing
Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing a songwriter who has been behind some of the top pop hits in the last decade. Something he said in regards to the writing process hit close to home:
“If it (the content) is just okay, but it doesn’t feel like magic, then find something else, don’t waste your time, on writing.”
Feel like magic. That’s what it’s supposed to feel like, isn’t it?
What encouraged me was the fact that even after so many years writing songs for A-list artists, he still judges his writing by the magic. As creative professionals it can be hard to keep that magic front and center in the work we do for others. But the magic – and finding it – is the key to what makes our work stand head and shoulders above the rest.
So how do you know if something has the magic?
I know one thing: you can’t create magic. You can receive it and you can refine your work until the magic comes through – but it is not something you can order and have served up in your work. You can’t layer it on top. It has to emerge organically. And it comes by listening.
Listening.
Getting quiet. Paying attention. Asking questions. Asking for guidance. And listening to what you hear, to what you feel, to what your intuition is telling you. From the Story, from the Characters, from the work, from your Spirit.
Magic evades us most when we are striving. When we disconnect from Spirit and push, pull, tug and coerce creative results.
This is one of the key risks in revision and one we need to be very careful about. Revision has the potential to delete the magic. And while you need to revise (revise, revise, revise) you also need to know your Story and Characters well enough to know which parts are magical and which parts aren’t. It’s the magical scenes and dialogue that give Story its soul.
How do you know which scenes those are?
By how they make you feel.
Chances are that if a scene you’ve written moves you emotionally, it’s carrying magic. Not everything in a script or novel is going to evoke emotion. When we’re writing a script, we see every page, every scene, every word in it’s long form.
We do not see it condensed down into film, with actors, sound and editing to carry the emotional tone through 90 minutes.
So we need to be aware of which scenes and dialogue carry the magic and protect those.
Magic flows most freely in the first draft, so mine it for gold. Magic also flows during revision when characters share scenes with you that you weren’t aware of before. In a script, the magic is in the characters. So you have to listen to them and let them express it.
And if you’re not feeling the magic?
Don’t waste your time. Don’t write something that just doesn’t speak to your own soul. If you’re on assignment, and you have to write the story given to you, then pay very close attention and listen to the character’s hearts. Let them give you the magic. Ask them for it. Give them room to find it amongst themselves.
It’s there.
Thriving Artists Series: How to Make More Money
“Thriving” and “artist” don’t often snap together in most people’s minds.
But they should. If anyone has a reason to thrive it’s those of us who make a living based on creative inspiration. And while many artists in all walks of creativity “struggle” to create a thriving income, when it comes down to it, making money doing what you love for a living is possible. We have no problem understanding that we own the power to create our work, but many of us stumble when it comes to owning that same power to create income.
Thriving as an artist involves more than just making money, of course. It’s a “whole-person” definition that needs the sum of it parts. Spirit, craft, experience, attitude, beliefs, effort. More on those in other posts.
How do you make more money as an artist?
Let’s start out by examining what it is you are being paid for. And for our purposes here, we’re not going to address unions or other “going rates.” Those are a part of many artists’ income guidelines, but that’s not at the core of what I want to discuss today. We need to back up a bit before we get to that aspect.
What are you being paid for? Your time? Your talent? Your marketability? Your experience? Your “you-ness”?
Most likely, it’s going to be a combination of all of the above. What I want to drive home is the fact that behind whatever it is you are doing for your art – acting, painting, writing, set designing – you are the key factor for why someone hires you or buys your creative work.
Your value is you.
But many artists, new and experienced, struggle with valuing the “you” aspect of their work.
Money is energy. Nothing more, nothing less.
We use it as a form of exchange for value. People respond to you based on the beliefs you have in yourself. (Occasionally, “old souls” (not to be confused with age) in the industry may respond to you based on the higher value they see in you and their belief in you – knowing that you’ll grow into these beliefs as you mature spiritually. But while this is a pure blessing if it happens in your artistic career, it’s also pretty rare.)
Let me say it again, people respond to you based on the beliefs you have about yourself. If you do not value yourself appropriately, they will value you at the level you value yourself. You’ll be paid for what you “believe” you are worth. No more. No less. Why? Because…
Money is an exchange in perceived value.
It’s what we are each willing to give and accept in order to receive the value we perceive. So, yes, you do have to be good at what you do, work with integrity, live up to professional standards and give them their perceived value’s worth in exchange. But ultimately, you set the value of “you.”
Believe that you can only earn the “going rate”? That’s all you’ll earn. Believe you can earn more than the going rate? You’ll find opportunities and ways to do so.
We externalize our income and tend to believe that it comes down to “the system,” “that’s just the way it is.” We set the locks on how much we earn by our beliefs.
We unlock how much we can earn by our beliefs as well.
I’m not talking about wishing on a star for a million dollars and it will land in your lap. Your income usually incrementally reflects your expanding beliefs.
Most people never gain consciousness of their money beliefs, let alone change them. But once you do, you take back the power over how much you earn and you create income – you don’t “get paid” by others. (In other words, yes, other people pay you, but you know that you are receiving that money because you created the ability to receive it and you opened your beliefs up to receiving it. The power remains in you. Not outside of you.)
You set the real value of your work and your income will reflect it.
This isn’t about arrogance or ego. You do have to be good at your craft to attract top dollar. But even if you’re not at the top of the league, you have the power to create more money in your life. It starts with your money beliefs. It starts with placing a higher value on you and your work. It starts with realizing that you can earn more. That it’s in your power to generate a flow of income into your life. When you do, you’ll start to create, find and accept opportunities for more income. It may mean raising your prices, your rates, asking for more during negotiations, and it may mean turning down work that doesn’t pay what you have decided you are worth.
This may sound crazy to you if you are still in a place where you are struggling financially. Turning down work? Yes, turning down work.
Remember, people respond to you based on what you believe about yourself. Believe you can only get buy, that you’ll never make a living at this, that you have bad luck, that it’s hard to get work, that the odds are ridiculously impossible – and that’s what you will experience. You’ll attract people who get that you don’t expect more or believe that your work is worth more and you’ll be a good match for them.
But, believe that your work is valuable, back it up with craft and performance to match it, never give luck or odds a second thought because they don’t apply to you, maintain that your work is worth what you are asking, turn down opportunities that don’t match your belief and guess what? You’ll attract people who get that you expect to be paid for what you are worth, see your work as valuable and they’ll have no problem paying you for it.You’ll be a good match for them.
There are jobs and people to match every level of money belief.
You are the one who sets the money beliefs about you and your work. It starts with you. You set that belief in others.
And get this, people leave it up to you to set your value. They meet you where you are.
You are the one who has the power to change it.
That’s a Wrap! Finding Closure with Characters
Last day in character, on set. Final revision on a novel. Screenplay’s bought and produced.
It’s done.
We finish creative work all the time, but we don’t always give ourselves the grace of actually closing our relationships with our characters. Most of us have projects lined up, already started or waiting in queue. And we tend to move mentally toward them as we finish up a current one. We’re busy, we don’t have time.
But rushing forward without taking time to find closure can be risky to our well-being and our new work. Why? Because we spend considerable amounts of time emotionally and physically invested in characters and we need to be emotionally available for the next one.
Tough emotions are part of the work
I’m currently finishing up Restoration*, a script that dives deep into the emotional interior of three scarred war veterans who must navigate the unfamiliarity of life after war and each other while trying to save their condemned house from being destroyed. The fabric of their story is steeped in tough terrain – from torture, from guilt, from being left helpless to make a difference and save others. And they’re asking relevant questions that we are all facing about the rationale behind going to war to impose democracy.
I know these characters well, they trust me fully as the First Trustee of their Story – but it hasn’t been an easy journey for me emotionally to work with them. It won’t be easy for the actors who will embody and carry their weight. And as I finish this up, there’s another Story, another set of powerful characters waiting for my attention, again, a Story that will be tough to carry.
Tough emotions are part of the fabric of stories that resonate deeply with the human spirit. They have the ability to touch places in us that we prefer not to go – unless a Story takes us there. As artists, we accept that the challenging emotions of our characters are part of our work.
Our experiences of characters are real
When it’s time to say goodbye, our logical minds argue that characters aren’t “real” so we minimize our departure. But our experiences of characters are real. And these experiences are what linger in us when the work is done. When you embody a character you think, see and feel that character’s emotions, you carry the weight of their pain, their struggles, their crimes, their pasts, their decisions. You get to know them better than anyone else knows them and they learn to trust you.
That last day can be very tough.
You may feel a sense of loss head on, but you may also go through grief, anger, depression, sadness and a sense of being emotionally overwhelmed and drained. You may feel adrift, unable to focus, sense a rush of exhaustion flood through you. Deflation is common.
All of this can hit you at once, or it can seep into the days and weeks following the last day. You may start to wonder what’s going on and stress over having to be ready and emotionally available for the next character and story that’s waiting for you.
So how do we say goodbye?
How do we close these emotional ties that have lived, breathed, felt, feared, loved, hated, risked, killed, received wounds, forgived, triumphed, in us and through us for weeks or months on end?
- Recognize that you need to create closure. You do this by being aware of what it means to end the relationship with the character.
- Accept that you are going to feel a sense of loss. Allow yourself the emotions of missing a character, of not being part of their fabric 24/7 anymore.
- Find some time to be alone to formally say goodbye to your characters. Thank them for what they have blessed and burdened you with, for the experiences they have opened your life up to, for their trust in your artistic ability to embody and share their story with the world.
- Separate out the emotions that belong to them from the emotions that are truly your own. You’ve been in their head and heart for intense periods of time, it can be hard to decipher what actually belongs to you. But it’s essential to make the distinction.
- Let go of their journey. They have to live now without you. They have to go on being present in the world without your daily presence. Trust that you have given them everything they need to thrive.
- Rest. You may not have much time between projects, but you are spiritually exhausted. You need time to re-center, to ground yourself again in your own being. You need time to let go of the motions of work. Physical activities – even mundane household chores- can be therapeutic – as they bring you out of the creative emotive state and sink you back into earthy presence.
- Celebrate what you’ve achieved.It is something major in any artist’s life to bring a project to a full close. No matter what level of success you’ve had in the past, each project takes all of you and creates new spaces within your spirit for what will come in the future. Having completed a project is an end and a beginning and you need to honor your spirit for that. Don’t just toss it off as “what you do.” Take a moment and feel a sense of achievement, accomplishment. You have done this. You are living a creative life. This is why you’re here.
In our work, we delve into tough, tough emotions of characters and live and experience pain that often would never be ours in our private lives. We do this as part of sharing Story, of furthering our human existence through Story. And because it’s part of what we do in our everyday work, we may not take what that pain can do to us seriously enough. We need to be conscious of the boundaries, of what belongs to us emotionally and what doesn’t. We are not our characters, they are not us. Yet, we will always be part of our characters and they will forever be part of us. Part of the magic and wonder of this amazing creative work is that we allow them to change us, we make ourselves vulnerable to them and in return, they give us the stories that become the fabric of our creative lives.
Close your projects with a sense of wonder and thankfulness. Bless your characters as you say goodbye.
Because no matter what happens when the work is done, they’ve blessed you.
*Restoration: When former Iraq P.O.W. and seasoned special operative Kyle Sandberg faces being institutionalized because he refuses to speak, war-weary psychologist Alicia Meier takes him home to her family’s abandoned farm in North Dakota’s booming oil fields—only to discover that her house has been condemned and will be destroyed, unless she can repair it in time. Battling insurmountable odds, threats from anti-fracking environmentalists and a neighbor desperate to see her off her land, Alicia, her Iraq war vet brother Daniel, and Kyle fight to rebuild the house and their lives, while grappling with the ultimate question: how do you know what’s worth saving?
Writers: Are You Giving Your Work Everything it Needs to Survive?
“I like to say that I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now. This is a useful notion, especially during revision. It reminds me, forcefully, that everything necessary must be on the page.
I must make a complete poem – a river-swimming poem, a mountain-climbing poem. Not ‘my’ poem, if it’s well done, but a deeply breathing, bounding, self-sufficient poem. Like a traveler in an uncertain land, it needs to carry with it all that it must have to sustain its own life—and not a lot of extra weight, either.” Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook, pg 110.
For those who are not familiar with Mary Oliver, she is one of the most prolific and enduring nature poets in America. Her writing connects the human spirit to the lessons and inspiration of the natural world in an easily accessible way. She also writes in A Poetry Handbook that each of her poems goes through 50 – 60 revisions before it’s ready to stand on its own.
Wow, are you that dedicated to your creative work?
It got me thinking about what our work needs from us to survive on its own. Particularly for screenwriters who are the First Trustee of the Story and must give that initial script everything it needs to sustain its own life in an uncertain land of development and production. But Oliver’s words also inspired me to think about how committed (or not) we are to our projects. Fifty revisions on a poem. That’s a lot of time, but even more so, a lot of focus and commitment to ensuring that each word, each placement of each word, is at its strongest, most efficient location and thrumming with power. Fifty revisions explains why Oliver’s writing simply sings off the page, why you never stumble over it, why it seems to sink straight down into your soul. It connects.
I revise a lot. I can’t imagine writing without revision. I do believe that you have to trust your first instinct in a first draft and let the story pour itself out – but then you bring the craft of writing into play. You take on the executive role of making decisions that will shape and anchor your story into a well-polished piece. You move things around, question the intent behind dialogue, get your characters to explain to you what they mean emotionally and what they aren’t telling you, and you choose the most effective way to retell their story. And once you have revised it through several drafts, you get a second-set-of-eyes to have a look and bring fresh insight into it. You take what agrees with the story’s purpose and you revise, revise, revise.
I used to wonder how I would know when a story was finished. I’ve found that the Story will tell you when it’s finished. You’ll sense it. You’ll know that it’s right, it’s ready, it has everything it needs. You’ll know when you’ve come up against all that you have to give it. You’ve done your very best. But that knowledge ONLY comes from having revised, revised, revised.From having the patience and the tenacity to take the time to give the story what it needs.
What do stories need from us to sustain their own life?
As Oliver so eloquently said: “everything necessary must be on the page.”
If someone in a foreign land in a few hundred years reads your story, will they ‘get it’? Scripts don’t need to be bogged down with minute detail (unless it furthers the story), but I do believe what Oliver is referring to here is the essence of the meaning of the story. Will a reader connect to the human emotion of the story, even if they can’t understand the jargon or cultural references? They should be able to.
Another way to check if your story can stand on its own is to “turn off” all the dialogue and see if you can still follow the storyline. You should be able to “view” it and get it. When I first lived in Sarajevo, I was in a small studio apartment and would watch French dramas with Bosnian subtitles. I didn’t understand either language. There were films that I could follow quite well and others that were impossible to follow without the dialogue.
Actions speaks louder than words and should be able to carry a script’s story. That’s not to say that dialogue isn’t vital and important, but the actions should back up the dialogue well enough to let the story stand on its own.
Giving your story everything necessary means ensuring the core story is present so that if and when the dialogue and actions are changed, the core story can still be expressed and understood. Remember, there is always more than one way to tell a story and get the same message across. The core story is the message. That’s what you need to nurture. That’s what needs everything necessary.
Take some time to ponder what “everything necessary” is for your story, your work. How can you ensure your story will survive without you?
creative inside out 