How Writers Can Learn from DVDs

Yes, seriously.

The best thing about DVDs is not the fact that they're tons lighter than ancient VHS tapes or that its easier to zip from scene to scene with the remote, or that you can watch your favourite films in languages you never heard before. The best thing about DVDs are the deleted scenes and director’s commentaries. That is, if you’re a writer keen to learn the craft.

Many directors and screenwriters are just obsessive writers who like to jaw about their craft and so the obligatory director’s commentary which many a film fan would ignore is actually a gold mine for learners like us.

Do you want to learn about how to stitch some back story into a scene? Check out the director/screenwriter’s commentary on Cider House Rules and hear author John Irving explaining how he struggled to find a place where he could establish the hero, Homer Wells’ stance on abortion.

Are you looking for the strength to cut scenes you love from your manuscript? Check out Finding Nemo and The Incredibles where you can actually see the scenes they chopped out for the sake of getting the story to move faster (the fact that the directors also co-wrote the screenplay seems to add to the dynamic of the director’s commentary).

How do you plot a story? Listen to the director’s commentary of The Day After Tomorrow and learn first hand the struggle to create credible scenes out of a fantastical premise. In You've Got Mail, director Nora Ephron (who in a previous life was a best-selling novelist) actually points out where each act begins and ends.

But as with other instructive material, some DVDs do it better than others. For example, Big Fish about a man with a talent for storytelling, seemed a great bet for a long writerly discourse on constructing a story. But disappointingly director Tim Burton’s commentary focused on the celebrity of his characters – how Ewan McGregor was "great" and how the elephant had a poo at the moment when McGregor leaned up against him – fascinating stuff but will be completely useless when next one does battle with one's manuscript.

Have you listened to a director/author's commentary you can recommend for writers interested in craft?

What Children's Book Week did for me

It’s National Children’s Book Week in the UK!

My seven year old’s primary school has invited authors and illustrators to visit, there have been competitions, and a dress-up-as-your-favourite-character day!

Caught up in the enthusiasm of this lovely, booky week, I plucked up the courage to volunteer to read to my daughter’s Year Three class. I say plucked up the courage because instead of picking something from the bookshelves, I decided to read my own unpublished picture book manuscripts!

Now, fellow obsessives, you may – as I often do – sometimes wonder if all those lonely hours tapping at the computer keyboard and peeling open rejection letters are worth it; you may sometimes wonder if it is time to give up the dream. Well, don’t give up until you’ve tested your work on your chosen audience!

Reading my stuff to the kids was more energizing than a library full of books on how to write! The children laughed and clapped and shouted out comments and, when the I finished reading, gave a big cheer!

The picture right is of Cat in the Hat enthusiasts from last year's Children's Book Week. Unfortunately I didn't get a snap of this year's costume parade.

The next day, when the school paraded into assembly dressed up as their favourite characters, amongst the Harry Potters, BFGs, oompa-loompas, knights and Sleeping Beauties, I was honoured to find that one of the kids had come dressed as a character from my story!

It was better than winning the Newbery Medal.

National Children's Book Week is organised by Booktrust.

Women Writers Who Don't

Though twice as many women as men are writing, they are 50 per cent less likely to send off their manuscripts to publishers or agents, or to apply for writing grants.

Debbie Taylor of Mslexia
As quoted in Writer's Services Comments

Sadly this is all too true. I should know. I am one of the 50 percent less likely to apply a stamp to my submission letters.

Debbie’s theory is that this failure to push our work out into the real world is due to a lack of support in our (women’s) intimate relationships.

This excuse I dare not claim – my family (especially my husband) have been supportive to the point of pushy (“Have you published it yet, Mum?”). But it certainly is more difficult for women to allow themselves certain freedoms. More often than not, one decides to forego that hour of working on the manuscript to clean the kitchen, knowing full well that the kitchen will revert to its state of original sin within minutes of the kids getting home from school.

James Frey in How to Write a Damn Good Novel II (How to Write Damn Good Fiction: Advanced Techniques for Dramatic Storytelling in the UK) puts it rather harshly:

To become a damn good novelist you will have to put in your time writing. And that means that you won’t be doing things other people do because you won’t have time for them.
But what if you’ve got kids and responsibilities and the like? Okay, you will have to have a job, a secondary career, but it cannot be the centre of your life.

The writing will have to be the centre of your life.

Ouch.

And if you are a mother, double ouch. Because if you’ve got kids and home and husband and oven and washing machine and underwear and toilets on your mind, chances are creativity is on indefinite leave.

I once attended a talk where Anne Fine (Madame Doubtfire, The Tulip Touch) said behind every successful female writer is a wildly successful, millions-making husband. Well, she didn’t put it quite like that. But you get the idea.

If only that were true for all us aspiring-authors with dishpan hands.

Frey writes: “Once faith (in writing) is broken, the writer is unlikely to go back to writing, ever.”

So how do you keep the faith? You keep the faith by doing it all.

I once set up a website to encourage creativity in mothers – home-bound or office-bound. It was based on my own realisation that there would never be time for my creative life unless I allowed myself to make time for it. Here was the anthem of Mum at Work :

Let’s do it all, we’re already tired anyway.

I haven’t updated the site for a few years now (too busy being creative!), but you can still check it out. I try to refer back to it when I'm fed up and tired and discouraged. It reminds me of that shining thing out there somewhere called Hope and gets me writing again.

Family supportiveness is important to the success of your extra-curricular endeavours. But more important I think is just giving yourself permission to do it.