Chained To The Keyboard

A little post to tide you over, Gentle Reader, as I am currently swamped with projects that need finishing. And though I may be drowning in obligations, I still have time to bring you these tantalising links:

Link The First: Bizarre but true - Spike Jones has signed on to direct the adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are. I’m having trouble even imagining this, but what I can imagine is awesome.

Link The Second: Apparently America doesn’t want its soldiers telling you the truth on their blogs. You know what, Mr. Bush? If I was the political head of an expansionist empire that happened to possess the world’s largest army, I’d probably be careful about ticking them off. I seem to recall certain ancient Emperors in your position being assassinated by their own Praetorian Guard.

On a related note, an American propagandist company has released a new free FPS game in which you play as special forces infiltrating an Iranian nuclear facility. Yeah, that’s right, Iran. A country that the U.S.A. is not at war with; a country whose ‘nuclear arsenal’ may be as real as all those nukes they found in Iraq. Kinda seems like the ‘War On Terror’ is in danger of veering off-course and going all Fourth Crusade on us.

Link The Third: And because it’s Hallowe’en, here’s some cool photos of cemeteries.

That’s all, folks. Check back tomorrow or the next day for an actual, honest-to-god post in which I rant about something or other.

‘Killing your children’ is a very over-used phrase in screenwriting. It is, however, still extremely apt, which I suppose qualifies it as a truism.

What I’m getting at is this: The feedback on my episode wasn’t as glowing as I would have liked. At first glance, I interpreted it as ‘cut out all your new ideas and subplots and go back to the outline we gave you’. This after the meeting in which they asked us - no, implored us - to ‘challenge’ them, ‘bring new ideas to the table’, etc. Apparently my new ideas weren’t quite what they were looking for.

I raged and I fumed a little bit. I complained to anyone who would listen that my artistic ideas were being ignored, but what the hell, I’d write whatever The Boss wanted. He’s my employer, I should just let go of my ego and get on with the job.

And you know what? I did it and I’m damn happy about it.

Once I actually sat down with a clear head and reread the feedback from the Boss, I could see exactly what he was getting at. He wasn’t saying ‘this idea is wrong’. He was saying Fine, but tighten this subplot, replace this character, trim out the fat and the whole thing works a lot better. And he was right. My rewrite became tighter, funnier, more coherent. That idea that worked fine in the breakdown wasn’t so great when implemented. By working to someone else’s specifications, my inner critic went into overdrive and cut out everything that wasn’t totally right.

So accountability is kinda fun. Writing for someone else can actually be liberating. Like a deadline or a bill that needs paying it makes you focus, makes you sharp, makes you ruthless. It takes you out of the blind reverie of creation that the lone artist immerses himself in. It’s a good thing.

Try it some time. Kill your kids. You’ll be glad you did.

Some Maintenance: Thanks to Red Right Hand and Shouting Into The Wind for linking to me, and Hello to anyone who just came over on those links.

And finally, today is the anniversary of arguably the most important day in history. Happy Constantine Day to you all!

This whole writing comics thing? Not so easy.

Craig Mazin at Artful Writer talks about how a screenwriter cannot simply write ‘he walks into an office building’. It’s all very well when we’re sitting alone at the keyboard - pants optional, possibly drinking - and we’re constructing our masterpiece goddamnit, and who cares about the little details? But then your masterpiece actually gets read by other humans and, sooner or later, a disgruntled director or 1st AD is going to ask you what, exactly, you mean by ‘office building’.

It’s worse with comics. About halfway through the first meeting with my erstwhile artist, I realised I had absolutely no idea about the specifics of my story. I was thinking in broad strokes when what she needed was details.

In a film script, for example, we can write about a tough-looking, tattooed, 30-ish character who takes his dog for a walk in the park. Nobody is going to begrudge us the lack of detail. In fact, everything they teach you in scriptwriting equates to ‘less is more’ - set up characters quickly, keep action punchy, white space is good, hit that page count. In a comic script, the artist is going to come back and ask us what kind of tattoos, how big is the park, what breed of dog, what clothes is the man wearing and what the hell does ‘tough-looking’ mean anyway?

Switching from film to comics, we have to learn whole new ways of visualising a scene. We must know our characters, not just mentally and emotionally, but visually as well. We have to think in terms of angle, lighting, background, posture, movement, and at the very same time, structure the story and put words in the mouths of characters. It’s a big balancing act. Frankly, I’m looking forward to it.

(Of course, it’s possible to go a little too far with details, ala Alan Moore, who has been frustrating the hell out of artists for decades. God bless ‘im.)

First off, welcome to any readers who came here via Kung Fu Monkey. Just for you, I’m going to talk about comics.

I love comics. Not ‘graphic novels’ - because that phrase is so nebulous and unwieldy as to be completely useless - just good, old-fashioned comics. It’s fair to say that my life hasn’t been the same since the day I read Sandman. The pantheon of artists who I consider to be my personal idols and heroes - Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon, Grant Morrison, Hayao Miyazaki - have all, at some point, worked in the comics medium.

And these days, that’s not such a weird thing to say. The battle for recognition of comics as an artform is pretty much won. As Grant Morrison says, when Spiderman and the Fantastic Four are plastered on the sides of buses, on TV promoting Coke and on DVDs outselling everything else, you have to admit that the world has changed. It’s been 13 years since Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize, and Alan Moore will almost certainly go down in history as one our generation’s greatest writers.

The fighting is over. Like the novel before it, the comic book has finally been accepted as art.

And you know what? Most people don’t care.

Last night, I watched the DVD of Batman Begins with my housemate. This prompted a discussion of various comics he had read, during which time my demeanor slowly went from mildly discouraged to downright horrified. The sum total of his exposure to the vast medium of comics seems to consist of Asterix, Garfield and, occasionally, The Phantom. He doesn’t like ‘long’ comics, because ‘it’s hard to follow the panels with your eyes’.

This is pretty bad, but it’s at least understandable. There’s a good chunk of the population that hasn’t read anything more taxing than the TV Guide since the days of their high school English class. But what he said next pretty much bowled me over:

“Comic books are easy to adapt into movies, right? You can just film each picture straight from the book. I heard that’s what they did with Spiderman - they just copied the first five issues of the comic.”

I could have cried. There’s just so much wrong with that, it’s impossible to know where to start. And to put this in context: my housemate is no idiot; he’s a film school graduate who now works in television.

This conversation really brought something home to me, and it’s this: Most people don’t much care about art. At the very least, they don’t care about any art that has to be actively participated in - art that has to be ‘read’, rather than absorbed like a mindless zombie. Consequently, most people will never understand the creative process. It all fits into perspective when you remember that the vast majority of the population believes that movies are shot sequentially, in the order of their scenes; and that novelists just sit down with a nice glass of brandy and a roaring fire and let their Muse flow through them, automatically producing a structured narrative as if by magic; and that… well, I could go on.

People don’t care. But really, that’s not going to stop us.

Grant Morrison once said, and here I paraphrase, that he writes ‘for angry, anarchic 14-year-olds who don’t fit into society.’ In other words, he writes for the sort of people who are predisposed to enjoy his work, while ignoring the mass market. It seems to work for him.

So to comics fans and creators I say only this: Forget about trying to hook in new fans, and start concentrating on creating incredible art. We’ll all feel a lot better about ourselves as soon as we drop this obsession with authenticating the artform.

And anyway, once the film adaptation gets made, the smart ones will find their way back to the comic books anyway.

UPDATE: Thanks to Dead Things On Sticks for linking to me, and welcome to anyone who followed the link here. Bring on the co-productions indeed!

Warren Leonard, of the excellent blog The Screenwriting Life, wanted to know about my TV job out here in Australia.

Well, it’s a long and tragic story, but what it really boils down to is this: The Australian film and television industries are irrevocably broken.

About a half hour’s drive from my house there stands a full, operational movie studio equipped with six enormous sound stages and miles of production office space. Local legend has it that Dino De Laurentiis set it up in the late 70s, then promptly abandoned it, leaving the state government with a gigantic white elephant of a site.

Ever since then, we’ve been stuck in a continuous cycle of rotating fortunes that goes something like this:

Phase One: Big American film production swoops in, takes over the entire studio complex and employs everyone in 100km radius for a few months. Our politicians opine to the media that this heralds ‘a new golden age of movie production for our state’.

Phase Two: Big American film packs up and leaves. The studios stand empty and silent for a year or so. Professional crew members get fed up and move to Sydney instead.

Phase Three: See Phase One.

And we don’t even get the decent American films down here. Far from it. In the last three years, our biggest claims to fame have been House of Wax, Ghost Ship and Peter Pan.

So what about our homegrown films? Well I don’t want to be mean or anything, but they’re uniformly fucking awful. They’re also completely unmarketable. At least British and Canadian films can actually be sold to the U.S. market - nobody likes watching films with Australian accents in them. Hell, even we don’t like them.

And the plight of the Australian TV industry is just as depressing. Just like the U.S., we’re hit with a constant cavalcade of worthless reality television. Unlike the U.S., we have no recourse to excellent cable channels like Showtime or HBO, just a continuous stream of valueless crap. Every time one of the braver networks tries to produce an original drama show, the premise is always something painfully provincial and yawn-inducing - like a sheep farmer and his three daughters and their dog called Bluey, trying to find their way in a sleepy Outback town, with lots of shots of Ayers Rock in the background - and it’s mercifully cancelled after two weeks.

This cannot go on. Someone needs to buck the system and break this trend of awfulness.

Which brings me back to my original point, and it’s about time too because you all fell asleep somewhere around ‘Dino de Laurentiis’. The show I’m working on is different. It’s so different, in fact, that it is the first children’s show in Australian broadcast history to reach the production stage without government funding. That’s right, it’s completely independent - a very gutsy move in such a tiny industry. The creator/showrunner tells the story of how he was actually physically attacked at a producer’s conference a few months ago by a woman screaming that she’d been trying to get her show concept made for 10 years, and how dare he come in and make his show before hers.

What’s more, there’s not a trace of Australiana in any part of the production. No landmarks, no colloquialisms, no nothing. The voice actors are actually using American accents, because that is the only sure way to make it globally marketable.

Perhaps another writer with a bigger patriotic (or idealistic) streak than myself would be having all sorts of ethical dilemmas right now. Me, I’m jumping up and down with excitement. The fact is, the creators of this show are beholden to no one but themselves (and their investors), which means that there is very little chance the show will get cancelled, and a very large chance it will go on to be a major success. Also, they can afford to pay me properly.

So how did I get this dream job, you ask? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: If you’re trying to get on an animated kid’s show, send them an Invader Zim spec. Turns out most animation people are huge Zim fans.

UPDATE: Denis McGrath of Dead Things On Sticks addresses the subject of my previous post (yesterday’s) in a manner far wittier than my own. Clearly, he is trying to make me look bad.

UPDATE PART DEUX: A friend of mine recently addressed the issue of Australian cinema’s crappiness in a rather excellent essay. To give you a taste:

“Not one of these “issues” is treated with any dignity whatsoever: rather, they’re simply approached as checkpoints that need to be hit by filmmakers in order to obtain financing from our conservative government funding bodies. “Your film doesn’t have a token homosexual character in it? No autistic hobos? Nothing about Reconciliation? Well, then, no soup for you!””

Oh, snap. Yeah, he went there.

Inertia is our greatest enemy. Our Achilles heel. Our cup of hemlock. Our deadly asp. (OK, I’ll stop now.)

Inertia - or ‘being a fat, lazy bastard’ - is something every writer has to deal with at some point. I had to overcome inertia just to write this post. Inertia is the force that tells you it’s easier to not write than it is to write. It’d be easier to check your email, read blogs, post on forums, read comics, play your Nintendo DS, wash your clothes… the list is endless. There are a million activities easier than writing - and less painful.

And no wonder. In this job you can wake up any time of the morning, and pants are optional all day. Of course we get complacent.

So how the hell do we fight inertia?

Routine. Write at the same time every day, and damn if that isn’t a lot harder than it sounds. Matt Waggoner compares writing routine to eating the same food every day. Good for him, but if I had to eat beans every day for lunch, I’d go insane. To be honest, some days I write in the morning, some days I write into the midnight hours. Routine just doesn’t work for everyone.

Deadlines. Ah. My favourite. The great catalyst, the force that fills us with righteous fear. There’s nothing like it. So what do you do if you’re not blessed with a contract deadline or a company breathing down your neck? Make your own. Seriously, set yourself a realistic timeframe, write it on a Post-It and stick it to your laptop. Or follow Warren Leonard’s advice and egg-time your way to success. Better yet, conscript your loved ones: Inform them of the deadline, then make sure they pester the hell out of you until you hit it. Imagine how bad you’ll feel if you let them down? Which brings us to…

Guilt. Mess with your own head. Set yourself a deadline, then mete out punishments and rewards to yourself, depending on how you did. Ban yourself from the internet, from buying comics this week, from playing video games, until you finish that draft. Finally…

Focus. Ever tried meditation? Stop laughing, I mean it. It’s not something I’ve experimented with very much, but it could be a useful tool for writers who need to clear their minds of unwanted clutter.

So there you have it: four methods for getting your ass in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard. But what happens when you get to that blank screen and find you have nothing to say? What good is overcoming inertia if you run straight into writer’s block?

Well, here’s the thing: Writer’s block is just another form of inertia. There’s nothing stopping you except your own brain. If you didn’t have anything to say, you wouldn’t have become a writer in the first place.

To finish up, I leave you with a quote from the prodigious Mr. Grant Morrison:

‘A cannon fires but once, but words echo across centuries.’

My name is Xander Bennett, I live in Australia and I write things. Pleased to meet you.

Even in these interesting times, when everyone and their dog has a blog, it takes a certain level of ego-inflation to actually create one of your own. I justify it to myself by imagining that it’ll force me to write more. This is what we writers like to call ’self-delusion’.

I also think I have something to say. I’m currently halfway through a spec screenplay, I recently started working for children’s television and, as of tomorrow, I’ll be collaborating on a comic book project with an artist. Over the coming months, you’ll have the privilege of watching me edge closer - little by little - towards my ultimate goal of escaping this godforsaken continent and becoming a working Hollywood screenwriter.

Just kidding, Australia. You’re an alright continent.

So there you have it. The introductions are done. Let’s get to the good stuff.