Читать книгу Script Tease - Eric Nicol - Страница 14
ОглавлениеNow that you have chosen your wardrobe, gathered your reference books, and informed your family that you won’t be available for six months, it is time to decide: What kind of creative writing do you want to do?
Yes, there are lots of choices. They range from the highly commercial to the purely recreational, the supplemental to the masturbatory. Here is a list of some possible genres:
• Novel
• Kids’ lit
• Young adult novel
• Chick lit
• Autobiography (not the life history of an auto)
• Travel (rent-a-camel)
• History (no fewer than twelve hundred pages)
• Medical (requires author to have a degree in something personal)
• Personal essay
• Screenplay (appropriate to one thousand videos)
• Stage play
• Poetry (commercially limited to greeting cards, but cost- effective in regard to not needing a haircut)
• Journalism (sometimes called “the Fourth Estate,” because part of you has died)
• Humour (a very chancy genre unless your name is Woody Allen or Dave Barry)
• Income tax return
NOVEL
Not just the short story on steroids, the novel is a relatively recently evolved species of creative writing, still treated with contempt by some older literary critics. Even the noun was unknown until the sixteenth century when the Italian novella was introduced to Western Europe, along with the pepperoni pizza.
For centuries the novel form was monopolized by male writers such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. Women were waiting for the invention of the printing press, which boosted book sales enough to make novel writing competitive with prostitution. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, made a bigger killing than her monster, inspiring female novelists everywhere to create heroes who needed to be struck by lightning.
Today virtually all successful novelists can be clinically identified as female. The exception being Stephen King (horror has no gender). The bestselling of these novels is called chick lit (with apologies to the chewing gum). They are stories written by women, about women, for women who have tried real men and moved on. You shouldn’t attempt chick lit if you are a virgin or otherwise sexually impaired. (Another test: can you write with your legs crossed?)
If you feel that you don’t meet any of these criteria, it doesn’t mean you are totally lacking in sensitivity and should be writing parking tickets. Your talent may be juvenile, and better suited to writing books for children.
KIDS’ LIT
This is a tremendously lucrative market for writers who have refused to grow up. Reason: parents are frantically buying books for their children in a desperate if futile effort to dislodge them from the Internet. Having to compete with porn channels is a real challenge to the children’s author trying to create a bedtime story that doesn’t involve handcuffs.
In order to write for children, it helps to think like a child, without having previously played professional hockey without a helmet. Some frequently asked questions about kids’ lit:
Q: I’m a guy. Won’t people look at me funny if I try to write children’s books?
A: Of course. That’s why you need to write under another name (nom de plume). Charles Dodgson, a respected English mathematician, could never have written Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As Lewis Carroll, he did. Just make sure your literary alias hasn’t already been taken (e.g., Mark Twain).
Q: Should I avoid using words of more than one syllable?
A: Not at all. Most kids over twelve can handle two syllables, sometimes more. But polysyllables may cause incontinence in sensitive children.
Q: Where can I research children’s books without having to buy one?
A: Your public library. A librarian will be happy to direct you to the shelf where the children’s books would be if they weren’t out. Or you may browse in a children’s bookstore, though some managers get shirty if you bring a camp stool.
Q: What about nursery rhymes? Any market?
A: This little piggy didn’t make it. The problem with nursery rhymes is that it is difficult to write any new ones without having them, under analysis, reveal the author’s sexual perversion (e.g., “Jack and Jill went up the hill” has a motivation other than to “fetch a pail of water”).
YOUNG ADULT NOVEL
This is a relatively new genre of creative writing: books aimed at the special market of parents who want to give their teenager something of a legal substance.
The prototype of the young adult novel has long been the works of Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832–1899), whose boys’ books inspired a whole generation of young Americans to go forth and earn big bucks. Alger’s classic — Ragged Dick — despite the catchy title is little read by today’s teenagers, being one long endorsement of hard work as a source of wealth. Alger also gave away much of his earnings to street kids, dying poor himself. Perhaps he’s not a role model for those students drawn to YA novel writing in lieu of gainful employment.
YA novels are usually published in soft cover, a hint that your work may not have the longevity of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the royalties are apt to be less than what the publisher paid the illustrator. But the glory is all yours, Horatio.
CHICK LIT
This genre is deplored as demeaning to novels in general. These novels are typically written by female authors, read mostly by women, and critically reviewed by men who like to live dangerously.
Unlike male-written novels, which are sometimes about something other than sex, chick lit concentrates almost entirely on relationships. It is impossible to imagine a Roberta Crusoe. Even if the castaway has email.
The genre was formerly described as “the bodice ripper.” Perhaps because today no one is quite sure what a bodice is, there seems to be less ripping going on than in the days when women wore discernible vests. Also, the provocation for shredding a woman’s underwear (“No!”) has waned as a response to male ardour. Today it is more likely to be the guy who gets his shirt totalled by impassioned fingers. Autre temps, autre skivvies.
To author chick lit, a woman really needs to have a personal background of bad experience with her mother. If she hasn’t had a mother, she is working at a distinct disadvantage. She will also need to have had an aunt, grandmother, or older sister to provide the oppressive regime when she is creating a female protagonist that will resonate with the reader who has relatives.
Here care must be taken, lest a wicked stepmother emerge from the closet to sue the author for libel. In fact, the author of chick lit may need to write off all her kin, in terms of amicable relations. It is the price one pays for writing fiction that isn’t kept entirely outdoors.
Can a male author write chick lit? What if he is a bit effeminate? Secretly paints his toenails? Hates ice hockey? Well, probably not. Virginia Woolf said that there is a spot at the back of every woman’s head the size of a shilling that no man ever sees. What she meant was that some areas of feminine sensibility are so esoteric that a guy can’t access them without straining his maleness.
Although it is more natural for a female author to produce chick lit, the question is: Is it proper to exploit relatives for the purpose of producing a book? The answer: absolutely. One can’t work a gold mine without disturbing the terrain, creating a certain amount of detritus. If your mother didn’t want to have a daughter who uses her as the basis of a story character with the disposition of a tarantula, she should have taken proper measures to prevent conception.
However, it is prudent to change all names to protect the guilty.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
This is the story of your life (sorry, Dear Me has been taken as a title) and should include the parts you would prefer not to be made public. These will make you look human, a quality attractive to your readers. These will make you look human, a quality attractive to your readers.
Should you change the names of persons in your life with whom you have had intimate or illicit relations? Never! Being sued for libel is the hallmark of a successful autobiography. As long as you don’t have any assets that can be seized by the court, the litigant will soon abandon seeking redress for your having publicly identified him (or her) as a sexual deviant with a lively interest in whips, chains, and power tools.
Autobiographies are often ghostwritten, especially for celebrities who, for one reason or another, haven’t learned how to compose whole sentences. You can earn good money as a ghostwriter, and of course the bedsheet is a lot cheaper than having to buy clothes.
TRAVEL
People like to read about voyages of discovery to exotic lands beyond East Toronto. Unfortunately, exotic lands are dwindling in number as more natives get cable. It is hard to spin an exciting narrative out of an encounter with a fearsome-looking African who is chatting on a cellphone.
Thus it is prudent to research how much has already been published about your destination. Mount Everest, for example, has been climbed to death. You don’t want to learn this after you have already booked the Sherpa guides (who, of course, now also have an agent).
Second, the travel writer needs to have a camera, especially if the project is an article for National Geographic. The camera should be as small as possible. Reason: in some sheltered parts of the world the natives see the camera as a devilish device for extracting their souls. Being strung up with your own camera strap is an ugly way to go, even if the photos have good detail.
As for financial reward, the market for your travel writing may be limited to your community newspaper, but your trip to Fiji will be tax-deductible.
HISTORY
To succeed in this genre of writing you need to have a good working relationship with the past. This may be why history is more popular with readers than with writers. Yes, history takes work. It involves substance. Legal substance. History requires research, a task that can propel a person into the library stacks where he ages quickly. In severe cases he is never seen again.
Writing history also means getting intimate with footnotes, each having to be numbered by hand because your computer balks at words with a dinky digit riding on their tails.1
1. Like that.
Footnotes have a special attraction for non-fiction authors with a fondness for the appendix (footnote fetish), as well as for Latin abbreviations (ibid., op. cit., etc.) that only irritate the reader who has been looking forward to turning the page. The writer should use footnotes only as required to acknowledge the sources of his facts, should his history happen to include any.
By far the most popular type of history is that of a war, preferably a world war. The First and Second World Wars have been pretty well done to death, unfortunately, but new wars are breaking out all the time — some of them with the potential of becoming World War III and the end of civilization as we know it. Which could, of course, affect sales of your history book.
MEDICAL
You really do need to have your M.D. to author a bestselling book for people eager to ignore their own doctor’s advice. Luckily, there are several universities that will grant the degree after completion of a correspondence course in heart surgery.
One of the most popular medical subjects today is sado-masochism, as a fun way of abusing the body without having to be drafted into the National Hockey League. Until recently, there was some stigma to being identified as a latter-day Marquis de Sade, but today there are numerous clubs for people who enjoy screaming in a social atmosphere. Researching this material may require some expenditure for gear popularized by the Spanish Inquisition, but should be tax-deductible if accompanied by degrading photos.
PERSONAL ESSAY
Montaigne is credited with having created this introverted literary form as a clever way of avoiding hard work. He could afford to, having been born rich. So, unless you expect to inherit a château in a lush part of France, depending on the sale of a book of essays may be an early symptom of dementia.
Like the diary form associated with Samuel Pepys, it’s a case of “Don’t give up your day job.”
However, you do have the role model of America’s most cherished essayist, Henry David Thoreau. Living in a simple cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau didn’t entertain much other than the ducks. His livelihood depended mostly on doing yardwork for Ralph Waldo Emerson, another essayist. Such was the Golden Era of Essayists in America before they all joined the staff of Time magazine and forgot about writing earthy homilies like: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
Thoreau wrote most of his best stuff in his journal. This assured him posthumous fame, which isn’t as rewarding as being somebody while you are still alive.
SCREENPLAY
Here dwelleth the Big Bucks. Film producers spare no expense to obtain a screenplay for the film director to ignore once shooting starts. The screenwriter must shed all sensitivity and feel comfortable selling his soul to the highest bidder. He is, after all, relieved of responsibility for the final product, left to merely wince as the credits roll by on a violated screen.
This raises the question: Is it possible to maintain complete artistic integrity and still afford to buy food?
Instead of pondering this question, the smart screenwriter must find satisfaction in being part of the process of elimination — he must have the integrity of a turd.
It is now possible to take a university course in screenwriting and study models drawn from the kind of movies that are no longer being made. Any college course that doesn’t have calculus as a prerequisite is bound to boost a writer’s self-esteem if he avoids writing the final exam.
Also, there is a good chance you will form a relationship with a classmate, an affair that ends unhappily when the classmate turns out to be bisexual, thus providing you with dramatic scenes that would have been inconceivable had you taken a correspondence course.
STAGE PLAY
This form of creative writing worked quite well for Shakespeare, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t follow in his footsteps — if you have a really long stride.
The main drawback to writing stage plays is that they nearly always involve spoken words. A screenplay can be successful with a minimum of verbal exchange — as proven by the Olympian stature of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. But it is difficult to have characters onstage without somebody’s saying something. Otherwise what you have is pantomime, a genre pretty well restricted to an audience that still wets its pants. The main benefit from writing for the stage is not financial but social, as the playwright gets to meet a lot of people — director, actors, stagehands — whom he might otherwise never have hated.
(Note: since the Age of Aquarius has pretty well dried up, presenting nudity onstage is no longer a novelty and rarely substitutes for dialogue.)
Occasionally, a stage play first mounted in the boonies (e.g., Canada) will graduate to Broadway, off-Broadway, farther-off-Broadway, the Great White Wail, Bad Times Squared, or some other doomed site. For New York critics the only good plays Canadians make are on the ice of a hockey arena.
POETRY
Early in life nearly everyone discovers that some words rhyme with other words. This incites the young person to write what he believes to be poetry but is, in fact, the mental equivalent of a wet dream.
For most writers this is just a phase, the acne of literary puberty. They recover from it without permanent damage to their ability to express themselves on paper. In fact, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the dean of budding scribes, recommends verse writing as a good exercise for the mind that has a tendency to wander into blank prose.
We might also recall that in the heyday of Greek literature, the Olympic Games included a public reading of original verse, something hard to imagine as an element of the Grey Cup or the Super Bowl.
The main advantage that today’s poet has over the ancient Greek is that modern poems may be — indeed, should be — comprehensible to no one but the author. Freed from the strictures of rhyme scheme and grammar, the poem reflects the breakdown of Western civilization. It draws praise from critics who recognize that it transmits the inexpressible, being as impenetrable as a mother superior.
However, the novice should understand that very few poets today can make a living from this activity alone. Even Ovid — a top-ranked poet in his time — was moonlighting from his job as a lawyer. Which of these activities led to his being exiled to the city on the Black Sea where he died, we don’t know. But the message for today’s aspiring poet is clear: unless you are independently wealthy or happy to be housed in an abandoned piano crate, with the Muse, you lose.
That said, if you do take a turn for the verse, and just can’t resist rhyming couplets instead of leaving them alone, you may derive a lot of perfectly legal pleasure from penning an ode. (An ode is a poem meant to be sung, which may be going too far in a shaky relationship.)
JOURNALISM
This is sometimes called “the Fourth Estate,” the other Three Estates being Lords Spiritual (the heads of churches), Lords Temporal (the peerage), and the Commons (the rabble). Also called “ink-stained wretches,” today’s journalist rarely comes into contact with ink. Instead he has an intimate relationship with a computer, which is likely to become insanely jealous if the journalist goes to the toilet.
The main virtue of journalism is that it combines creative writing with a steady job. An actual livelihood. Which in turn makes the writer able to afford a spouse, children, a motorized vehicle, and possibly a permanent residence with indoor plumbing.
Journalists — whether in print or electronic media — comprise the major class of employed writers today. There are actual schools of journalism and university courses to train the average writer to transmit news or opinion without attracting undue attention to himself. These courses may be combined with athletics, such as rugby, to train the reporter to take notes in a media scrum or while hanging on to the door of a politician’s limo.
The basic college course for journalism is that of writing emissions for the campus student newspaper. The student — naturally shy and socially inept — gains confidence in his ability to write for an audience other than his immediate family, as well as to drink beer with other introverts.
Today the college newspaper’s editorial room isn’t as anarchic as in earlier times when it served as a mating ground for the creatively queer. Some observers fear that it has become merely a mirror, in miniature, of the daily newspaper, decorum snuffing out the divine afflatus.
However, writing for the student paper does familiarize a person with the hierarchy of the trade:
• cub reporter
• editorial writer
• star columnist
• publisher
• paper carrier (without whom revelation remains with St. John the Divine)
While less prestigious than being an award-winning novelist or an esteemed historian, being a journalist does get the writer out of the ivory tower and into the pub. With enough wampum to pay for a round. And seeing your name as a byline is visible proof of your existence in case you have doubts based on buying lottery tickets.
HUMOUR
Canadian humour is more personal than American humor because it includes u. (A little orthographic joke, there. We’ll hurry on.)
The best-known Canadian humorist to achieve wealth, as well as fame, was Stephen Leacock. Leacock profited so handsomely from work like his Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town that he was able to give up his day job as a McGill University professor to concentrate entirely on making Canadians laugh — a feat previously thought to be impossible.
Today most publishers are leery of humorists because humour may be used to suggest that a sacred cow is yielding bullshit. Thus the market for humour in print has shrunk with the gelding of Punch and the bloated state of The New Yorker without Robert Benchley, James Thurber, and S.J. Perelman. Only Dave Barry survives, by the sheer weight of giggles, and he may yet be targeted by the CIA.
A pity this; in earlier times the only member of a powerful king’s court who could imply folly was his clown. Not sure you will look good in motley? Take heart from Woody Allen, the humorist who added a new dimension to appearing dishevelled. Woody is the role model for the neurotic image that people find hilarious.
Does this mean that if you suspect you lack the vital neuroses, you should forget about writing humour? Probably. But there is always the chance that life will deal you a blow you can see the funny side of. If necessary, go into politics.
INCOME TAX RETURN
This form of fiction may be safely ignored by most writers. Tax-wise, their earnings put them in a bracket that is off the wall and in the basement.
However, in the blissful event that your novel hits the bestseller list or your screenplay is honoured at an Academy Awards ceremony, it is prudent to keep a written record of all deductible expenses. Does this mean having children? Only if you are terminally fertile. Dependents are the most costly type of tax deduction. Especially if your children are over forty and living at home.
Tax-wise, it is better to have a liver transplant than to have children (liquor is deductible if used to research a project).
While using your creative imagination to prepare your tax return, it is wise to remember that the Receiver General can be a severe critic. His unfavourable review of your work could include a cash penalty and possibly a jail sentence. Yes, your new computer may be deductible if used for something other than browsing the Internet for porn. But the trip to Tahiti to research a book on Paul Gauguin’s use of native girls may not survive scrutiny (unless artfully woven into a travel narrative).
So, with math skills unequipped to deal with numbers over ten, it may be prudent for the writer, in the unusual circumstance of his having earned money, to have his tax return prepared by a tax accountant. One who is willing to do the job in return for having his car washed.
