Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah. Needle stuck in his arm. Blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Seventy packets of
heroin scattered around the world. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Moron.
As readers of this blog know by now, Thriller Guy has no
qualms about speaking ill of the dead. Yes, TG understands that it’s a disease,
that he had his demons, blah blah blah blah blah blah. He also had a wife and
three kids. He wanted to get high. He died doing it. Three more words: selfish,
selfish, selfish.
One good thing to come out of the sorry affair (man, even TG
thinks that’s a pretty cold statement) is that everybody is running all their
old radio interviews they had with Hoffman. He was a very smart, interesting
guy and gave intelligent interviews. TG was listening to a 2009 interview with
Terry Gross and he said something that resonated with TG. He was talking about
acting, but TG related it to writing. She asked him about how he had once said
that acting was tremendously difficult, and he really struggled with parts of
it. He said when you’re on a movie set, it’s usually for ten or twelve hours a
day and that entire time you had to keep the character you were playing
constantly in your head. Otherwise you might lose the sense of him, and that it
took an enormous amount of concentration, which was very difficult. TG’s
thought was, if you think it’s hard to act
a character, you should try creating one and getting him down on paper over a
period of hours, days, months and years. Think it’s hard to keep a character in
your head for 10 hours? Try ten months.
And while you’re at it, try doing it with every other
character in a book, all at the same time. And then put them all in various
scenes that make sense and add up to a compelling story. You want to talk about
concentration? But enough about
Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The above led TG to think about how he goes about writing a
scene: what does it look like inside his head? How exactly do you do it? TG
(Allen Appel’s alter ego) starts writing while envisioning a scene, like a
movie, except the scene is full blown, not flat like it’s being projected. If
there are no characters, the scenery gets described. Then there are characters
in the scenery, and they talk, one at a time, usually. Each time a character
talks, it is as if there is a camera recording what is happening: first, from
TG’s mental POV, (which is usually the main character’s POV) which is usually
looking at another character to whom he is speaking. When the second character
speaks, the “camera” shifts to that character so TG can record what he/she is
saying (making up this dialogue) and see what effect it is having on the first
character. These effects are then (sometimes) noted. (“Albert could see that
his words had hurt. Jim looked down at his feet, considering his response. Or
maybe he would just punch Albert instead.”) Usually TG will run a scene like
this, or a section of the scene) through his mental projector before writing it
down. Then he writes it down, and continues on within the scene or on to the
next scene. Remember, the next scene has to reflect the last and at the same
time move the action forward. Not only are you keeping the initial scene in
your head, you’re writing the present one and thinking ahead to the next. And
you are doing this from the viewpoint of all the characters at the same time.
Man, this is really hard to describe. Talk about
concentration. Now TG’s head hurts.
But here’s a secret. All the above machinations that go into
warming up the engine of the mind and getting settled and in gear can slip away almost
without notice, and, if you’re lucky, morph into the background where they do their
job silently. The mind, the story, the unconscious takes over and the
writer writes only dimly aware that he is doing so; he becomes the story and simply, without conscious thought, records it
through the medium of the keyboard or pen. You will often hear writers say,
“The story just takes over me, I just record what it says to me.” And as phony
as this sounds, it is exactly what happens if one is lucky. We used to call
this “being in the zone” and maybe that’s still what they call it, and it is a
true thing and it is a wonderful place to be. Hours can go by while you are in
the grip and you then emerge, blinking, dazed back into the real world and you
look around and wonder, where have I been?
You’ve been in your own world, brothers and sisters, and TG understands, give
it a few minutes, soon enough you’ll be faced with life’s usual problems to say
nothing over your story’s usual problems. But for a while, you have been on
your own journey, your own world, your own dream and that can be a wonderful
place to be.
Concentrate, yes. It’s hard work. But also…
Dream.
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