WRONG ONE

These rules were originally tweeted by Emma Coates, Pixar’s Story Artist. Number 9 on the list - When you’re stuck, make a list of what wouldn’t happen next – is a great one and can apply to writers in all genres.

1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
2. You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.
3. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
4. Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
5. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
6. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
8. Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
12. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
13. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
14. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
15. If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
18. You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
20. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
21. You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
22. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

http://yorkpen.wordpress.com/

Long-awaited sequel to 2009’s Up in superb counterpoint to its predecessor.

After the once Edenic ‘Paradise Falls’ falls to money-grubbing developers, Carl Fredericksen decides once again that the only way is up, and inflates his last hidden store of thin, latex balloons.

In anguish, Carl, his house and (regrettably) several hundred dogs, are silently dragged to the heavens, towards the cold, dark void of space. That is until forty minutes in, when the balloons begin to over-expand at around 90,000ft, allowing Pixar’s latest creation – understood to be the last of the franchise – to freefall towards its somewhat atypical conclusion.

One of the real strengths of the film is its appeal to a family audience. Carl’s stoic ambition has been called a lesson in perseverance from which both adults and children can learn. Some parents will enjoy the film’s dark, dark humour. And for the children there are loads and loads of dogs.

“It seemed like they were falling forever,” said one child. “I don’t really understand what happened at the end.” A Disney spokeman concurred: “We expect the kids will be mostly oblivious to the obvious oblivion.”

Critics at the première had mixed reviews. While “definitely not uplifting” – with Carl described as a “drunk, self-destructive Icarus” – reviewers unanimously agreed that Down “falls with style”. Disney officials present at the screening were active in using any means necessary to make sure that every sobbing child was crying ‘tears of joy’.

Later at the reception, a toddler was praised for her mature understanding, after claiming that it would be impossible at her age “to ascertain the gravity of his situation”. Director David Lynch made no comment.

An undergraduate has been found after more than a week, after getting herself trapped in a lever-arch file. The first year sociology student found herself ringbound, after accidentally closing the lever through her friendship bracelet – understood to have been given to her by another first year – and finding that she was trapped between the covers.

“I was trying to absorb some notes, but I think they absorbed me,” recounted the fresher, who will not be named. “I began to get delirious by the third day. It was very dark. And cold. After reading it several times, I started eating Durkheim. Then the Rousseau.” 

She added: “The worst thing was all the fibre. It really caused me some problems later on.”

The student is not planning to file a complaint to the university. “I’m just scared it would happen again. My advice is: be careful what you accept from strangers at fresher’s week. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Luckily I do sociology, so I didn’t actually miss any lectures, or seminars, or anything. Plus, I’ve done all my autumn reading now, so I suppose it worked out for the best.”

The student is understood to have showered, and is now a little fresher.

A week ago I was fortunate enough to be offered a ticket to the final night of Chris Hannan’s The God Of Soho at the Globe Theatre. I had heard mixed reviews and went without expectation, and to some fantastic seats.

Clem, the goddess of Love, has a tiff with New God, her boyfriend, in the shiny, Postmodern, Soho-writ-large Heaven of white patent leather jackets and studs. She goes to Earth (arriving in ‘actual’ Soho) in search of raunchier sex that doesn’t involve the ‘certain items’ that New God seems to require. He follows her down almost immediately (perhaps a little too fast?), fitting in as a wine salesman, who sells to the chef of celebrity-for-nothing Natty and her pretentious, but rather likeable rockstar boyfriend Baz, who also fight (throughout, in fact) causing him to spitefully abandon her bag of sex toys – which is found, surprise surprise, by Clem…

Between Heaven and Earth, which is utterly debased, the play dips and dives as the various characters undergo changes of attitude, and try different (onstage) bedroom antics to get back on track. Iris Roberts, who plays Clem, is very convincing as both a free spirit and a girl craving love. Edward Hogg as rockstar Baz, and Emma Pierson as Natty play equally admirable parts, and their charisma carries some of the play’s lesser performances.

Sadly this could not disguise the play’s major fault; it just didn’t seem as though it was quite sure what it was about. It struggled to find balance between farce, which the settings and costumes lent towards, and a comedic play that could still carry a message. On one hand, the outlandish transvestite deity, the Queen of the Dogs giving advice about herself as a young ‘woman’, the perpetually farting Mrs God, and, who could forget, the full-cast musical number “We Are So Shit”. On the other, Teresa, Natty’s homeless and apparently alcoholic sister dousing herself in spirit and threatening to set light before an extended monologue on the miserable state of her existence.

It was clear why the Globe had chosen to put it on. It was certainly Shakespearian in its gags and metatheatricality, and certainly got laughs; it had a strong female lead buzzing about like a modern day Rosalind, mediating between the play’s various lovesick characters; it was bold and colourful, and had a rocking backing band, King Porter Stomp, that punctuated scenes like a chorus; but it did not have any clear message – no point to it – except a few worn-out words about the mutability of love and its accompanying torments.

It’s a shame. There’s a scene in the second half, in which a mentally fragile ‘Big God’ breaks down, as he is ignored by a schizophrenic tramps ‘of 319 illnesses’, who believes he is succumbing to: “Uh Oh - The God Delusion!” It felt as though Hannan really wanted to write this sort of absurd tragicomedy, this Beckettian meeting of two totally incompatible souls, but had lost his way somewhere in the attempts to make it accessible to the tourists through outlandish shouting and cheap tricks. And so while he managed to keep the script going with a joke-a-minute, the play does not clearly resolve, leaving the audience with an unsettling feeling that they are as lost as the gods themselves, hoping but struggling to find any meaning to desperately cling onto.

http://youtu.be/dS-jLM75xuU

The Dreaming Spires dream too high

And so I dream anew,

“So find another dream,” said I

And logically, I do.

I don’t feel like a poet,

Despite the shadows and the time.

But I do it right, the metre’s tight

I capitalise every starting block,

I take notice of the rhyme.

Analysis - that’s key, I think

But I’m force fed till I swallow

Cocky scholars, who laud the lives of 

Dons they bait and follow.

And pouring ink upon a page

Within an empty room - 

An old convention, on a stage, yet,

Cogito ergo sum.

Silverfish writhe in darkness

Cold companions of late nights

Minute demons, enigmatic and streamlined

They glide to my heart

And make it see.

“Well, ask me why I’m drunk alla time
It levels my head and eases my mind
I just walk along and stroll and sing
I see better days and I do better things
(I catch dinosaurs)
(I make love to Elizabeth Taylor)
(Catch hell from Richard Burton!)”