Structure Doesn't Only Hold Up Buildings posted by Martin

I decided to pipe my own few cents on the structure questions, after Shockah’s fine post on the matter.

I was reminded, reading his description of his college writing experiences, of the Mamet quote that “the Avant Garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.” This is not to downplay abstraction or disregard completely avant material, but what I took from Shockah’s point about his college experience is much that I took from nearly every writing class I’ve experienced: They don’t teach you how to write.

Instead, they teach you to think as abstractly as possible. They try to get your mind into creative spaces. Often, there is flowery talk about personal self-expression, which millions of writers take to mean that the only craft in writing is just to express their feelings. Just ask the editors of any poetry magazine about how many unpublishable entries they receive every day (thus giving rise to the guaranteed-to-be-published poetry anthologized subsidized by the authors themselves).

What’s wrong with this? It ignores that there is craft involved in writing at all. You teach painters how to paint by teaching them how to draw and how to see. They take life drawing classes, and burn through charcoal. They study perspective. The great avant artists of the 20th century weren’t great because they were really creative, man—they were great because they understood the medium deeply. Rockwell, a huge admirer of cubism, once went to study in Paris. The instructor pulled him aside and asked for advice how to sell illustrations.

Point being this: the only education that taught me about writing was in classes where I was forced to write essays. I learned that I had to make a point, make it fast, and defend it. I had to create a narrative that the reader might be interested in—specifically, the instructor whom I was trying to impress to get a high grade.

Most of the writing classes I’ve taken are filled with the same post-modern-at-its-worst drivel about personal expression. The fact is, writing is not subjective in the least. We can judge good writing. Dickens is not subjectively a good writer, he just was a good writer. Heather McHugh is not subjectively a good poet, she just is a good poet. Both of them have mastered language in a very specific way. While I personally don’t like some authors very much, it doesn’t mean their craft is poor, it’s often a personal taste thing. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with not liking something?

A good beginning writing instructor would start by saying that all interesting stories share a few basic traits. Master those first, then go as outside as you want. Learn that you need a character and something needs to happen to that character. Teach Aristotle and the seven stories of the world, or just teach the three basic stories: man against man, man against nature, man against himself.

Then, let the students experiment with breaking those boundaries, pushing them, and also with working within them. Teach them how to hook a reader with a story that they care about, and that’s a skill they’ll always be able to use.

Writing instructors—and, to be fair, they may be much better these days then in my school days—are like an early Jan Tschichold. Tshichold was one of the great typographers and designers of the 20th century modernist movement. Early on, in his book Die Neue Typographie, he decried poor typography, and declared sans-serif fonts as the modernist masterpieces that would replace serifed typefaces. He was a firebrand of high order—he pissed the Nazi’s off something fierce. But, riding out the war in England, he designed the Penguin library and came to realize that 600 years of typographic refinement really didn’t happen arbitrarily—serifed typefaces are easier to read in print. The idea, of course, is that the words disappear and the message comes through. This is, what famous typography writer Beatrice Warde called the Crystal Goblet.

The same thing is true for great writing. The words should disappear and be replaced in the readers head with the message or story being told. If the person keeps thinking to themselves “Wow, this writing is really beautiful” then the writing is about the words themselves. There’s an argument for that, I think, but there’s another big argument for just telling the story.

In any case, relating to screeplay writing: I am with Shockah that methods are more like models: views of looking at your script and seeing it from a different angle. They aren’t meant to be the one true path to writing successfully. Ironically, if you read a few of these books, they all reference the same great screenplays as proof of their analysis. Wow—seems like China Town used fifteen different methods.

I am, though, nowhere near as good of a student as Shockah is. Or, rather, he has a much better memory than I do. I tend to jumble all of the terms together. And, I plan on developing my own method of screenwriting based on the game cricket just to confuse things even more. Keep tuned for that.

But in the meantime, I just have to say that these books are so needed and so popular because many writers, despite degrees or many hours spent in classrooms, don’t know how to tell a fucking story. Maybe if the world was different they wouldn’t be so needed, but what’s the harm in using the theories? If you write a good screenplay, the only thing that matters is that people will read it and forget that it’s words on paper, and they won’t give a shit which method you used to lay it down.

As for telling a story: it should be the first damn thing that you learn in any creative program. Start with how to hold the brush.

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