Revision: What a Slow Agonizing Pain in the Tuckus!

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
– Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Review Interview, 1956

I put this quote here to start this post about what I feel is one of the most laborious and difficult tasks a creator has before him or her: that of refining, editing, and revision. Why is it so hard? If the answer were universal and easily applied, I'd publish a self-help book for writers and be a millionaire. Countless people already try this.

So, I can only speculate on my own difficulty with revision. I consider my "weapon" of choice to be that of narrative filmmaking, but I have produced quite a bit of prose and a bit less of purely visual art. Each process has its own revisionist pains, and all are experienced differently. But as writing for me is part of both prose and the early stages of filmmaking, (and it's what I've been doing the most of lately), I'll have to give more perspective on this as the wounds of revision are fresh and nasty.

1. Starting.
Starting is hard. Staring everyday (and I mean everyday of the week) on the same project is harder. For me, it's about the tension I often feel as a writer, when just sitting down at my computer, and that nagging critical inner voice starts to creep in to set standards that are beyond expectations. She's like the mean coach in middle school PE that made us tweens run a mile while she was sneaking puffs on her Marlboros. That little critical voice is a bitch, so some meditation sometimes helps before writing. Ten to twenty minutes, while my two cats battle it out over laptime. (I wonder if the Buddha had the same problem.) While trying to meditate and avoid feline distractions, I attempt to recognize the voice and the tension, and actively say "I see you, you little cunt," which seems to sometimes be a good way to mute the inner critic.  Also, a few glasses of red wine, or any available tasty alcoholic beverage, will usually put that critic right to sleep, and (unfortunately) me a short time after.

Toni Morrison

2. Choosing.
You've gotten all the way to the "finish line." (Yay, open up that bottle of Andre if you are a poor artist like me, but if you have the means, go for the Krut Brut Vintage, 1988.) There are now words on paper that was once as white and bare as a Little Debbie Zebra snack cake. Notes from your trusted colleagues are available. Now what? Well, it's time to pick up your machete and "kill those darlings," hack them to tiny bits and shove them in a garbage bag. This I think is inevitably easier to do with script writing than with prose. There is so much liberty in prose that I feel does not exist in narrative filmmaking, and a definite page number limit for screen plays that isn't really as stringent for prose.

So. What's working? Can you actually identify it? Why is it working? Keep that.

What isn't working? Why does it suck? Does it need to be in this draft then? No? Then delete that shit!

Sometimes I can't answer these questions. Sometimes I am just too close to the script or story, that I just can't choose. I find that putting away the draft for a little while, a week or longer, and starting something else creatively is immensely helpful. I've had lulls between drafts where I've written other things or gotten back into photography, certified myself in Pomeranian dog grooming techniques (joking), etc. as a break from wordsmithing. Coming back to the script or novel after this hiatus has allowed me to really see things that I was not able to see before hand. A nice vacation to a foreign country is also a great distraction from the burdens of your craft, but unfortunately, not in this woman's budget. Alternatively, for the ultimate poor artist's tip for creative perspective, you can do what I sometimes do, and put away your drafts for a decade or more, and then return to them. (For more details, I've already blogged about my file cabinet repository below.) A word of caution: sometimes it's rather humbling to see the crap that was spilling from your printer when you were in your fresh 20s, and it might make you forlornly question your current abilities as a writer. Hopefully, some little gem will be amongst the wasteland of your mind. A hard little diamond nugget shining through the poo.

Here's a nice Neil Gaiman quote on this idea:

“The best advice I can give on this is, once it’s done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you’re ready, pick it up and read it, as if you’ve never read it before. If there are things you aren’t satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that’s revision.” — Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman

For How to Eat Pho, Martha Lynn returned some very big questions for my main characters that I could not answer for days. I'm clearer on the answers to these questions now, but it's still not all there. I can say that in these moments of frustration, at the point of tears, just putting something out there, as outlandish as it may be, at least gave me something to shape and form. A sculptor cannot sculpt without clay, even if it's homemade playdough. So, give yourself some words, even if they would make a sixth grader think you are dumb, so you can do something with them.

3. Knowing when to stop.
My co-producer wants to pre-film a "perfect" draft of How to Eat Pho. Well, this will never happen. There is no such thing as a perfect script, because defining perfection is a subjective thing. Your mom's idea of perfection is not yours (hopefully). This is why, no matter what anyone says about your work, it's up to you to figure out when it's "ready." If you are constantly revising, based on what everyone is saying about your work with whom you share it, you will have lost the core spirit of your writing, its energy and vitality, and you'll have something you no longer recognize. It's like over-whipping a batch of mashed potatoes until they become a sticky and pliable mound of starchy goo.

So, after all this stupid ranting I've done here, sometimes it just comes down to doing it, avoiding these stupid "how tos," and just practice, practice, practice.  And remind yourself when you are ready to light your script or novel on fire and wish it to slowly rot a painful death in the recycle bin of hell, that everything, even the process of revision, as much as it sucks, will end.

What Puppets Are Teaching Me...

In my previous posts, I've been writing about my next feature project, How to Eat Pho, a black comedy that (for now) is about three distant sisters who have to get their shit together long enough to throw their dying ex-porn star dad his last birthday party. One sister is a mid-aged B zombie film director, one is an ESL teacher with a penchant for BDSM and vintage porn, and the youngest is a rather untalented but starry-eyed solo puppeteer.

I'm fortunate enough to have started working through the second draft with writer Martha Lynn Coon (Ring, Rip, Rent) who is serving as the dramaturg. While drafts are being reviewed, I've been thinking through the visual style of this story, trying to wrap my head about how I want to present these scenes. The last few years of my life have involved a lot of thinking about the artistry of film, how I feel it is more or less confined by standard coverage practices (wide shot, medium two shot, close ups, etc.,) and the structure of the traditional narrative. With the exception of the horror genre, I've discovered that film is largely expected to present reality, with a small twist of artistic license. A very small twist. I think this is largely a reflection of the era in which film was born. Other art forms, such as puppetry, have so much more stretch and wiggle room, I'm jealous. Of course, lots of directors go imaginatively beyond this (Jarman, Greenaway, Lynch are a few), and I've been wanting to find out what is my specific imaginative "stretch" for this film.  I'm lucky one of the characters, Annie, is a puppeteer, as this gives me ample rich territory to work with.

So, I started making puppets. My first ones. Inspired by Austin's own puppet troupes from Glass Half Full Theater and Trouble Puppet, I traipsed around fabric stores and Loews, gathered lots of wood, cloth, googly eyes, and began to assemble my versions of the characters, thinking that I might give some scenes a go as a solo puppet show, as told by Annie. My little puppets aren't that great, and I would never do a live performance with them, but they do the job for letting me get inside Annie's head a bit, and see what a scene looks like, through her point-of-view, performed by puppets that are her family members.

It's been a strange challenge, as a film director, to try to step into the skin of a puppeteer. I'm sure if there are any puppeteers actually reading this, they are laughing when I say it's hard to jump from one character to the next, remembering that each should have their own style of movement, voice, and not lose their face from the "audience" (a camera run by Jorge Sermini.) My brain tires easily I have noticed, from this step outside of my normal creative sphere. Ultimately, this is really good for me.

As it took me a while to build the entire cast of this film, (using everything from painted juice bottles, to cubes of wood with googly eyes, to the more complicated ones where dowel sticks were cut and jointed together with eye hook screws and string, faces completed with Sculpy) we have just started filming the scenes. I am interested to see where this puppet journey takes me.

I do want to introduce a puppeteer I have learned about by reading a great book by Eileen Blumenthal called "Puppetry: A World History," This woman is Theodora Skipitares and her work blows my mind. It borders somewhere between the closely aligned worlds of childhood storybook imagery and adult nightmares. She's worked with many prominent composers, and puppeteers in other parts of the world. She is now working with Greek myths. I will include some of the images here.

I am working to find the film equivalent in my own work, of how her stagings and works strike me.

 

Just Because....Sergey Obraztov

I can say no more:

Coffee stained napkins and stickie notes: the big black file cabinet as my Wunderkammer

If you step into my work space/office, one of the many things you will notice is a large black file cabinet, hailing from probably the 1960s and having been used by who knows how many disgruntled secretaries with carpal tunnel and bad beehive hairdos. I bought the thing at a used office supply store down on East 5th before the East Side of Austin was a trendy place for hipsters-to-be to spend their ample free time in training to graduate with degrees in coolness.

Minus the one shelf that contains tax files and school loan documents and other boring adult crap that will be tossed into the garbage when I die, the file cabinet has been the repository of most of the creative work I've done, at least, what I've been able to put on paper as sketches for future projects, ideas, snippets of things, works-in-progress. This includes napkins from the 90s when I was struck with an image for a painting, or an idea for some weird performance art thing involving roaches and water tanks (this was back when I was younger, more ignorant, and living in NYC of all places where you could do that stuff...kinda.) It also includes all of my scripts, bad and good, lots of not so great poetry, and prose.

Of all the items in this file cabinet contains, prose eats up most of the realestate. Why have I kept it all? Because even when I was a teenager, spouting out piles of stuff, I felt that I would find value in it at some point. Well, I have been wrong about a lot of things in my life, but for this I finally got something right. Many many years later, I often find myself digging through these files for new ideas, looking at yellowing pieces of paper, old coffee-stained napkins from my cigarette-smoking days of writing with friends in Mercer Street cafes or other East Side (NYC) coffee shops. It's strange to read these words that I don't recognize as having ever belonged to me, but to know them as having come from my hand at some point in the past. I was a better writer at 19 than I am now. I am not sure why this is, although I'm starting to speculate why and will talk about that in a future blog. For now, I think part of it was that I was a bigger risk taker then, a girl who had lived most of her life to that point, in a public education system that was more about babysitting bad kids than giving a lift to intelligent kids who showed some interest in learning. I was amazingly bored and didn't even know it, and not challenged by anything in middle school or in high school.

So, what happens when you take this kind of kid from Pueblo, Colorado, to one of the most stimulating cities in the world? Her brain is going to go into overdrive and write every bit of anything that passes through her skull. It was a feverish two years of capturing all of that, and realizing, even before turning 20, that it would take several human lifetimes to make all of those precious gems of ideas into solid and real works of tangible art to be experienced, and that most of these napkins of ideas would end up disintegrating over time, probably lost upon my death (wow, I've mentioned death twice in one blog post now), the idea gone and useless.

At one point a few years ago, I impulsively painted white sperm all over the file cabinet, as a metaphor for human conception. Most sperm are lost along the way, but only one will be, possibly, successful.

Despite the tragedy of this (not the sperm, but the ideas, there are too many humans on this planet as it is, and not enough great art), I'm still glad I have kept all of this writing and idea collecting.

My prose has been the more interesting parts of all this mental barf. And the more films I have watched over time, the more I have sensed that some of my favorite works have been adaptations from novels, or plays. I have longed at times, to have the luxury to write a novel first, then do a screenplay from this. Why didn't I? Well, I've only made two feature films, and both had very pressing deadlines, which made this novel-writing luxury a bit of a problem.

However, as I have been working on this third script, I don't have the same deadlines looming over me like an impending cold front. I don't have a lead actress arriving in a month and staying for five weeks. I don't have a remote Caribbean hotel open for me only during the off-season. And as I have been reading both Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Chuck Palahniuk on my bus commutes, and although different in styles, they have reminded me of revisiting the magic of language, the prose writing I used to do so freely when much younger.

So, about a month ago, I started writing a novel version of the screenplay I'm working on for my next film, How to Eat Pho. As it's easily been about four years since I've written prose, it has been a shaky start. I have "written" two novels before, and when I say that I mean, writing the first draft in word count. I did minor revisions to them, and let them go into my black file cabinet. That is not writing a novel. Revision is the most major part of any writing project.

But it has been a very enlightening process to be writing prose from a screen play that is in a second draft. For one, I know where I'm going, which allows me to explore the path I am on, without getting lost in the forest. I am also spending so much time with these characters, understanding their histories in the most detailed of ways, discovering their important life moments, and the crappy ones too. I've been into Shakey's Pizza with them on an awkward date where one tells his wife he is now a porn star. I have been in a dingy apartment watching a stack of newspapers get knocked over by an anxious chihuahua and squash an old puppeteer who had dreams of working on the TV show, Fantasy Island. It's also been fun to be writing from the perspective of the lead character's puppet, whom I've named Mr. D. An intelligent sarcastic cat-like puppet from the mercados of Ciudad Juarez.

Will I actually do the right thing and finish this novel? I'm not sure. It's easy to get lost in the myriad of projects I have my fingers in, and this novel idea for Pho was just meant to be an exercise in discovery for the film, and I'm also knee deep in landscaping my backyard. But if the delight and laughter I am getting while writing, all by my lonesome late at night with my cats sitting around me like faithful dogs, is any indication, I'd have to say yes. And I'm doing it right next to that massive black file cabinet.

Puppets, Porn, and the Artist's "Skin"

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Some Advice from Dolly Parton, One Awesome Lady

I'm going to share some advice I've read from Dolly Parton's auto-biography, "My Life and Other Unfinished Business." I think it's great advice for anyone in the entertainment "biz." She's also just a swell spunky gal.

Here goes:

"If there is one bit of advice I could give to young people trying to break into show business, it would be this: Don't assume that the people on the inside know what they're doing.  He may have a big office and a fancy suit. He may have the power to hire you or not. But he probably has no idea whether or not you have any talent. Even if he has an opinion, he probably has to clear it with guys in event bigger offices with even more expensive suits (and even less of a clue). There's a joke around Hollywood about a writer who runs into a studio executive over the weekend. 'What did you think of the script I turned in Friday?' the writer asks. The studio exec answers in all seriousness, 'I don't know. So far, I'm the only one who's read it.'"

Research, O What Strange Paths Thou Shall Lead Me Down

Any writer worth their salt spends a good deal of time doing research on the topics their story is exploring. Of course, this is only my opinion as I'm sure there are the rare types of writers that just hop right into their story and what comes out is gold. I'm not that type of writer. The world is full of critics who are just dying to make you look stupid in the goal of making themselves look smart, although they themselves have never and will never create anything in their lives. They feel better about their sorry lives by trying to make the artist feel bad. Critics and their useless diatribe is a different topic for another day. My point being, if you've done your research, you are more entitled to defending the way you have presented your story.

My current film is dealing with a fictional character who was a very sought after male porn star at one time in the 1970s and 1980s, during the so-called "Golden Age of Porn." This is the father of three sisters, a man who is much older now, but loved his job of being an entertainer in one of the most economically stable forms of mass entertainment there has ever been. As I have watched maybe three adult films in my entire adult life, I can't just jump into the world of pornography without trying to have some understanding of it. So, let's just say my research for this film has been quite interesting up to now. I watched Debbie Does Dallas quite recently, and had a few good chuckles, along with some "crap that's nasty" eye shielding moments, and was humming the music to the film the next day. I did not expect that part. I understood more about how people around this time period took care of their bodies, and what was considered sexy. Body hair was apparently quite popular when Debbie Does Dallas was being made, as were visible bikini tan lines on what I would consider a "normal" female body (no amplification/reduction of parts.) In contrast to what porn stars look like today, it's a night and day contrast.

It's extremely difficult to do internet research on pornography without being bombarded by sites assuming I'm a horny male and trying to get me to use my credit card. I often wonder how professors whose careers are about pornography studies (yes, it does exist) deal with this. One has to be very careful about what they are typing in the Google search text box. I am also having a difficult time trying to locate more confessional biographies about what it's like to work in the adult film industry. The people that work here are still people, and have lives outside of their work. I'd love to know more about what drew them into adult films, why they continue to do it (beyond the money, at least for the women), the pluses and minuses, how they've dealt with raising families, or their parents' and friends' perceptions of them. Most people on the internet, I've noticed, go one way or the other when talking about how they perceive porn stars: either find it extremely shameful and chastise the adult film star or they glorify it in the sense of something like this (albeit with typos): "Yeah, man. I'd totally date a porn star. That sh*it is hot."

I'm following a male porn star on Instagram, (and the only reason I am on Instagram, my iPhone already consumes too much of my attention on a daily basis) and am delighted by his photos of himself with his two young children, doing normal dad-kid activities like going to a park and eating ice cream. This is the stuff that I also must understand when crafting my script about three sisters and their porn-star father. My fictional characters had moments like this real life porn actor. But as sex is such a huge and tricky topic for American culture, especially when it comes to art trying to make a statement or show it, something simple like a man and his three daughters becomes highly complicated when the man is an ex-porn star. There is just so much conflict suddenly. It's my job as a director to try to understand all sides of this life, and avoid stereotypes as much as possible. This is a tricky task, as my research has already shown me that getting a honest straight forward picture of this world is not easy.

Up next on my film queue: Deep Throat.