Category: Inspiration

Making This Fun: Nora Ephron

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Writer and director Nora Ephron passed away yesterday, which is quite a loss for the film and literary industry. Her When Harry Met Sally is one of the best romantic comedies ever. Much like YA, romantic comedies don’t get a lot of credit, but a well written one can truly touch on what so many of us experience on a daily basis.

One part of her obituary in the New York Times struck me in particular. About working with Ephron, Meryl Streep said:

“Nora just looked at every situation and cocked her head and thought, ‘Hmmmm, how can I make this more fun?'”

I wish more people looked at their job and coworkers and had that same thought. Although writing is often seen as a solitary activity, I think there’s a huge element of community to it. I’m going to try to instill this philosophy into my writing life.

(image: IMDB)

Quote of the Day

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Juvenile or adult, War and Peace or Treasure Island, Pride and Prejudice or Beauty and the Beast, a great work of the imagination is one of the highest forms of communication of truth that mankind has reached. But a great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is.–Madeleine L’Engle

This is from my current read Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life, which is basically a bunch of awesome quotes from L’Engle about writing, reading, and art.

Quote of the Day

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“Novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it. A novel’s whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.”–Diane Johnson

Very much agree with that. I don’t think many writers sit down to write about a particular theme and end up with a compelling story. Themes have to emerge naturally and with layers of complication.

(H/T Advice to Writers)

The Rules of Storytelling According to Pixar

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Yesterday I caught the beginning of Finding Nemo. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times now and I always tear up at the beginning. “No, this time will be different,” I tell myself. “I know what’s coming.” But damnit, every time Marlin holds that little fish egg my lip starts quivering. Sometimes I think Pixar is out to make adults weep as much as possible.

Even if their goal isn’t to steal the tears of every living adult and child, Pixar does know how to tell a good story. So even if you’re not a screenwriter, you should probably check out this list of storytelling rules by Pixar artist Emma Coats. A few that I really liked:

“#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.

#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.”

To me, these are all about pushing yourself as a writer. In early drafts, I tend to give my characters easy outs or not insert enough tension to really fuel the story. You want to make things hard for your characters because a) life is hard and b) drama is compelling. And if you can think of an easy way out for your characters, the audience has probably already thought of that as well, which isn’t compelling for them.

Make sure to check out the whole list. It’s a fantastic resource for writers of all levels.

(Also, who’s excited for Brave?!)

(via 109)(image: Pixar Wiki)

The Eureka Moment and Why Breaks Are Important

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You know how you can sit in front of your computer, struggling to figure out how to get your main character from point A to point B, and then it hits you when you’re in the middle of brushing your teeth that night? A new study confirms you’re not alone.

Apparently, study participants were given a challenging task. Some participants were allowed to have a break, and others weren’t. The ones who had a break performed better at the task afterward than the ones who had to work straight through the allotted time. This suggests that breaks are actually helpful in getting your mind working in new ways.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can skip the work, just take breaks, and expect results:

“The implication is that mind-wandering was only helpful for problems that were already being mentally chewed on. It didn’t seem to lead to a general increase in creative problem-solving ability,” says [research team leader Benjamin] Baird.

So get to work, but also feel free to give yourself a little time away from the desk if you’re stuck on a particular issue.

In My Room

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Really intrigued by photographer Rania Matar’s project, “A Girl and Her Room,” which features photographs of teen girls and their bedrooms from around the world. About her photographs, Matar says:

“I was discovering a person on the cusp of becoming an adult, but desperately holding on to the child she barely outgrew, a person on the edge of two worlds and trying to adjust to the person she is turning into.”

Since most of my characters tend to be teen girls, Matar’s photos made me think about their rooms and how their stuff reflects that balance between adulthood and childhood. Might be a good character exercise to write down all the things that are in a character’s room and why they’re there.

Incidentally, my bedroom as a teen was kind of a mess. I hated the pink wallpaper I’d had since I was five (not that I ever liked it) and tried to cover it up with movie posters, pictures of friends, collages I’d made, and lists of quotes I liked. Nothing came together well–probably a reflection of that childhood/adulthood dynamic.

(image: Rania Matar, via Newsweek)

Lasting Fame and the Span of Time in the Universe

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This New Yorker article looks at what makes a popular novel lasting and what makes famous writers fade into obscurity. If readers polled in 1929 couldn’t pick out who would be the leaders of the literary cannon in one hundred years, could contemporary readers do any better?

My question: does it matter?

We all think about fame and glory. My imaginings even veer into talents I don’t have. (Why yes, I will accept that Academy Award! And how awesome will it be when I will a gold medal in marathon running?) But I’m also reminded of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which Mr. Ramsay thinks about how fleeting fame is:

“It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare. His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still.”

I’m a big Woolf fan, and that part of To the Lighthouse has really stayed with me. Even famous writers who have seemed to withstand the test of time–Shakespeare, Chaucer, Sophocles–are blips when you think about the span of time of the planet or the universe. Even if people read your stories for thousands of years, that’s nothing to the span of time.

So why stress about who’s going to be popular or considered a genius in a thousand years, or even a hundred years? Shouldn’t the people who are reading your stories now matter more than the people who might be reading them in a thousand years? I think it’s more important to focus on the readers who are currently moved by your work–even if it’s just one person and that one person is your mom/spouse/best friend.

Again, I’m going to keep imagining accepting my Academy Award/gold medal/Nobel Prize. But I also think it’s good to focus on the readers you want to connect with now. If people read your books in a hundred years, that’s awesome. Just remember that lasting fame is meaningless. Even Shakespeare’s a blip.