Chekhov on Marriage

Here's an incisive quote from Anton Chekhov as related in Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount, Jr.

Very well, then, I shall marry . . . But under the following conditions: everything must continue as it was before, in other words, she must live in Moscow and I in the country, and I'll go visit her. I will never be able to stand the sort of happiness that lasts from one day to the next, from one morning to the next. Whenever someone talks to me day after day about the same thing in the same tone of voice, it brings out the ferocity in me . . . I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does not appear in my sky every day. I won't write any better for having gotten married.

Don't show this to The Woman!

Quotes From Stuff I Like - Greene

Monsignor Quixote, Graham Greene

Another book I read (or in this case, re-read) while writing Escape From Fred. Once you've read it, you can see how this book might have informed it. Greene was my favorite author until I discovered Robertson Davies.

p. 55. It’s odd how sharing a sense of doubt can bring two men together perhaps even more that sharing a faith. The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself.

Carlos Santana on influences

If you drink orange juice, once you sweat it it's yours. Oranges really don't belong to anybody. -Carlos Santana

The Day Job

This Dilbert cartoon illustrates the value of my services in the day job.

Weekend at Bernies **

** Weekend at Bernies, Robert Klane, 1988

On a recommendation from Reneau to watch this in connection with my latest project, I watched this. I found the script online and read it as I was watching. I found it amusing, but not as hilarious as everyone else seems to find it. Oh well.

Mark Heard

From the Songs you won't hear on the radio files:

Mark Heard died in 1992 at age 40. He had a minor heart attack on stage at a festival, but finished his set before going to the hospital. A week later he had another heart attack and went into a coma from which he never recovered. He left behind a collection of songs that are startling and heartbreaking in their clarity and insight.

Gvien the fact that he died before the internet became commercial, much less before the YouTube age, there's not a lot of good video of him online. Here's one of the few somewhat decent (almost) samples: Treasure of the Broken Land

A less-than-great, dubbed-from-cassette upload of Look Over Your Shoulder:

A 17-song tribute album (Strong Hand of Love) was released in 1994, and another, with those same songs and 17 more (Orphans of God) was release in 1996. It's a must have. Seriously.

Buddy ***

*** Buddy, 2003

Not sure what led me to this movie. I watched on Netflix instant play. Some really good writing. They never lost an opportunity to increase the tension. Worth watching. [Norwegian, with subtitles.]

The Art of War for Writers ****

**** The Art of War for Writers, James Scott Bell, 2009

Hmm. The only other 4-star books I read this year were Story and Edgar Sawtelle. And now this one, making two writing books in the list. Interesting.

I'm a small-time conniseur of books on writing. I have two dozen on my shelf right now, not to mention the ones I gave away or otherwise discarded through the years.

The advantage that The Art of War for Writers has over Story is that it is much smaller. [23 cubic inches vs 93 cubic inches. Not that I rate books by their volume. I rate them by how large an insect or animal I can kill with them. So this is really a roach-killing book vs a mouse-killing book.] Why is that an advantage, you ask?

Story sat on my shelf for two years untouched because it was daunting to even think about having to wade through it. The Art of War for Writers, on the other hand, is small and inviting. And, even better, it's divided into 77 little topics of 2 to 4 pages of advice. I started reading it almost before I got it all the way out of the bag.

But there is one thing they have in common: Both are great books on writing. And another thing: Both are keepers - books you'll want to refer to in the future.

The book is divided into three sections:

• Reconnaisance: advice on getting mentally, physicall, emotionally, practically ready for the life of writing and for sitting down to write
• Tactics: advice on how to write well
• Strategy: advice on how to sell your work and thrive in the post-publication world

There's not a false note anywhere in the book. The only fault I could find was the omission of my excellent advice for aspiring writers: Quit now and avoid the rush.

SPOILER ALERT! Instead, he ends the book with Onward. Keep fighting. Keep writing. Much more encouraging. Which is one reason why he's creating books on writing and I'm not.

Bell also writes best-selling novels (so he knows whereof which he speaks) and is an erstwhile fiction columnist for Writer's Digest. He's also a lawyer. And a ukulele player. [Or should that be an ukulele player? These things are so tricky.]

Note: Pursuant to full disclosure under FTC 16 CFR Part 255, I actually got a review copy of this book, which is my sole compensation for writing this review. However, if the book had sucked giant ostrich eggs, I would say so because that's the kind of frank, honest, forthright jerk that I am. So, don't send me anything to review. If I don't like it, I'll say so, politely and devastatingly. Your ego has been warned!

Chinatown ***

*** Chinatown, Robert Towne, 1973

Chinatown is a classic, but, like many other classic things, I missed it the first time around. It's used for examples in dozens of screenwriting books, and the nefarious Mr. Polanski was in the news, so I figured it was time to see/read it.

There were some interesting differences between Draft 3 and what made it on the screen, like the scene where Nicholson and Dunaway escape the nursing home, and especially the ending, which was quite different. Towne and Polanski had significant differences on the ending and it wasn't until 20 years later that Towne came around to agreeing with Polanski's take on the ending.

The script reads a lot more gumshoe than the film looks. And Nicholson and Houston bring some menacing power to the breakfast scene that goes beyond the page. But it's clear why this was an instant classic. Towne went on to write the screenplay for a lot of exciting movies, including The Firm, MI-1 and MI-2.

Worth the read.

Grosse Point Blank ***

*** Grosse Point Blank, Tom Jankiewicz, D.V. deVincentis , S.K. Boatman , John Cusack

I'm currently reading several giant books:

• Songwriters on Songwriting - 752 pages
• Wodehouse: A Life - 530 pages
• Alphabet Juice - 384 pages
• Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings - only 270 pages, but small type and slow going

Which explains why I'm not ready to offer a review this week. However, I realized that the other reason is that I've been reading screenplays, which I have not reviewed. I can fix that.

My current project has a character that could be unsympathetic (a nurse who helps in assisted suicides) and I wanted some pointers in how to make a potentially unsympathetic character more sympathetic. To that end, I found a copy of the Grosse Point Blank screenplay online and rented the movie to watch it again as I read.

I read 30 pages or so, watched until I caught up to that point, paused to read more, watched more, etc. until I got through both the movie and the screenplay in one sitting.

In case you don't know, the movie is about a professional hit man who is having a career and identity crisis. One thing I learned right away is, if you want the character to be more sympathetic, cast John Cusak in the role.

As I read the dialog on the page of Martin Blank talking to his assistant while doing a hit, I had a much more hard-nosed tone in mind. But can you imagine Cusak delivering anything hard-nosed? Exactly.

The other thing they did was make the character more accessible by making him less foreign. What do you have in common with a professional killer? Not much, I hope. But how about a guy who is conflicted about attending his 10-year high school reunion? A lot more.

I applied this knowledge to my project by showing the emotional connection between the nurse and those she assists. Before, she was a little more business-like. I think the change is an improvement. We'll see what the critique group says next year when my time slot comes up.

The other interesting thing was to note the differences between the draft I read and what was on the screen. New material, deleted material, conversations moved to other scenes. Good stuff for evaluation.