Update (Long Overdue)
Guess who's back, back again?
JP's back, tell a friend.
Yes! After a 14 months gap, I've decided to reboot this baby!!! Big shout out to Liberty RPF and MG for nudging me (kick my sorry ass) in the right direction.
Soooo, where have I been these past months? As I said in my last post, I’ve been trying hard to figure out what to do with my life. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write anymore (that passed thankfully). I could say it was my midlife crisis, except it feels like I’ve been through seven of those in the last ten years….
Anyway, you wouldn't believe what I had to sacrifice to be here with you today. I'll spare you the details, but here I am, fourteen months later, a single-kidneyed writer (I kid) who's ready to take on the world.
What's my writing situation? To my great sadness, I haven't touched Land of Stone or any of my shorts in all that time and I had to take a three-days/week office job… BUT, some positive came out of all this —> I found an amazing collaborator (SN) and we figured out that to live off of our passion in this world, we might have better chances going down the screenplay road. So there you go! That’s what I've been doing for a while now:
→ Developing a TV series ←
I'll have more to say in the following weeks about that process: how we had to make a series Bible, what I’ve learned while writing the pilot, and most of all, how fun (and challenging) it can be to work on a project with a partner. But overall, that's it. I'm back, and no I haven't quit writing at all. I fully intend to get back to LoS as well ( still burning strong in my heart) and perhaps explore the self-publication route (including posting some of my actual fiction in this here newsletter). Who knows what the future holds!?
Craft Tools - The Spark™
DW 2.0 will have new sections too! How fun. This one is where I share tools of the craft that I like to use. Some really concrete stuff that can be applied immediately for fellow writers. And I suspect that some of them will even work for non-writers.
For those who have never written fiction, or pursued an artistic project, you might think that it goes something like this: the artist sits down, and she's ecstatic and ART just flows out of her butt onto the page/canvas/clay/music sheet in a transcendentally orgasmic masterpiece.
Okay, nobody believes that for sure, but what I'm trying to say is that, sometimes, when I sit down and I have to write a scene, I don't really want to. I can even sense a slight revulsion in my body just thinking about it. When I'm in that mindset, it's so easy to open up YouTube and watch random people react to a song I've cherished my whole life in which said random dude has only just discovered.
But NO, that’s not the way you achieve shit in this life. What one can do instead is use the craft tool I've discovered a while back (can’t remember where, but I am forever grateful to that forgotten genius):
**The Spark™**
An example will help understanding it better. That precise situation actually happened to me on Monday morning. I sat down at my favorite writing spot, and while journaling, I wrote down my to do list for the day which was rather short.
TO DO LIST
Write that scene.
But “that scene” wasn't exciting to me. It involved a bunch of women at a book club sharing their personal struggles after one of them is triggered by a passage. I had two choices:
1- Write another scene; or
2- Find The Spark™. (sadly, I couldn't watch YouTube because I've learned a long time ago to pick up a writing thing spot with no internet, and my phone has almost no data for that very reason).
Basically, The Spark™ goes something like this: you try to find a new angle that excites you and that makes your body go from a sensation of revulsion to one of excitement.
What could I add then? The scene was already fully outlined. Okay, BUT, I told myself, one can find The Spark™ anywhere: in a cool song you need for the scene, with a symbol/metaphor, through humor, with vivid sensory details, or as it was the case for me on Monday morning—by fleshing out at two dimensional character.
There was a secondary character in that scene called Jess. She's 24 and she recently broke up with the protagonist, Raf, to become Jimmy's girlfriend and turn into a wild party girl. She's also the one who picked the book for the book club to read: an anthology of erotic short stories.
So I started asking myself: why did she become a party girl? Why did she love Raf in the first place and why is she a member of this book club at all? The answers started pouring out. Well okay, she used to be a literature nerd and that's how she connected to the MC (an aspiring writer) but recently, her best friend Chloe started dating one of Jimmy's best friend and they both started partying with the whole gang. Jess liked this new person she was becoming or maybe it was just the cocaine. And when Jimmy's brother died, she took care of him and grew closer and developed feelings for him.
Great! Now I had a more interesting character… but what about my scene? Well, the other women could be wondering why she brought that erotic book because she used to pick mainly classics. One of them could be very happy about it: it was a much more fun read then Flaubert. And there you go, the scene hadn't really changed that much, but I had found The Spark™. My sucker brain had been TRICKED. I was now excited to write that scene, which I did and it was a blast.
"So I started asking myself: why did she become a party girl? Why did she love Raf in the first place and why is she a member of this book club at all? The answers started pouring out."
I find that so interesting. I don't write fiction, so finding motivations and fleshing out characters feels like black magic to me!
🤘 Fuck yea 🤘