Carrie Fisher’s Long Career as a Writer, Screenwriter, and Hollywood Fixer: “I’m a Writer” First and Foremost

in Film, Writing | December 28th, 2016

By now the news of Carrie Fisher’s death has hit hard all over the world. It’s true that for an entire generation of people, her breakout role at 19 as Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy has made her a sci-fi icon and a childhood crush—both roles she longed to escape. Tribute after tribute on social media and elsewhere reminded us almost immediately after Tuesday’s announcement that her life and work have had a much wider impact, even on people who have never even seen a Star Wars film.

Fisher’s unabashedly candid public conversations about her personal struggles with substance abuse and bipolar disorder made her a powerful advocate for others who felt ashamed to talk about these too-often-taboo subjects and often too ashamed to seek help. Much like George Michael, another celebrity mourned by millions this holiday season, Fisher refused to be shamed into silence or to capitulate to bullies and bigots. Instead she practically bloomed with earthy charm and wit as she co-opted tabloid character assassination and turned it into her own form of autobiographical art and therapeutic outreach.

Her return to the rebooted Star Wars franchise last year as the wise, aging General Leia Organa elevated the conversation about older women in Hollywood, after her response to some vicious comments about her looks made her haters look small, mean, and stunted. Fisher’s talent for Oscar Wilde-worthy aphorisms that sliced right through layers of insufferable bullshit also led to one of her most successful career stints, as a writer, script doctor, and Hollywood fixer during a “long, very lucrative episode,” as she told Newsweek in a 2008 interview. (In true Carrie Fisher fashion, she brought these life experiences to an Emmy-nominated guest turn on an episode of 30 Rock as her funniest character, Rosemary Howard.)

It’s rumored that Fisher revised her lines in George Lucas’ notoriously wordy Star Wars scripts. (Although one image of Empire Strikes Back edits purported to be in her hand actually contains revisions by the film’s director Irvin Kershner.) But her formal screenwriting career began in 1990, when she adapted her bestselling 1987 autobiographical novel, Postcards from the Edge, into the screenplay for a Meryl Streep-starring film. The project led to rewriting work on high-profile comedies throughout the next decade. In addition to a credit for one of those unwieldy Lucas scripts for The Phantom Menace in 1999, Fisher helped rework films like Hook, Sister Act, Made in America, So I Married an Axe Murderer, The Wedding Singer, and several more.

Always a fiercely outspoken critic of the way Hollywood treats women, Fisher fought to make female characters more three-dimensional. In a WebMD interview, she was asked, “What does it take to heal bad dialogue?” Her pithy answer: “Make the women smarter and the love scenes better.” As a peacemaker for troubled productions, however, she often advised women actors to use diplomacy—with her own spin on the concept. When Whoopi Goldberg feuded with Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg, for example, Fisher advised, “Send Jeffrey a hatchet and say, ‘Please bury this on both our behalfs.’” Goldberg thought it over, and “the next day Katzenberg received his hatchet. Within a few days a token of Katzenberg’s respect arrived at her front door: two enormous brass balls.”

Stories like this one, and many more uproarious and often personally self-destructive episodes, formed the basis for Fisher’s autobiographical bestsellers, including her memoir Wishful Drinking, which also became a one-woman Broadway show, then an HBO special (see an excerpt at the top). She has always won over critics as an actress, and she made a wry kind of peace with her eternal fame as Princess Leia, imbuing the character with renewed gravitas and sensitivity in the year before her death. But she did not see herself principally as an actress. “I’m a writer,” she told WebMD. Asked whom she’d choose to share “confined quarters” with from history, she answered—with her winning combination of disarming sincerity and winking self-awareness—“Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was manic-depressive, too.”

Watch the Very First Trailers for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back & Return of the Jedi (1976–83)

The Complete Star Wars “Filmumentary”: A 6‑Hour, Fan-Made Star Wars Documentary, with Behind-the-Scenes Footage & Commentary

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Stephen King Explains the Key to His Creativity: Not Losing the Dream-State Thinking All Children Are Born With

in Psychology, Writing | December 27th, 2016

While nothing could make me personally want to return to childhood, children do, for better or for worse, perceive the world more vividly than adults. The best writing for kids makes rich narrative use of that fact, as do stories about but not for kids by writers who haven’t forgotten their pre-grown-up selves’ experience of reality. Stephen King, for instance, hardly writes children’s literature, but his novels about the fear that seeps into every corner of working-class America often include very young characters. Not only does King write plausibly from their psychological point of view, he uses that point of view as an engine of his entire project.

King, in a 1989 interview on WAMC’s Public Radio Book Show, elaborated on “the two things that interest me about childhood,” the first being that “it’s a secret world that exists by its own rules and lives in its own culture, and the second that “we forget what it is to be a child and we forget that life, which is kind of exotic and strange.” Though readers often ask him what agonies his childhood must have visited upon him that spurred him to write such vividly horrific fiction, King doesn’t remember anything wrong with his formative years. But he does remember “that we think in a different way as children. We tend to think around corners instead of in straight lines.”

We see these differences animated in the Blank on Blank video at the top of the post, which envisions the adult King in the world of imagination that kids instinctively inhabit and out of which they eventually grow, but to which he regularly returns to write his stories. “Sometimes for a kid, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line and that’s the way that we think and dream,” he says. “As children we tend to live in this kind of dream state [ … ] and because I equate that sort of dream state with a heightened sort of mental state, I make this easy cross-connection between childhood and strange powers, paranormal powers or whatever, and it has been successful as a fictional device.”

As the source of such bestsellers as Carrie, The Stand, Christine, It, the Dark Tower series, and countless other works, it’s been successful to say the least. If connecting one thing to another in new ways — be those things people, places, events, ideas, feelings, or whatever else — constitutes the central act of creation, then it makes sense that the naturally associative nature of a child’s imagination, harnessed to an adult’s experience and discipline, can produce such abundant and widely resonant results. No coincidence, surely, that youngsters unable to pay attention to the linear progression of the classroom get labeled “dreamers,” a tendency that King has used to his advantage — though he seems to have got most of his textual mileage out of the nightmares.

Related Content:

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Stephen King on the Magic Moment When a Young Writer Reads a Published Book and Says: “This Sucks. I Can Do Better.”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writing with Style (1882)

in Philosophy, Psychology, Writing | December 19th, 2016

The life of Russian-born poet, novelist, critic, and first female psychologist Lou Andreas-Salomé has provided fodder for both salacious speculation and intellectual drama in film and on the page for the amount of romantic attention she attracted from European intellectuals like philosopher Paul Rée, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Emotionally intense Nietzsche became infatuated with Salomé, proposed marriage, and, when she declined, broke off their relationship in abrupt Nietzschean fashion.

For her part, Salomé so valued these friendships she made a proposal of her own: that she, Nietzsche and Rée, writes D.A. Barry at 3:AM Magazine, “live together in a celibate household where they might discuss philosophy, literature and art.” The idea scandalized Nietzsche’s sister and his social circle and may have contributed to the “passionate criticism” Salomé’s 1894 biographical study, Friedrich Nietzsche: The Man and His Works, received. The “much maligned” work deserves a reappraisal, Barry argues, as “a psychological portrait.”

In Nietzsche, Salomé wrote, we see “sorrowful ailing and triumphal recovery, incandescent intoxication and cool consciousness. One senses here the close entwining of mutual contradictions; one senses the overflowing and voluntary plunge of over-stimulated and tensed energies into chaos, darkness and terror, and then an ascending urge toward the light and most tender moments.” We might see this passage as charged by the remembrance of a friend, with whom she once “climbed Monte Sacro,” she claimed, in 1882, “where he told her of the concept of the Eternal Recurrence ‘in a quiet voice with all the signs of deepest horror.’”

We should also, perhaps primarily, see Salomé’s impressions as an effect of Nietzsche’s turbulent prose, reaching its apotheosis in his experimentally philosophical novel, Thus Spake Zarathustra. As a theorist of the embodiment of ideas, of their inextricable relation to the physical and the social, Nietzsche had some very specific ideas about literary style, which he communicated to Salomé in an 1882 note titled “Toward the Teaching of Style.” Well before writers began issuing “similar sets of commandments,” writes Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, Nietzsche “set down ten stylistic rules of writing,” which you can find, in their original list form, below.

1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.

2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)

3. First, one must determine precisely “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.

4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.

5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything — the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments — like gestures.

6. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.

7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.

9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.

10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

As with all such prescriptions, we are free to take or leave these rules as we see fit. But we should not ignore them. While Nietzsche’s perspectivism has been (mis)interpreted as wanton subjectivity, his veneration for antiquity places a high value on formal constraints. His prose, we might say, resides in that tension between Dionysian abandon and Apollonian cool, and his rules address what liberal arts professors once called the Trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic: the three supports of moving, expressive, persuasive writing.

Salomé was so impressed with these aphoristic rules that she included them in her biography, remarking, “to examine Nietzsche’s style for causes and conditions means far more than examining the mere form in which his ideas are expressed; rather, it means that we can listen to his inner soundings.” Isn’t this what great writing should feel like?

Salomé wrote in her study that “Nietzsche not only mastered language but also transcended its inadequacies.” (As Nietzsche himself commented in 1886, notes Hugo Drochon, he needed to invent “a language of my very own.”) Nietzsche’s bold-yet-disciplined writing found a complement in Salomé’s boldly keen analysis. From her we can also perhaps glean another principle: “No matter how calumnious the public attacks on her,” writes Barry, “particularly from [his sister] Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche during the Nazi period in Germany, Salomé did not respond to them.”

Walter Kaufmann’s Classic Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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J.M. Coetzee on the Pleasures of Writing: Total Engagement, Hard Thought & Productiveness

in Books, Literature, Writing | November 24th, 2016

Martin Amis once criticized his fellow novelist J.M. Coetzee for writing in a style “predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure.” This confused those of us readers who enjoy both men’s books, but then British tradition, of which Amis has been an inheritor as well as a critic, says that if someone gets put on a pedestal, you must at least try to knock them down. The South African Coetzee, winner of one Nobel Prize and two Bookers, doesn’t exactly want for acclaim, but his stark prose and ascetic, ultra-serious images hardly make him seem like an author drunk on his own literary power.

In a controversial profile, Coetzee’s countryman Rian Malan wrote that “a colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once.” We might expect the author of books like Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace, and Elizabeth Costello to declare what he declares in the interview clip above: “Writing, in itself, as an activity, is neither beautiful nor consoling. It’s industry.” Yet he does credit it with certain pleasures, “the pleasures of total engagement, hard thought, verifiable activity, verifiable results. Productiveness.”

“Having written the book, being able to look back on having completed the book, may or may not be consoling, but writing a book is quite different.” Work, asks the interviewer? “Yes. It’s good work.” And why do this work in the first place? Coetzee would advise against the mission of “transforming the world into the world as it should be. That would be too much of a task if one undertook it every time.” He finds “grasping the world as it is, putting it within a certain frame, taming it to a certain extent” — taming “its wildness, its disorder, its chaos” — “quite enough of an ambition.”

These words come from an episode of the Dutch documentary series Of Beauty and Consolation on Coetzee which aired in 2000, after the publication of Boyhood but before that of Youth and Summertime, the books of his trilogy of partially fictionalized “autrebiography” in which he grasps frames, and tames the events of his own experience. “I haven’t forgotten the miseries of my childhood,” he says, going on to insist that misery has no beauty in itself. “I have plenty of happy moments in my childhood, many of which are in the book. The richness of those moments depends very heavily on their being embedded in a certain life. A book is a way to bring that life to life,” in its pleasures and sorrows alike.

Lists of the Best Sentences — Opening, Closing, and Otherwise — in English-Language Novels

The Reader: A Touching South African TV Commercial Celebrates Literacy and Scotch

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Decoding the Screenplays of The Shining, Moonrise Kingdom & The Dark Knight: Watch Lessons from the Screenplay

in Film, Writing | November 3rd, 2016

“A screenplay isn’t meant to be read,” said no less a directing-screenwriting auteur than Stanley Kubrick. “It’s to be realized on film.” The quote comes up in “The Shining — Quietly Going Insane Together,” an episode of the video essay series Lessons from the Screenplay. Creator Michael Tucker uses it to explain his lack of access to the actual “shooting script” of the film, meaning the sort of script typically written before production and then more or less adhered to on set. But Kubrick worked differently. On his projects “the words of the script and the design of the film were created together.” (Or as star Jack Nicholson says in a bit of archival footage, “I quit usin’ my script. I just take the ones they type up each day.”)

Tucker goes on to break down The Shining’s writing process in a way that will fascinate not just screenwriters but anyone with an interest in artistic structure, beginning with the segmentation implied by the film’s memorably stark title cards: “THE INTERVIEW,” “THURSDAY,” “8am,” and so on. He does this in service of one important overarching question: “What, exactly is so creepy about The Shining?” (I’ve been asking it myself ever since watching it at a Halloween party nearly twenty years ago.) In “Moonrise Kingdom: Where Story Meets Style” he gets into the question of what storytelling functions Anderson’s signature abundance of vivid, whimsical, or askew details perform, and how they do it effectively.

As far as what makes Christopher Nolan’s second Batman movie The Dark Knight work so well, Tucker has the answer in two words: the Joker. Different actors have portrayed Batman’s most famous rival with different levels of effectiveness, with Heath Ledger’s Joker generally acknowledged as the Joker, or at least one of the Jokers, to beat. But like any character, this Joker began on the page, and in “The Dark Knight — Creating the Ultimate Antagonist,” we learn which screenwriting guru-approved qualities instilled there give him so much power: his exceptional skill at attacking Batman’s weaknesses, how he pressures Batman into difficult choices, and how he and Batman ultimately compete for the same goal, the soul of Gotham, and become two sides of the same coin.

You can learn other lessons that Tucker draws from the screenplays of movies like Nightcrawler, Gone Girl, Independence Day, Ghostbusters, and a two-parter on American Beauty. While elements of cinema like the directing, the acting, the editing, and even the music might capture our attention more aggressively, we shouldn’t forget that every narrative film, large or small, traditional or unconventional, grows from words someone wrote down. “It’s not what a movie is about,” declared Roger Ebert, “it’s how it is about it” — and the decisions of how to be about it happen in the screenplay.

via The Overlook Hotel

10 Tips From Billy Wilder on How to Write a Good Screenplay

Woody Allen’s Typewriter, Scissors and Stapler: The Great Filmmaker Shows Us How He Writes

How Ray Bradbury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

Raymond Chandler: There’s No Art of the Screenplay in Hollywood

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Kurt Vonnegut’s Term Paper Assignment from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Teaches You to Read Fiction Like a Writer

in Creativity, Education, Letters, Literature, Writing | October 24th, 2016

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Commons

I wish I’d had a teacher who framed his or her assignments as letters…

Which is really just another way of saying I wish I’d been lucky enough to have taken a class with writers Kurt Vonnegut or Lynda Barry.

There’s still hope of a class with Barry, aka Professor Chewbacca, Professor Old Skull, and most recently, Professor Drogo. Those of us who can’t get a seat at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Omega Institute, or the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop can play along at home, using assignments she generously makes available in her books and on her Near-Sighted Monkey Tumblr.

Vonnegut fans long for this level of access, which is why we are doubly grateful to writer Suzanne McConnell, who took Vonnegut’s “Form of Fiction” (aka “Surface Criticism” aka “How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro”) course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the mid-60s.

The goal was to examine fiction from a writer’s perspective and McConnell (who is soon to publish a book about Vonnegut’s advice to writers) preserved one of her old teacher’s term paper assignments—again in letter form. She later had an epiphany that his assignments were “designed to teach something much more than whatever I thought then… He was teaching us to do our own thinking, to find out who we were, what we loved, abhorred, what set off our tripwires, what tripped up our hearts.”

For the term paper, the eighty students—a group that included John Irving, Gail Godwin, and Andre Dubus II—were addressed as “Beloved” and charged with assigning a letter grade to each of the fifteen stories in Masters of the Modern Short Story (Harcourt, Brace, 1955, W. Havighurst, editor).

(A decade and a half later, Vonnegut would subject his own novels to the same treatment.)

A noted humanist, Vonnegut instructed the class to read these stories not in an overly analytical mindset, but rather as if they had just consumed “two ounces of very good booze.”

The ensuing letter grades were meant to be “childishly selfish and impudent measures” of how much—or little—joy the stories inspired in the reader.

Next, students were instructed to choose their three favorite and three least favorite stories, then disguise themselves as “minor but useful” lit mag editors in order to advise their “wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior” as to whether or not the selected stories merited publication.

Here’s the full assignment, which was published in Kurt Vonnegut: Letters (Delacorte Press, 2012). And also again in Slate.

Beloved:

This course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will probably be Animal Husbandry 108 by the time Black February rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.”

As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all …”

I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Havighurst, editor, 1955, Harcourt, Brace, $14.95 in paperback). Read them for pleasure and satisfaction, beginning each as though, only seven minutes before, you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze. “Except ye be as little children …”

Then reproduce on a single sheet of clean, white paper the table of contents of the book, omitting the page numbers, and substituting for each number a grade from A to F. The grades should be childishly selfish and impudent measures of your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that you like some stories better than others.

Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a good literary magazine not connected with a university. Take three stories that please you most and three that please you least, six in all, and pretend that they have been offered for publication. Write a report on each to be submitted to a wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior.

Do not do so as an academic critic, nor as a person drunk on art, nor as a barbarian in the literary market place. Do so as a sensitive person who has a few practical hunches about how stories can succeed or fail. Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

Since there are eighty of you, and since I do not wish to go blind or kill somebody, about twenty pages from each of you should do neatly. Do not bubble. Do not spin your wheels. Use words I know.

poloniøus

McConnell supplied further details on the extraordinary experience of being Vonnegut’s student in an essay for the Brooklyn Rail:

Kurt taught a Chekhov story. I can’t remember the name of it. I didn’t quite understand the point, since nothing much happened. An adolescent girl is in love with this boy and that boy and another; she points at a little dog, as I recall, or maybe something else, and laughs. That’s all. There’s no conflict, no dramatic turning point or change. Kurt pointed out that she has no words for the sheer joy of being young, ripe with life, her own juiciness, and the promise of romance. Her inarticulate feelings spill into laughter at something innocuous. That’s what happened in the story. His absolute delight in that girl’s joy of feeling herself so alive was so encouraging of delight. Kurt’s enchantment taught me that such moments are nothing to sneeze at. They’re worth a story.

via Slate

In 1988, Kurt Vonnegut Writes a Letter to People Living in 2088, Giving 7 Pieces of Advice

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story

Kurt Vonnegut Urges Young People to Make Art and “Make Your Soul Grow”

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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How to Fill the Blank Page: Advice from Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell & 5 Other Authors

in Literature, Writing | October 13th, 2016

A couple months ago we featured a video of eight writers on how to face the blank page produced by Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. (And if you should ever find yourself in Copenhagen with time for a bit of a train ride, I do recommend a visit to the museum itself.) Now, Louisiana has released eight separate videos, each offering one notable writer’s viewpoint on that scariest of all confrontations in their profession. But as The Corrections and Freedom author Jonathan Franzen puts it, “the blank page in the mind has to be filled before you have the courage to face the actual blank page.”

“If you say, ‘I want to write,’ and turn on the computer and look at the blank page, it’s over. It’s not going to happen,” says the man who somehow manages to turn out his weighty, American-zeitgeist-capturing novels faster as the years go by. “It’s when you have had a thought in the shower before, you’ve woken in the middle of the night, and suddenly you have a sentence or two — you have something. You’ve already written it in your mind.” In contrast, the even more experienced and prolific Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, sees “something compelling about the blank page that beckons you in to write something on it. It must be filled,” whether or not you’ve filled your mind already.

She likens this phenomenon to “an invitation, but it’s an invitation to something like going swimming in a very cold lake. So you approach it in a similar fashion: you put your toe in, you change your mind, ‘Maybe I won’t do that,’ you put your foot in, ‘Really, do I want to do that?’ You come back, and finally you just run screaming and you plunge in. Unless you plunge in, you’re never going to begin.” The immensely imaginative number9dream and Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell uses a different metaphor: “A blank page is a door. It contains infinity, like a night sky with a supermoon really close to the Earth, with all the stars and the galaxies you can see — it’s very, very clear, maybe at a high altitude. You know how that just makes your heart beat faster?”

If that image doesn’t get you writing, Mitchell has another: “A slightly overweight, bald boss saying, “It’s time to work. Get to work, come on. You’re supposed to be a writer, aren’t you? You can’t just sit around on your fat arse waiting to be inspired, waiting for creativity. You’re stuck? Fine. Why are you stuck? Why isn’t this working? Why can’t you push on with this scene? What are you trying to hold on to what just isn’t working here? Be more honest.’ ” Have a look at the series’ entire playlist (embedded above), which also features Joyce Carol Oates, Lydia Davis, and others, and you’ll find as many strategies for battling the blank page as writers who win that battle. Whether you use ideas thought up in the shower, plunge straight into the lake, or stare up at the night sky or a bothersome boss, only one thing matters: that your page ends up with some words on it.

Stephen King Creates a List of 96 Books for Aspiring Writers to Read

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Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

21 Artists Give “Advice to the Young:” Vital Lessons from Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Umberto Eco, Patti Smith & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Sci-Fi Icon Robert Heinlein Lists 5 Essential Rules for Making a Living as a Writer

in Sci Fi, Writing | September 29th, 2016

So you want to be a writer? Good, you’ll find plenty of advice from the best here at Open Culture. Oh, you want to be a science fiction writer? The great Ursula K. Le Guin has offered readers a wealth of writing advice, though she won’t tell us “how to sell a ship, but how to sail one.” But wait, you also want to know how to publish, and make a living? For that, you’d better see Robert Heinlein, one of the acknowledged masters of the Golden Age of science fiction and a hugely prolific author who pioneered both popular hard sci-fi and what he called “speculative fiction,” a more serious, literary form incorporating social and political themes.

In his 1947 essay “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction,” Heinlein refers to these “two types” of science fiction as “the gadget story and the human interest story.” The latter kind of story, writes Heinlein “stands a better chance with the slicks than a gadget story does” because it has wider appeal. This advice sounds rather utilitarian, doesn’t it? What about passion, inspiration, the muse? Eh, you don’t have time for those things. If you want to be successful like Robert Heinlein, you’ve got to write stories, lots of ‘em, stories people want to publish and pay for, stories people want to read.

Heinlein spends the bulk of his essay advising us on how to write such stories, with a proviso, in an epigram from Rudyard Kipling, that “there are nine-and-sixty ways / Of constructing tribal lays / And every single one of them is right.” After, however, describing in detail how he writes a “human interest” science fiction story, Heinlein then gets down to business. He assumes that we can type, know the right formats or can learn them, and can spell, punctuate, and use grammar as our “wood-carpenter’s sharp tools.” These prerequisites met, all we really need to write speculative fiction are the five rules below:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you start.

3. You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.

4. You must put it on the market.

5. You must keep it on the market until sold.

You might think Heinlein has lapsed into the language of the realtor, not the writer, but he is deadly serious about these rules, which “are amazingly hard to follow—which is why there are so few professional writers and so many aspirants.” Anyone who has tried to write and publish fiction knows this to be true. But what did Heinlein mean in giving us such an austere list? For one thing, as he notes many times, there are perhaps as many ways to write sci-fi stories as there are people to write them. What Heinlein aims to give us are the keys to becoming professional writers, not theorists of writing, lovers of writing, dabblers and dilettantes of writing.

Award-winning science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer has interpreted Heinlein’s rules with commentary of his own, and added a sixth: “Start Working on Something Else.” Good advice. Heinlein’s rule number three, however—“the one that got Heinlein in trouble with creative-writing teachers”—seems to contradict what most every other writer will tell us. Sawyer suggests we take it to mean, “Don’t tinker endlessly with your story.” Writer Patricia C. Wrede agrees, but also suggests that “Heinlein was of the school of thought that felt that ‘good enough’ was all that was necessary, ever.”

Like 19th century writers who churned out novels as serialized stories for the papers and magazines, Heinlein and his fellow Golden Age writers made their living selling story after story to the “pulps” and the “slicks” (preferably the slicks). One had to be prolific, and being “’prolific enough’ often involved not having time to polish and revise much (if at all).” So rule number three may or may not apply, depending on our constraints. The literary market has changed dramatically since 1947, but the rest of Heinlein’s rules still seem nonnegotiable if we intend not only to write—speculative fiction or otherwise—but also to make a career doing so.

via Ken St. Andre

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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