Catégorie : Screen/Writing

Ressource pour scénaristes

Janvier! C’est le temps de faire du ménage de début d’année et ce blogue est beaucoup trop poussiéreux. J’ai donc revu ma liste de liens. Le concept de blogoliste est un peu daté mais bon, quand on est un dinoblogueur, on s’attache à certaines manières de faire. Même si je suis davantage présente sur les réseaux sociaux, je lis toujours des blogues via les fils RSS. Les noms cités à gauche ne sont donc pas entièrement représentatifs de mes lectures.

J’attire particulièrement votre attention vers un nouveau lien dans la catégorie Screen/Writing. Il s’agit du blogue Scénario-Buzz maintenu par la scénariste française Nathalie Lenoir. Elle fait un boulot admirable dans sa recherche de liens intéressants concernant la scénarisation. Les ressources scénaristiques en français sont rares sur le Web. Si le sujet de l’écriture pour le cinéma et la télé vous intéresse, ça vaut la peine de l’ajouter à vos lectures quotidiennes!

Day 3: Don’t knit that scarf

Carolyn Kellogg from the Los Angeles Times reacts to Laura Miller’s article about NaNoWriMo. She makes a lot of good points and she’s quite funny too.

Here’s a quick rundown of Miller’s argument, and where it goes wrong.

1. Miller writes: » ‘Make no mistake,’ the organization’s website counsels. ‘You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create.’ I am not the first person to point out that ‘writing a lot of crap’ doesn’t sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November. »

In fact, spending a month « writing a lot of crap » is more fruitful than many things, including much of the fun, casual cultural consumption we regularly engage in. It’s more fruitful than watching TV, playing video games, spending hours on Facebook or Twitter. It might not be more fruitful than innoculating children in an underdeveloped village, but we’re not talking about people quitting the Peace Corps in order to do NaNoWriMo. The only thing « writing a lot of crap » can genuinely be said to be less fruitful than is writing well.

Miller quotes it, but misses the essential point: for a hopeful writer to « just create. » It’s the act of doing that’s important. Knitters don’t knit because their friends need more hats. But so far, there hasn’t been a « Better yet, DON’T knit that scarf » manifesto.

Meanwhile, I’ve managed to do my full word count for the first time in three days, and things were going smoother. It helped that I did not have to do « paid » work for a client, of course. I really need to learn to write faster in general. (People who know me well will tell you that I need to learn to do EVERYTHING faster, but hey, one thing at a time.)

I took a break in the late afternoon and went for a walk in the woods near where I live. With the headphones on, inspiring music playing and the blood pumping fast, I kept coming up with what felt like better ideas and nicely constructed sentences. Someone needs to come up with a way for writers to type while they walk. I could record my ideas into my iPhone but generally, as soon as I say them out loud, I stop believing in them.

NaNoWriMo: a waste of time and energy?

Salon’s book critic Laura Miller is not going to make very many friends with this article, but I actually think she’s right in a lot of ways. Her article points out most of the elements that still make me uncomfortable with the concept of NaNoWriMo. You should read the whole thing, but if you are too lazy, here’s an excerpt:

NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it’s largely unnecessary. When I recently stumbled across a list of promotional ideas for bookstores seeking to jump on the bandwagon, true dismay set in. « Write Your Novel Here » was the suggested motto for an in-store NaNoWriMo event. It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.

I say « commerce » because far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them. And an astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former will confess to never doing the latter. […]

Rather than squandering our applause on writers — who, let’s face, will keep on pounding the keyboards whether we support them or not — why not direct more attention, more pep talks, more nonprofit booster groups, more benefit galas and more huzzahs to readers? Why not celebrate them more heartily? They are the bedrock on which any literary culture must be built. After all, there’s not much glory in finally writing that novel if it turns out there’s no one left to read it.

Recently, I ran into someone I know at the book launch of a mutual friend. While chatting about the abundance of books published within a certain group of our acquaintances, this person revealed to me that she attends every single launch and buys all the books to show her support. « But I never read them, » she says. « I just don’t have the time. » This person was a published author herself, and I’m sure she expected most of her friends to read her book. While her comment surprised me, I’m sure she was just admitting out loud a practice done by many, many other writers.

The cheerful « Write a novel in 30 days! » suggested by NaNoWriMo has annoyed me from the start. There’s something in all the excitement around the event that seems to imply that anyone can write a novel. That kind of thinking is not doing anyone a favor, as Laura Miller judiciously points out. While the NaNoWriMo promoters do insist on the fact that what you’ll end up with is a first draft — and a messy one at that — I know that many people will still turn in their unedited manuscripts to editors, or force it upon their family and friends, « just to see ». The idea makes me cringe. I love good books too much and I admire good, hard working writers too intensely to ever dare show one of my first drafts to anyone. But that’s just me. Over-analyzing, terrified and proud me. Trust me: it’s not that I’m elitist. I just have too much respect for this stuff.

So why did I join in this year? For the purely artificial pressure of the self-imposed deadline. I’ll confess that I’m not that excited about the support group aspect of the exercise, though I know it’s a central part of NaNoWriMo. I don’t really believe that the 175 pages I’ll end up with in November, if I do manage to write that many, will be the true first draft of a novel. At best, it will be a decent start to a longer piece of work that, knowing myself too well, and the fact that I do have to work to make a living, I’ll probably take a couple of years to edit. If I don’t get sick of the characters and the story before I manage to finish it, of course, but that’s another story.

Nine years of freelancing, combined with an ever-increasing online presence have turned me into a scatter-brain in constant need of stimulation, which I probably always was anyway. I have been scared of writing a novel all my life, or at least as long as I have been able to read. When I was 10 or so, I sat down in our unfinished basement in front of an old typewriter and I decided to write a novel. I managed to type about 2 pages and then left the project aside for a while. When I came back to it a few weeks later, I was humiliated to see how naive, earnest and just plain bad my words were. I think it scared me for the following 30 years.

Yeah, I’m that crazy when it comes to writing and I am that hard on myself in general. So if I don’t publicly hold a gun to my head and risk further humiliation by not completing this damn NaNoWriMo, I’ll probably be hiding in a hole for another 30 years. A hole where there is no pen, paper, or laptop. (I’ll probably manage to find an Internet connection though, which I’ll wire directly to my sad, full-of-regrets brain and then I’ll surf and refresh my Twitter feed until I die from bitterness after reading all of your wonderful accomplishments.)

There’s nothing wrong with being « just » a reader. I’m a huge reader. Hell, I even think that I’m a GOOD reader. I’m sure writers would love me if they knew how well I read their books. But at this point in my life, because I’ve been seeing myself as a writer since I was a little kid — though I pretended that I wanted to become a helicopter pilot because it sounded more realistic — I need to write the damn thing. I need to just give it a freakin shot.

Damn. Look at this. I’ve written a 1000-word blog post. And to think that I am behind on my NaNoWriMo word count for the day!