This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:
May 28 Paul Austers: I cut out this National Post
article “The Mechanics of Reality” by Iris Benaroia on Nov. 1, 2012. Here are some excerpts of
the article:
His most
recent book, Winter Journal, gives readers a glimpse of the man behind
the pen — and it is a pen; Auster writes longhand before hitting the
typewriter. Written in his 64th year, the author has taken a freewheeling
approach to the 230-page journal, a disordered collection of enticing and
personal mini-essays.
“Look,
there’s nothing particularly exceptional about my life. I’m not even very
interested in myself in the way that most people who write autobiographies are.
But I feel that in the very ordinariness of my life I share things with just
about everybody,” says Auster, sitting in his publisher’s Toronto office earlier this week, in town to promote the book at
the International Festival of Authors.
“First-person
seemed too exclusionary to me, which is traditionally the voice of an
autobiography,” he adds, in his alluring gravelly voice. “Therefore the second
person seemed to me a very intimate voice, but a way of separating myself from
myself a little bit so I can enter into a kind of quiet dialogue with myself.
At the same time, I hoped to bring the reader into the story as well.”
“I don’t
believe in those mystical approaches to life,” he says. “There are people who
are accident-prone, who are constantly falling down stairs, but I think it has
to do with a lack of attention to one’s surroundings.”
“Life is
arbitrary. These things happen all the time, And they seem to defy all the
odds,” he says. “But what I’ve always been interested in is what I call the
mechanics of reality. Going by this, I am eliminating a kind of mystical
interpretation because then you have to start believing in things like destiny,
and I don’t.”
“[When I
sit down to write], I have a sense of what I want to accomplish with the book —
who the characters are, and obviously you need that first sentence to launch
yourself into the project,” he says. “Sometimes it has taken me years to find
the first sentence. Sometimes the first sentence is a gift that comes out of
nowhere.”
“Ideas
that I thought were good turn out to be no good whatsoever. I scrap them.
Things that had never occurred to me pop up,” Auster says. “New characters, new
situations — so I’m improvising. I think if I mapped everything out in great
detail, the adventure of writing would be lost to me.”
What I
eventually realized late in life was that if you do keep a diary your whole
life, you’re writing to your future self because when you’re young you don’t
realize how much you’re going to forget.”
My
opinion: I agree with the last paragraph. All of you guys need to keep a journal or a
blog. I read in a women’s magazine to
keep a blog even if it’s something like taking a picture and putting it up. It’s to show the passage of time.
It’s good
to keep a record of where you spend your time at.
Your
Sister’s Sister: I cut out this Globe
and Mail article “No one knows what’ll happen next” by Johanna Schneller on
Jun.
16, 2012. It talks to the director Lynn Shelton who
makes “scriptments” like half story treatment and half script. Here are some excerpts:
There's a
moment in the new indie Your Sister's Sister, which opens in select
cities on Friday, when one sister (Rosemarie Dewitt) drops an embarrassing
detail about the personal grooming habits of another (Emily Blunt) during a
drunken dinner with a male friend (Mark Duplass). It's a perfect moment:
surprising, funny, genuine. It furthers the emotional action, and reveals
something about both the speaker and the spoken of.
Your
Sister's Sister is one of the new breed of
films that began life as a scriptment – that is, a treatment which details the
tone and direction of the scenes and the emotional points that must be hit,
along with some scripted lines – rather than a fully fleshed-out screenplay.
First of
all, the scriptment method is fleet. Instead of one writer alone, banging his
head against the wall for months or years to perfect a screenplay, scriptments
require only a killer concept, promising characters, a map of the story – and
the faith that the details will be worked out in the process.
For this
one, Duplass had a long-gestating idea: A man is grieving his dead brother. The
late brother's girlfriend offers the man her family's remote island cabin as a
place to get it together. He goes, meets the girlfriend's mother, and things
develop from there. Duplass told this idea to Shelton, his friend and sometime
collaborator. She changed “girlfriend's mother” to “sister.” (“I guess ‘mother'
was kind of the indie film circa 1998,” Duplass says now, laughing at himself.)
Then boom, within six weeks they had the schedule, the budget, and the cast,
and Shelton was scouting accommodations on an island in Maine.
An actor
can go deep into character, and know her voice will be heard. “So often you're
so structured, and it's quite straight-jacketing,” Blunt says. “This way is
quite exposing, because you're having to act and create story. But the fact
that everyone was willing to jump in, no hands, head first, was essential to us
creating that chemistry, and creating something unique. You rely heavily upon
what everyone else is doing, so your brain is like [she makes a whirring noise]
the whole day. I find it really awakening. It's an exercise in Who Knows? And I
think that's the joy of it.”
“You have
to say, ‘I know it looks like we're all burning doobers and running around
improvising, but it's hard work, we're going to fall on our faces a lot, we'll
feel lost, and you have to be not put out by it.' They don't have to show me
smarts. They just have to be a good actor who's a kind, generous human spirit,
who's interested in exploring human behavior.”
Third,
this method is truly collaborative. For eight months, the three talked on the
phone, throwing out ideas and plot developments.
Those
jewels are the fourth, and main, reason this method is so appealing: It can lead
to this generation's ever-elusive goal – authenticity. “It's all about the
quest for naturalism,” Shelton says. “My first film, We Go Way Back, was
traditionally scripted, and I always felt it was a struggle to get the lines to
sound as if they were naturally coming out of the characters' mouths. We did
one scene that was improvised, and it felt like there was electricity suddenly
zinging through the room. I remember thinking, ‘Could you make an entire movie
that felt like this?'”
My
opinion: I really like structure in a
script. But then again, improvisation is
good and mostly used for comedy.
Ann
Patchett: I cut out this Edmonton Journal
article “Witnessing a caesarean too much research for Patchett” by Pauline
Askin on Sept. 11, 2011. Here are the exceprts:
Prize-winning
U.S. author Ann Patchett has always taken research for her
novels seriously - but never more so than with her latest, State of Wonder.
Set deep
in the Amazon, the book centres on a doctor who goes in search of a former
mentor engaged in research on a tribe where the women are fertile until they
die - but also touches on topics such as malaria, corporate greed and facing up
to questions from the past.
“I wanted
to write a book about a teacher/student relationship in which the teacher and
the student meet again as adults as equals. This is not the story of a child
student but of a medical student who was so profoundly influenced by her
relationship with this teacher and the teacher essentially doesn't remember
her.”
The thing
that I love about being a writer is that I love going outside of myself and my
personal experiences and I like to write about things that I don't know
anything about because it's a great opportunity to educate myself. I can think
of something that I don't know anything about, that I'm interested in, malaria,
and say I'm going to write a book in which there is malaria and it gives me the
opportunity to study and research and think about it. It's wonderful. . In the
last several books I have gone into places and characters and situations that
are very far outside of my experience.
Q: Do you
write the outline of the books before you write and if so why?
A: Yes I
do, I tend to write the scene and then do the research and I use the research
to correct myself.
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