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WRITING FROM YOUR IMAGINATION In this newsletter.
1) WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW? We find in all of our courses, from Unlocking Creativity to those writing their novel or screenplay, that the best fiction writing comes when people are forced out of their own experience and called upon to make up fictional characters and storylines. This discipline takes writers out of their comfort zone, (sometimes kicking and screaming) and allows for their imagination and true creativity to kick in. And ironically, is the only place where real emotional truth can be attained. Here is an interesting article by a Hollywood scriptwriter and former teacher from UCLA, Howard Suber, on the same subject. He says, “There is no writer alive who has not been advised, “Write what you know.” And there are few writers who have not, in the course of following this advice, spent months or years producing a personally cathartic but boringly predictable work. Too often, writers take “write what you know” to mean “write what you’ve lived.” Yet, few writers lead dramatic lives;if they did, they wouldn’t have much time or energy for writing. Writing what you know, therefore, can constrict a writer to a very narrow and uninteresting perspective. What you "know," if you have any creativity at all, is not just what you have experienced. Paul Schrader had no experience as a pimp or a taxi driver when he wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver. He had studied to be a minister at Calvin College, a small fundamentalist school in Michigan, and earned his M.A. degree in academic film studies at UCLA writing about the spiritual dimensions of the work of the Danish director Carl Theodore Dryer. Mario Puzo wasn't a made man or even a member of a Mafia family, he was a novelist looking for a commercial hit, and what he knew about the Mafia when he wrote The Godfather came mostly from his research in the New York Public library. George Lucas grew up in rural Modesto, California, where there were no space ships, hyper-drives or even robots. What he knew about “The Force” he got largely from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces and popular studies of comparative religions. If all that a writer “knows” is his own personal experience, it will never be broad enough to sustain him/her. Experience, in itself, is never enough. The more one relies on it exclusively, the more one runs the risk of restricting one’s imagination, which is where most creativity originates.” As Tennessee Williams said, nothing in his stories actually happened, they just reflected the emotional currents of his life. Just because something happened is no excuse in fiction. This isn’t of course to say there is anything wrong with non-fiction, or writing about things that happened. But you want your writing to ring true emotionally and if you want to write fiction, don’t limit yourself to feeling you have to have lived through something literally to write it. All writers must learn to tap into and trust the power of their imagination, the true source of creative power. 2) SUCCESS STORY Here is an email we received the other day from one of our former writers, Nigel Bartlett. “I've been meaning to send you a copy of the short story I recently had published in the UTS Writers' Anthology, which was very exciting. The book was launched at the Writers Festival and at Gleebooks, and I was one of five readers asked to give a reading from my story at the Stanton Library in North Sydney a couple of weeks ago. I'm now studying on the MA in Creative Writing at UTS, which I'm really enjoying, but credit the Writers' Studio with getting me going and unlocking my creative juices! The best thing about this story (which is the first one I've ever completed) was that I just sat down and wrote it, using the principles of keeping the pen (or keyboard) moving and capturing first thoughts. After workshopping parts of it in class, I tweaked it and made some minor changes, and then went through an editing process with one of the editors from the book, in which a few small things were changed around. But other than that it's not far off how it came out the first time around.”
This next course commences on Thursday August 17 (with an optional live class with Roland Fishman) and will run till October 2nd. It is still essentially a four week course but we are giving you, by popular demand, an extra couple of weeks in which to complete the exercises. It is still the same price as the 4 weeks. You will write up to 8 short scenarios of 800 words each and receive three-pronged feedback on every story you post. This will be the final short story course for the year. To read more click here: http://www.writerstudio.com.au/4week_more.html 4) SHORT STORY COMPETITION Writers World is conducting its 2nd short story competition for August. They run them every month and are now free. The Writers’ World is an Australia website and resource for Aussie writers. Here is their website with details of the short story competition. http://www.writersworld.com.au/home.jsp 5) SUCCESS OF READING NIGHT Thank you to everyone who came to our reading and get together last week and to those who read. It really was a special event. All the pieces were exceptional. One member Marie told us that she goes to a lot of professional and non-professional readings and they were by far the best readings she had ever heard. We’ll be running another one later in the year, so we can do it all again. To view other newsletters. http://www.writerstudio.com.au/articles.html ______________________________________ If
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