Zen in the Art of Writing Read online

  Would you be cutting dialogue or action?

  Everything. The main thing is compression. It really isn't cutting so much as learning metaphor-and this is where my knowledge of poetry has been such a help to me. There's a relationship between the great poems of the world and the great screenplays: they both deal in compact images. If you can find the right metaphor, the right image, and put it in a scene, it can replace four pages of dialogue.

  You look at a thing like Lawrence of Arabia: some of the greatest scenes there are nondialogue scenes. The whole scene where Lawrence goes back into the desert to rescue the camel driver: there's not a line of dialogue. It goes on for five minutes, and it's all image. When Lawrence comes out of the desert, after everyone's waited for him for those minutes of beating sun and violent temperature-the music rises and your heart rises with you. That's the sort of thing you're looking for.

  I'm an automatic screenwriter; I always have been. I've always belonged to films. I'm a child of movies. I've seen every film ever made, starting when I was two. I'm just chockful. When I was seventeen, I was seeing as many as twelve to fourteen movies a week. Well, that's a hell of a lot of movies. That means I've seen everything, and that means all the crap. But that's good. It's a way of learning. You've got to learn how not to do things. Just seeing excellent films doesn't educate you at all, because they're mysterious. A great film is mysterious. There's no way of solving it. Why does Citizen Kane work? Well, it just does. It's brilliant on every level, and there's no way of putting your finger on any one thing that's right. It's just all right. But a bad film is immediately evident, and it can teach you more: "I'll never do that, and I'll never do that, and I'll never do that."

  Tales of novelists dissatisfied with screen adaptations of their work are legion. Often their dissatisfaction is a result of their own false expectations. Can you give an example of advice that Ray Bradbury the screenwriter might have given to Ray Bradbury the novelist while adapting Something Wicked?

  Jack and I debated for a long time about the Dust Witch. She's a very weird creature. In the novel I have her coming to the library, and she's got her eyes sewn shut. But we were both afraid that if you didn't do it just right, it was going to be hilarious. So we reversed it; now she's the most beautiful woman in the world (Pam Grier). Occasionally she'll turn suddenly, and the kids will see what she is underneath: this ugly, ugly creature. I think it works better that way.

  In the book, Charles Holloway has a sorrowful attitude toward the inevitabilty of youth slipping away. Was there some way to express that in the film other than with rueful looks? Some way to retain that internal monologue that has no action connected with it?

  There is. It's not all there, but we've strengthened it, I believe. At a given time in his life, when his son was young, Charles Holloway (Jason Robards) missed a chance to save him from drowning; and the man across the street, Mr. Nightshade, saved him instead.

  So, you then have this as a recurring chord. At the very end, it's up to Holloway, then, to save his son (Vidal I. Peterson) in the mirror maze; that strengthens that.

  Then you have little hints in the script all through of the father talking with the mother (Ellen Geer) late at night or with the son on the porch. You don't have to do it too heavily. That's the great thing about film work: you just have someone look a certain way or sense the wind a certain way, and you don't have to go through all the speeches.

  There's a wonderful scene when the father's sitting on the porch with Will late at night, and the little boy says, "Sometimes I hear you moan late at night. I wish I could make you happy." And the father says, "Just tell me I'll live forever." It breaks your heart.

  What about hyperbole? I guess there's no question of retaining "The billion voices ceased, instantly, as if the train had plunged in afire storm off the earth. "

  My dear young man, there's a scene where the boys (Peterson and Shawn Carson) run through the graveyard and watch the train go by. They're huddled against the embankment, and a certain moment the train whistle screams and all the stones in the graveyard shudder and the angels weep dust. Ah ha!

  You have an eye-catching way of using nouns as verbs. At one point you describe Charles Holloway as "a father who storked his legs and turkeyed his arms. " Can descriptive language like that ever make it to the screen?

  A good director could do it.

  Would you still see the bird?

  A good director would find a way, because what you're shooting is haiku. You're shooting haiku in a barrel.

  Let me give you an example of what we're talking about. I've been lecturing at the University of Southern California cinema department for twenty-two years-I go down there a couple of times a year-and various students have come up to me and said, "Can we make films of your short stories?" I say, "Sure, take them. Do it. But there's one restriction I put on you. Shoot the whole story. Just read what I've done and line up the shots by the paragraphs. All the paragraphs are shots. By the way the paragraph reads, you know whether it's a close-up or a long shot." So, by God, those students, with their little cameras and $500, have shot better films than the big productions I've had, because they've followed the story.

  All my stories are cinematic. The Illustrated Man over at Warner Brothers a couple of years ago (1969) didn't work because they didn't read the short stories. I may be the most cinematic novelist in the country today. All of my short stories can be shot right off the page. Each paragraph is a shot.

  When I first talked to Sam Peckinpah years ago about directing Something Wicked, I said to him, "How are you going to shoot the film if we do it?" He said, "Tear the pages out of the book and stuff them into the camera." I said, "Right."

  The job finally is to pick and choose among all metaphors in the book, put them into a screenplay in just the right proportion where people don't start to laugh at you.

  For instance, I saw The Only Game in Town, George Stevens' film about gambling in Las Vegas, on TV recently. Warren Beatty and Elizabeth Taylor, who is a little bit Porky Pig. About a half hour in, Taylor turns to Beatty and she says, "Carry me into the bedroom." Well, there's no way to do anything but laugh. I thought, "He's going to throw his back out." I mean there goes your film.

  So when you do a fantasy for the screen, make sure people don't fall off their seats.

  How do you begin the process of adapting for movies?

  I throw it all out and start over.

  You never look at the original material?

  When I write a screenplay or stage play based on my work, I never look at the original work. I get the play done, and then I go back and see what I've missed. You can always insert things if they're missing. It's more fun to hear characters speak thirty years later.

  I did Farenheit 451 for the stage in Los Angeles two years ago; I just went to the characters, and I said, "Hey, I haven't talked to you in thirty years. Have you grown up? I hope so. I have." And, of course, they had, too. The fire chief came to me and said, "Hey, thirty years ago, when you wrote me down, you forgot to ask me why I burn books." I said, "God damn! Good question. Why do you burn books?" And he told me-a glorious scene that's not in the novel. It's in the play. Now, at some time in the future I'm going to go to the novel, open it up, and shove in the new material, because it's glorious.

  Could you do another film about it?

  It's not necessary because I love the Truffaut film, but I would like to do a TV special of the play with all the new material; give the fire chief a chance to tell you that he is a failed romantic: he thought books could cure everything. We all think that at a certain time in our lives-don't we?-when we discover books. We think in an emergency all you've got to do is open the Bible or Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson, and we think, "Wow! They know all the secrets."

  With all your knowledge of screenwriting and what can and cannot be done on screen, are you not interested in taking the step into directing films?

  No, I don't want to handle that many people. A director has got to ma
ke forty or fifty people love him or fear him, or a combination of both, all the time. And how do you handle that many people and keep your sanity and your politeness? I'm afraid I would be impatient, which I wouldn't want to be.

  I'm accustomed, you see, to getting up every morning, running to the typewriter, and in an hour I've created a world. I don't have to wait for anyone. I don't have to criticize anyone. It's done. All I need is an hour, and I'm ahead of everyone. The rest of the day I can goof off. I've already done a thousand words this morning; so if I want to have a two or three-hour lunch, I can have it, because I've already beat everyone.

  But a director says, "Oh, God, my spirits are up. Now, I wonder if I can get everyone else's up." What if my leading lady isn't feeling well today? What if my leading man is cantankerous? How do I handle it?

  Your characters never present those problems?

  Never. I never put up with anything from my ideas.

  You just slap them into place?

  As soon as things get difficult, I walk away. That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won't let you do it. You've got to say, "Well, to hell with you." And the cat says, "Wait a minute. He's not behaving the way most humans do." Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: "Well, what's wrong with you that you don't love me?"

  Well, that's what an idea is. See? You just say, "Well, hell, I don't need depression. I don't need worry. I don't need to push." The ideas will follow me. When the're off-guard, and ready to be born, I'll turn around and grab them.

  1982

  ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING

  I selected the above title, quite obviously, for its shock value. The variety of reactions to it should guarantee me some sort of crowd, if only of curious onlookers, those who come to pity and stay to shout. The old sideshow Medicine Men who traveled about our country used calliope, drum, and Blackfoot Indian, to insure open-mouthed attention. I hope I will be forgiven for using ZEN in much the same way, at least here at the start.

  For, in the end, you may discover I'm not joking after all.

  But, let us grow serious in stages.

  Now while I have you here before my platform, what words shall I whip forth painted in red letters ten feet tall?

  WORK.

  That's the first one.

  RELAXATION.

  That's the second. Followed by two final ones:

  DON'T THINK!

  Well, now, what have these words to do with Zen Buddhism. What do they have to do with writing? With me? But, most especially, with you?

  First off, let's take a long look at that faintly repellent word WORK. It is, above all, the word about which your career will revolve for a lifetime. Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects.

  Let me stop here a moment to ask some questions. Why is it that in a society with a Puritan heritage we have such completely ambivalent feelings about Work? We feel guilty, do we not, if not busy? But we feel somewhat soiled, on the other hand, if we sweat overmuch?

  I can only suggest that we often indulge in made work, in false business, to keep from being bored. Or worse still we conceive the idea of working for money. The money becomes the object, the target, the end-all and be-all. Thus work, being important only as a means to that end, degenerates into boredom. Can we wonder then that we hate it so?

  Simultaneously, others have fostered the notion among the more self-conscious literary that quill, some parchment, an idle hour in midday, a soupcon of ink daintily tapped on paper will suffice, given inspiration's whiff. Said inspiration being, all too often, the latest issue of The Kenyon Review or some other literary quarterly. A few words an hour, a few etched paragraphs per day and – voila! we are the Creator! Or better still, Joyce, Kafka, Sartre!

  Nothing could be further from true creativity. Nothing could be more destructive than the two attitudes above.

  Why?

  Because both are a form of lying.

  It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by money in the commercial market.

  It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary group in the intellectual gazettes.

  Do I have to tell you how filled to the brim the literary quarterlies are with young lads and lasses kidding themselves they are creating when all they are doing is imitating the scrolls and flourishes of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner or Jack Kerouac?

  Do I have to tell you how filled to the brim are our women's magazines and other mass circulation publications with yet other lads and lasses kidding themselves they are creating when they are only imitating Clarence Buddington Kelland, Anya Seton, or Sax Rohmer?

  The avant-garde liar kids himself he will be remembered for his pedantic lie.

  The commercial liar, too, on his own level, kids himself that while he is slanting, it is only because the world is tilted; everyone walks like that!

  Now, I would like to believe that everyone reading this article is not interested in those two forms of lying. Each of you, curious about creativity, wants to make contact with that thing in yourself that is truly original. You want fame and fortune, yes, but only as rewards for work well and truly done. Notoriety and a fat bank balance must come after everything else is finished and done. That means that they cannot even be considered while you are at the typewriter. The man who considers them lies one of the two ways, to please a tiny audience that can only beat an Idea insensible and then to death, or a large audience that wouldn't know an Idea if it came up and bit them.

  We hear a lot about slanting for the commercial market, but not enough about slanting for the literary cliques. Both approaches, in the final analysis, are unhappy ways for a writer to live in this world. No one remembers, no one brings up, no one discusses the slanted story, be it diminuendoed Hemingway or third-timearound Elinor Glyn.

  What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, "That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!"

  Then and only then is writing worthwhile.

  Quite suddenly the pomposities of the intellectual fadists fade to dust. Suddenly, the agreeable monies collected from the fatadvertising magazines are unimportant.

  The most callous of commercial writers loves that moment.

  The most artificial of literary writers lives for that moment.

  And God in his wisdom often provides that moment for the most money-grubbing of hacks or the most attention-grabbing of literateurs.

  For there comes a time in the day's occupations when old Money Writer falls so in love with an idea that he begins to gallop, steam, pant, rave, and write from the heart, in spite of himself.

  So, too, the man with the quill pen is suddenly taken with fevers, gives up purple ink for pure hot perspiration. Then he tatters quills by the dozen and, hours later, emerges ruinous from the bed of creation looking as if he had channeled an avalanche through his house.

  Now, you ask, what transpired? What caused these two almost compulsive liars to start telling the truth?

  Let me haul out my signs again.

  WORK

  It's quite obvious that both men were working.

  And work itself, after awhile, takes on a rhythm. The mechanical begins to fall away. The body begins to take over. The guard goes down. What happens then?

  RELAXATION

  And then the men are happily following my last advice:

  DON'T THINK

  Which results in more relaxation and more unthinkingness and greater creativity.

  Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.

  Impossible! you say. How can you work and relax? How can you create and not be a nervous wreck?

 
; It can be done. It is done, every day of every week of every year.

  Athletes do it. Painters do it. Mountain climbers do it. Zen Buddhists with their little bows and arrows do it.

  Even I can do it.

  And if even I can do it, as you are probably hissing now, through clenched teeth, you can do it, too!

  All right, let's line up the signs again. We could put them in any order, really. RELAXATION or DON'T THINK could come first, or simultaneously, followed by WORK But, for convenience let's do it this way, with a fourth developmental sign added:

  WORK RELAXATION DON'T THINK FURTHER RELAXATION

  Shall we analyze word number one?

  WORK

  You have been working, haven't you?

  Or do you plan some sort of schedule for yourself starting as soon as you put down this article?

  What kind of schedule?

  Something like this. One-thousand or two-thousand words every day for the next twenty years. At the start, you might shoot for one short story a week, fifty-two stories a year, for five years. You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done.

  For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.

  How so?

  Michelangelo's, da Vinci's, Tintoretto's billion sketches, the quantitative, prepared them for the qualitative, single sketches further down the line, single portraits, single landscapes of incredible control and beauty.

  A great surgeon dissects and re-dissects a thousand, ten thousand bodies, tissues, organs, preparing thus by quantity the time when quality will count-with a living creature under his knife.