“Rejected Thoughts,” “Alienated Majesty,” and “Trust the Process”
I love to teach screenwriting. Approaching the craft as an educator has opened up a depth of understanding about story that I never would have developed just as a writer. Plus I find inspiration every day I teach, most often from the participants in my classes.
For example, here is an exchange between myself and a current Screenwriting Master Class “Prep: From Concept to Outline” course member. First an email I sent to the class about this gem of a quote I discovered:
Check this out:
“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
This speaks to the very nature of the prep-writing part of the creative process. We never make a ‘bad’ choice re character or plot. Rather some choices, hell, most choices turn out to be ones we simply don’t use. At least directly. However they can be felt indirectly because they were a necessary part of what we did in order to arrive at where we are when we finish a script.
All hail our necessary but unused thoughts and their alienated majesty!
To which one of the class participants James responded:
The part that I’ve always struggled with, and I would guess all creative people struggle with, is recognizing when the thoughts are to be rejected or used. And how thoughts that are used and kept for weeks and months and years one day suddenly need or want to be rejected.
For sure in prep writing, all the various ideas come and go, and some hold on, some fade away — it’s a little intimidating. But throughout the writing process, from prep to polish, ideas wane, refresh, live and die. And it scares me because I can’t control it! I love an idea long after it’s been used up and I should let it go. And ideas that I should embrace, I resist, fight, even when they won’t fade like I want them to.
I love it but I also hate it, because it’s so hard to consciously know. It’s hard to let go and just trust…
How great is that honesty? In talking publicly about his fears, James actually demonstrates a kind of fearlessness. And in sharing the difficulty he sometimes has to “just trust,” he actually exhibits trust in myself and his classmates, this little online community we’ve formed during our time together. So I responded with this:
James,
You’ve hit on one of the most confounding and challenging aspects of writing. I wish there was some magic formula that would allow writers to easily sort through ideas, separating the wheat from the chaff. Eventually it boils down to what you know intellectually and what you know instinctively. The best we can do is keep feeding both aspects of our Self. Read scripts. Watch movies. Write pages. The more you do, the more you learn.
I believe courses like this one help. You not only get a chance to test out your ideas in a public forum and receive immediate quality feedback, you also are afforded the opportunity to critique other stories which helps to develop your critical analytical skills.
At the end of the day, a writer really must learn to trust the process. Put the words down. Show them to people. See how they react. Repeat. In this era where content is king, perhaps the single most important thing we can do is commit to creating the content. Nothing is etched in stone. You can always rewrite it. Eventually you get there.
It’s like that line that’s repeated three times in Shakespeare in Love.
Q: How does it turn out?
A: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
Writing is a mystery. A confounding one. A challenging one. But as writers, we have to trust that in the end it will turn out all right, and we’ll somehow find our way to FADE OUT.
The six-week online Prep class James and his fellow writers is currently participating in is the best approach I’ve yet found to wrangle a story. Starting with your story’s most important character — the Protagonist — the course lays out a series of weekly writing exercises that spur a writer’s creativity and guide them from concept to outline.
And yet as much structure as those writing assignments provide, the process is still an organic one. We can’t reduce a story to mere steps, but we can use those steps to engage our story. Once there, it’s pretty much a roller coaster ride emotionally, lots of ups and downs, fits and starts. But just as we know a roller coaster will take us from beginning to end, so, too, the prep-writing part of the process will get us to the point where we know our story — if we trust that process.
So rejected thoughts? Not a waste of time, but each a learning experience that helps to shape our story. Alienated majesty? Yes, we shouldn’t look down on narrative choices we make that don’t pan out, rather acknowledge them as an essential part of our creative journey. And trust the process? As scary and confounding as the writer’s journey may be, each story we write is waiting for us to find it. In that, we must always trust.
For more information on the Screenwriting Master Class “Prep” courses which begin January 3, 2010, go here.
Comment Archive