The most important writing lesson I ever learned was not in a screenwriting class, but a fiction class.
This was senior year of college. Most of us had already been accepted into grad school of some sort. We felt powerful, we felt talented, and most of all, we felt artistic.
It was the advanced fiction workshop, and we did an entire round of workshops with everyone’s best stories, their most advanced work, their most polished pieces. It was very technical and, most of all, very artistic.
IE: They were boring pieces of pretentious crap.
Now the teacher was either a genius OR was tired of our shit, and decided to give us a challenge. Flash fiction, he said. Write something as quickly as possible. Make it stupid. Make it not mean a thing, just be a quick little blast of words.
And, of course, we all got stupid. Little one and two pages of prose without the barriers that it must be good. Little flashes of characters, little bits of scenarios.
And they were electric. All of them. So interesting, so vivid, not held back by the need to write important things or artistic things.
One sticks in my mind even today. The guys original piece was a thinky, thoughtful piece relating the breaking up of threesomes to volcanoes and uncontrolled eruptions that was just annoying to read. But his flash fiction was this three page bit about a homeless man who stole a truck full of coca cola and had to bribe people to drink the soda so he could return the cans to recycling so he could afford one night with the prostitute he loved.
It was funny, it was heartfelt, and it was so, so, so well written.
And just that one little bit of advice, the write something short and stupid, changed a ton of people’s writing styles for the better.
It was amazing. So go. Go write something small. Go write something that’s not artistic. Go write something stupid. Go have fun.
Know what ticks me off the most about the “we’re canon” and “but that’s not canon” and “your ship is not canon” nonsense? It buys into the whole proprietary ownership of storytelling that Disney exemplifies: tales as commodities controlled and dispensed by suits with their own self-serving agendas.
If you tried to tell the bards or poets or ballad-writers of centuries past that there’s such a thing as “canon” and it’s superior, they would have laughed in your face. Try telling even the famous storytellers like Shakespeare or Homer or Sappho or Ibn Tufail.
The recent preoccupation with “canon v. fanon” in the culture battles makes the Textual Poachers author’s quote more relevant than ever:
“Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.”
- Henry Jenkins, 1997
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