Can Dystopias Motivate Utopias?
Commentary on Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopiawritten by Tom Moylan
Don't forget your history,
know your destiny.
In the abduance of water
the fool is thirsty.
-- Bob Marley’s Rat Race
One thing humanity seems to agree on: We all want a better life for ourselves and our world.
One thing humanity can’t seem to agree on: How to get there.
Per Albert Einstein, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." We, especially Americans, constantly reinvent ourselves through our political shifts, our culture, and fads. Each time we do, we seem to dig a bigger hole in the ground. We forget to look over our shoulders at history so that we can move forward, up and out. Our irrational desires for a utopic state that is unattainable serves no one but those few that we willingly put in power.
Because we do not want to have that power over ourselves.
Though Critical Past is first and foremost meant to be entertaining, I also hope to demonstrate (albeit more so in my rewrite than my 1st draft) that we can’t go forward unless we look to our past. History continues to repeat itself because we fail to memorize its maxims. Republics fall, Empires crumble, and Democracies linger in corruption. And though their intent is pure: a means to take care of the many; the few, or the one, become lost in the mix. If an ocean is made up of drops of water, shouldn’t each drop matter? How good is Utopia for humanity? And does evolution do best under fire, when our liberties and even our definitions of ourself as individuals is threatened by the culture that surrounds us?
I picked up Moylan’s Scraps of the Untainted Sky in hopes of finding contextual guidelines for my novel. I now deeply regret not having read this book a year ago when I was first outlining Critical Past. Moylan manages to tie in SF and classical literature, real politics and philosophies, and human nature in a quest for why humanity seeks perfection yet can never have it. The book is a must read for anyone who is a student of Science Fiction and its place in culture.
Utopic/Dystopic societies are a popular theme in literature (as well as music, film and on the stage). Conflict being core to good storytelling, the exploration of humanity’s ‘hunger’ to make the world a better place, create a backdrop of tension that easily echo within the mind of the reader. Science Fiction (and its stepsister Fantasy) focuses on this search for utopia. Sometimes the results are idealistic, such as the realms of BF Skinner’s Walden II, Roddenberry’s Star Trek, or even the fairy tales that end with “Happily Ever After.” But more often, Speculative Fiction, as pointed out by Moylan, explores utopias that wreck havoc on the individual and in turn, lose sight of their goals.
The theme is anything but new. And though Moylan contends that pre WWII dystopias were predominately focused on technological fears (e.g. Frankenstein), I strongly disagree. Plato’s Republic, most likely our first recorded examination of Utopia (which means Nowhere in Greek), demonstrates the limitations of a utopic lifestyle. For instance, according to Plato, a poet would be dangerous to the spirit of a utopic society, their though too free, too catalytic in tendencies. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia preaches utilitarianism; everyone wears the same clothes, does the same chores. Again, the individual is lost for the sake of the society. Although Plato and More may have meant well in their dissertations, their ideas obviously formed the basis for more cautionary tales of this idyll such as George Orwell’s 1984 to Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle to Atwood’s Handmaid Tale.
Moylan spend a good deal of his tome discussing specific works in SF, including recent works such as Spider Robinson's and Octavia Butler’s. A key focus through the second half of his book is the hero’s desire (intentional or not) to upset the status quo. He’s right to drive this theme home, and in doing so has made me realize that I am NOT accomplishing this as much as I should. Instead I’ve succumbed to the styles of Ex-Utopians such as Orwell and Shaw who “have lost their original perspectives and given up hope.” There’s a synchronicity to having read this book at the same time I’m being reminded by my mentor to further emphasize my theme. I don’t want Critical Past to be Ex-Utopic. Instead, I would prefer it to end up in hope, with Kate and Jon carrying a proverbial torch for why the individual’s spirit is so vital to humanity’s future.
Thank Gods for rewrites.
+++++++++++++
Recognize that there are ties between us
All men and women
Living on the Earth
Ties of hope and love
Sister and brotherhood
That we are bound together
In our desire to see the world become
A place in which our children
Can grow free and strong
We are bound together
By the task that stands before us
And the road that lies ahead
We are bound and we are bound
There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist
There is a hunger in the center of the chest
There is a passage through the darkness and the mist
And though the body sleeps the heart will never rest
--James Taylor’s Shed A Little Light
The First Five Page, Ad Infinitum
Key thing learned from Noah Lukeman’s book? That every paragraph, every page, every chapter should be treated like the first five pages. Show, don’t tell; ensure the style fits the tone of the piece; use setting as character, take advantage of how sentence structures ‘sound’, keep the pacing and progression intense and on course. His guide “To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile” delves into the rewrite process of the entire manuscript, not just those very first pages.
Good advice, especially from a literary agent, but I’ve read it all before. With one exception (Lukeman’s chapter on HOOKS - see more below), I’ve read this all before. In fact, I’d have to say that SELF EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS (see my comments) does a better job of laying out the realities of constructing a strong piece of prose because of the detailed before and after examples used to support each and every issue. And Lukeman never, ever, mentions RUE: Refuse the Urge to Explain -- perhaps one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in the past year.
Ironically enough, the one chapter in Lukeman’s book that deals with those First Five Pages is Chapter 14 -- The Hook. I found it particularly illuminating that he considers books with subdued openings to have the most potential. Less of a chance of being disappointed versus an opening line (or paragraph) that demonstrates an initial intensity because it sets a heighten expectation for the remainder of the book. I see where he’s coming from but he’s an agent, I’m an unpublished author, and I have a gut feeling that if I don’t grab the reader (be it agent or editor) immediately, they’re never going to get past that first sentence or paragraph. My ‘jury’ is still out on this and I hope to poll other writers in the SHU program as well as my current and former mentors once I get to PA in June.
All in all, I wouldn’t say that this book was useless, just redundant. I’ll certainly pull it out in late June when I make my ‘list’ of steps I need to take once in rewrite phase. But more as a backup check to Self-Editing Still, I would have very much liked to see more discussion on techniques tried and true for grabbing the reader in those First Five Pages.
SIDEBAR: Found a good interview with Lukeman where he discusses the business of running an agency and the challenges for the new author to get published. There’s some discussion regarding Women’s Literature (aka Chick Lit) in the piece as well but nothing on speculative fiction.
Where setting and plot are character
Clarke/Baxter’s Time’s Eye was a big disappointment.
There was a time when you couldn’t pull a Clarke book out of my hand.
At my golden age of 10, I was always glomming on to one gem of his or another’s and in between my discoveries of his works, I’d go back to reread either
Against the Fall of Night or the revised version,
City & the Stars, again and again and again.
There’s a definite sense of wonder in Clarke’s work.
Charlemagne, the alien of Night/Stars, pulled thousands of years of humanity’s trials and errors into perspective for me, a wee lass at the time.
The explorers of the
Rama series looked beyond the failed qualities of humanity to explore what’s next. And now, with this new series,
A Time Odyssey - yep, that’s right,
Time’s Eye is just book one in a series - Clarke and Baxter use a historical melting pot of humanity’s key eras to explore the absurdity of Homo sapiens and war through a battle between Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great.
And oddly, or rather not so oddly, I am left cold and bored.
I know that Clarke had very little to do with writing this book due to health reasons, so while he may have provided Baxter some direction for his efforts, the ‘wonder’ I’m used to experiencing when reading something of Arthur’s is gone. This tome is stale, predictable and anything but wonderous. I’m not familiar with Baxter’s work so I have no way of really telling who contributed what, but I can take a stab at guessing that other than the broad points of the story, the inner workings are all Baxter’s.
Instead, we’re taken on a long winded history lesson of Alexander’s reign, Khan’s barbaric plunder, 19th century British troops ramrod India, 21st century Middle Eastern politics and Russia’s efforts to keep the outdated Soyuz flying even as the Americans can’t get their own shuttle back in the air. All to lay some sort of groundwork with the reader as to what is good versus what is bad about humanity.
I can’t help but think of that line from the West Wing episode We Killed Yamamoto (referring to the US covert operation to kill Yamamoto after Pearl Harbor)...
Leo: We spent millions of dollars developing a pen for the astronauts that would work in zero gravity. Know what the Russians did?
Toby: Used a pencil?
So yes, Alexander was a philosopher-king. And Khan was a brutal rapist pig. And the Russians make a better pencil. But who cares? We, or at least most of us, know these things already.
I might have cared. I might have gotten caught up in this story IF the characters had. But they didn’t. They walked through the stories, POV jumping all over the place (there is no way a new author would get away with this!), and we are never allowed inside. We’re never allowed to care about them. They’re just cardboard cut outs that walk through the story.
Time’s Eye is predominately done in an omniscient POV - case in point, the scenes with Seeker, an Australopithecus, an ancestor of man. We’re supposed to be in her POV but there’s this heavy history lesson about the millions and millions of years it took for the Earth to form and become a viable planet.
The entire book is like this. You’ll get a few lines of dialogue, then it’ll go into a history lesson, then a few lines of dialogue, then more history.
If the characters knew this stuff and we got into their motives and attitudes about it, I’d be happy. But the writer(s)’s stamp is all over this book and well, quite frankly, I learned this stuff over 20 years ago -- I didn’t need another round of it here.
Heavy on setting (and some it IS wonderful - their description of ancient Babylon is fascinating), light on character, this book is antithetical to what I’m attempting to do with Critical Past. Though I know I need to beef up my settings in rewrite, my ‘mission’ is to show how the past was important to our future through the characters. The ancients and the moderns. I want Jon, Kate, Burke, etc (and therefore the readers!) to feel the implications of each step taken in history and how it will echo through the halls of time.
SIDEBAR: A few side notes of frustration
There are a few minor similarities between Time’s Eye and Critical Past that I need to mention. Nothing huge, just little things:
+Heron is mentioned, using Hero with the N at the end. It’s just one paragraph discussing an invention of his that they cobble together.
+The 19th century Brits teach Alexander’s troops how to use stirrups - something I planned on delving into in more detail in my rewrite (i.e. the Jon and Cadeyrn scene on the road to the Iceni)
+After the “Discontinuity” = which Clarke/Baxter’s name for the change (I just use “the accident” - I wonder if I need to come up with something more ‘poetic’), one of the Cosmonauts looks down on Earth from space in a manner similar to when Jon looks at the moon and its missing colony. But I wrote this scene months and months ago - I ain’t changing it! In fact, in rewrite, I intend to do more with the holo image experience he has.
Am I glad I read Time’s Eye - yes. But here’s the acid test: Will I reread it? No, thank you.
Struggling to Show the Story & Coyote Rising
Wrote: 5 pagesRead: 3 chapters PAGE AFTER PAGE 1 chapter TIME'S EYEOff to watch: BSG mini-series PREFACE:
I’ve hit a wall where my writing feels amateurish, unfocused and even though I have all my wonderful plot points outlined on paper, I can’t seem to SHOW what’s going on in each scene, I can only TELL. I suck.
After 3 days of beating my head, it dawned on me that there are a few issues behind this dry spell:
1) Unlike every other creative work I’ve done in my life, my writing persona doesn’t like to be told it HAS to complete 5 pages a day, 5 days a week. Point blank, I just am rushing things. I suppose if I had not had such a lousy year last year (father’s death, husband/daughter/self all having major surgeries), I may have produced more than 200 pages in the 1st year of writing this novel. But facts are facts and my head really gets resentful when it’s pushed too hard. This is not a good thing but it’s a truth.
2) I’m not reading enough good fiction to ‘feed my head’, plain and simple.
There’s nothing I can do change item 1 but certainly I can do something about item 2. Though I have to admit to some hesitancy and frustration…
MY THOUGHTS ON COYOTE RISING
A year ago I picked up Steele’s first installment of this series, COYOTE, (see my review) and became enamored. I need to emphasize that prior to discovering Steele (thanks to a nudge from my 1st mentor at SHU- Tim Esaias), I’d spent several years whining about the lack of good SF that is ‘post 2000’. Along came Steele and I got hooked. His characters’ POVs are deep. The science was mostly soft - an exploration of how humanity behaves under stressful (and often, political) situations. I read it, I loved it, and I wanted more.
Flash forward a year and COYOTE RISING debuted. And while COYOTE explored what drives humanity to explore, to reach out past the known and find new places it can call freedom-- and, more importantly, what does freedom mean -- COYOTE RISING delves into the “what if” when freedom is threatened, by those who believe might makes right, and by natural forces that threaten to tear the planet apart.
Steele has a knack for making writing seem effortless. He charges in, full barrel, with a story that is filled with believable characters, plot twists that not only ‘could’ happen but most likely will when different factions of philosophical and societal belief clash. And he does it with a smile, a lilt and without beating the reader over the head. Humor, adventure, action, romance and even a tinge of the cautionary tale all reside in this sequel and I am envious.
There’s a few ‘secrets’ Steele uses that I’m beginning to discern. For one thing, we never stay in one character’s POV for more than a few chapters. The character may appear in other scenes but he never, ever, goes back into that character’s head again. So you never get bored, and he doesn’t need to worry too much about growth and arcs for too many characters. Usually the first and last characters of his stories are the ones that get to learn something, to change, to grow. He also uses just the bare minimums of science hardware in his stories. They’re there, but just like a modern day story in the kitchen wouldn’t stop to explain how a toaster works, Steele doesn’t stop his tale to tell you how his spaceships work. You just have to trust him. And because of the level of confidence evident in his storytelling, you do!
And that’s something I really need to achieve in my rewrite of CP - I have way too much technobabble - some of it is inaccurate (in large part to my own weak science education) and it SLOWS THINGS DOWN. So yes, Steele will be a great model for me in my rewrite phase.
He also manages to make a 3, 4, 5 page dialogue scene come to life. You never feel like it’s a case of “literary talking heads”. His dialogue is crisp, conflicted, mostly angry - and very real. His characters are people I can quickly identify with - they aren’t caricatures or 2 dimensional widgets (see my complaints of Stephen Baxter’s Time’s Eye), they breathe, they bleed, they fight for what they believe in. I ripped through this 382 page book in no time.
But… my chief complaint is that he didn’t delve deep enough into one very important and special character: Captain Lee. In the first Coyote installment, the reader becomes very close to the leader of the rebel movement that founds Coyote. Steele spends a great deal of time crafting a character that has admirable traits and yet wrestles deeply with his beliefs in freedom and liberty. In this sequel, Lee is pushed to the side and we don’t get to “be” anywhere near him for the first 250 pages! A poor decision, in my opinion, and one where the author wasn’t paying attention to what resonated so deeply with his readers in the first place: the hero, the leader, the main character of his first book.
Steele fell in love with his full cast, and his world, and sacrificed his main character to explore the others. And not just figuratively because … this next piece is a spoiler so you’ll need to highlight to read … he lets Lee get killed by the villain and contagonist of the book: Matriarch. A completely dissatisfying way to have your favorite character bumped off.
SIDEBAR: Antagonists vs Contagonists
Think Empire vs Darth Vader for Star Wars
Think Social Collective vs the Matriach for Coyote
Think US Senate vs Burke for Critical Past
The Antagonist represents the overall evil, the Contagonist personifies that evil and uses it to obstruct the main character's goals.
Back to Coyote Rising . . .
One last note of criticism -- and this is something I noted in the 1st book as well. Steele has the ability to come up with some tremendous allegorical images. In the first book he developed an entire mythology - or rather a crewman whose cryogenic chamber stopped working 20 years into a several hundred year flight. And he never used it. In COYOTE RISING, he’s created this wonderful half bat, half man creature but we never are allowed inside Zoltan’s head to understand his agony. And his ecstasy. Very frustrating.
I just “poked my head in” over at Amazon to see what the reviews of COYOTE RISING were like and was surprised to see some ‘bashing’ in regards to inconsistencies and irregular science. The book is not doing tremendously well in sales at a ranking of 124,000 either. Which is too bad, Steele needs our support.
Why, you may ask? Because we need confident tellers of tall tales, make believers and storytellers that can look up at the night sky and share our futures with us with confident writing that leaps from the page and keeps us moving forward in anticipation of the end.
And if I can get through my "suck" phase, I hope to be able to do the same.
Short
Write: 0 (too busy/too tired)
Read: 2 chapters Page After Page
1 chapter Time's Eye
I need sleep. Plain and simple. I've learned that unless I am well rested, I just can't write anything that makes any sense.
Simplicity and Focus
Written: 3 pages
Read: 1. 4 chapters of Page After Page
2. 2 chapters of Time's Eye
3. 3 chapters of Sword Sword (a crit partner's work)
2 Things I'm endeavoring to accomplish in my writing life.
Even though I've had no or little sleep for 3 nights - thanks to dogs that are afraid of thunder and power outages and coyotes attacking our sheep and fowl - I actually accomplished 3 pages of writing today. Nothing overally wonderful but the skeleton is there.
I bought myself a present of sorts:
Page After Page by Heather Sellers. The subtitle is:
Discover the confidence & passion you need to start writing & keep writing (no matter what). I'm enjoying reading the book - there's something very gentle and soothing about her writing and how she discusses the struggles to fight the insidious DOUBT of writers. Something I have a chronic case of.
Her advice is practical (butt in seat is what its all about), her sympathies real (she’s suffered from the same inner conflicts and self-doubt that I do -- the key reason I picked this book up), and her attitude right on: writing is a love affair onto which we struggle, romance, hate and love ourselves.
I've been having difficulty focusing as of late - amazing what a little extreme fatigue will do - and so I haven't been much into reading. I absolutely HATE Clarke/Baxter's Time's Eye - and I should have known better than to put anything Baxter is involved in on my contract list. Afterall, I hated what he did to the Foundation series. Actually, I don't care for any of the B's - Binford, Baxter, Bear - all too cold and unpersonal. Too droll. There's no heroic journey, no delving into the deeper darkness of the id, just some fantastic science - wonderous as always, but you know what? I'm not a gasket, or a widget. I'm not an alien or a meteor. I'm a person - I want to be a better person. I NEED to experience, again and again, journeys through the process of humanity if I'm going to achieve my goals.
I don't want to be a better widget.
Al at SHU turned me on to a semester long World Building course: http://curriculum.calstatela.edu/courses/builders/index.htmlIncredible - a semester long course in building worlds - the astronomy, biology, ecology. All the scientific aspects of creating a strange new world.
Very tempting. It's a 5 credit course and costs $625. Happens January to end of March and I am seriously considering taking it. Science is my weakest link and once I'm done with Critical Past, the next book I have in mind is very other worldly and would very much benefit from taking this course.
More to come.
STORY by Robert McKee
Robert McKee has been the Mecca for screenwriters for decades. As a Producer and sometimes writer in Hollyweird, I was personally a John Truby fan, with his 22 Building Blocks that evoked Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces (and Vogler’s Writer’s Journey). When I found STORY listed on the SHU list of recommended readings, I was surprised - especially since I use this tome in my screenwriting classes at SMSU and my workshop. I’ve always thought the book was a great way to get writers to think differently - to understand how screenwriting is about the image and sound, how quite literally, a picture can say a thousand words. How dialogue may tell you the WHY of a conflict but the image can tell you the WHAT.
Of course, it’s one thing to accomplish this in script form, and entirely another in prose. I am always in awe of authors with the ability (in prose) to get inside the character’s head, indicate their body language/gestures, and a few other dozen things you have do plus, of course, provide the image descriptions (aka settings but also more - much more) which seem to vie for your attention. I’m still struggling with finding that proper balance but…
Re-reading STORY in “novelist” mode was illuminating to say the least. I’d been all worried about prose versus script issues but discovered that some truths about storytelling are universal:
The Ten Commandments According to Robert McKee
1) Thou shalt not take the crisis/climax out of the protagonist's hands. Death to the use of Deus ex machina.
I feel pretty good about this one -- I’m planning on putting both of my protagonists (Kate and Jon) through hell, make them struggle their way out of it and then come out the other side better for it. But first pain and suffering (with maybe a few doses of humor - got to bring the funny at least once in a great while). So no, I don’t see a Deus ex machine for the solution. I do, however, recognize that I’m using it as the cause of the problem.
I do, however, have insecurities about the problem appearing too convenient, too trite, too arranged. I’m hoping that in my rewrite I can get the tension and conflict tight enough that the reader won’t know what hit them.
2) Thou shalt not make life easy for the protagonist. Nothing progresses in a story, except through conflict.
And I agree with this, almost. 99.9% absolutely. But I do believe in the occasional need for ‘falling action’, for a brief moment every now and then where the reader (and the characters) can breathe. Not more than a paragraph or two, but an infrequent moment where the tension is not slammed up against the wall and the story can settle down. I like to think of it as a moment where the reader is able to pull the covers up further as they read the book in bed, where they can mentally sit back for just a moment and let the scene that just happened sink in.
3) Thou shalt not give exposition for exposition's sake. Dramatize it. Convert exposition to ammunition.
This is so much easier said that done and I struggle with it constantly. Show vs. Tell, death to Maid & Butler, I get it. Info dumps are boring to read. And I kick myself daily for having chosen a story to write that has so much information to get across.
The newest issue of Writer’s Digest brings up a good point about where there are appropriate times to use expository:
When a full dramatization would be repetitious.
When the scene isn’t important enough to rate a full treatment.
When a full dramatized scene would interfere with the story’s momentum.
I actually just took advantage of this and did a bit of ‘telling’ for when Burke and Kate get to the city gates of Camulodunum with Heron. Two little paragraphs. Mind you, this comes right after a scene with Jon panicking in the woods on his way to meet Queen Andra so I think this bit of telling served a few purposes: 1)A bit of falling action to let the reader settle down and 2)Gets Kate, Burke and Heron ready for a big conflicty scene where they meet Suetonius and Catus and get to see the nasty underside of the Roman Empire. Tempo wise - it helps the momentum of the story.
4) Thou shalt not use false mystery or cheap surprise.
To ask a reader to sit through a book, get emotionally charged and involved, care about the characters and then slam! Hit them on the back of the head with a cheesy, been there, done that, trick is just plain unfair. I’ve personally experienced this phenomenon a few times and there’s dents in the wall in my bedroom (from throwing books against it) and a large pile of discarded DVDs (from movies with really cheesy endings) to prove it.
I struggle with concern over doing this in my own writing and I suspect its one of the things that slows me down - into a sort of flaccid, self-doubting state. A mystery or surprise can seem original to me but overdone to someone else. Thank gods for mentors and critique partners and friends all willing to read monthly chunks of my work in progress. Anyone who writes in a vacuum is suspect to this and hackerism (see below):
5) Thou shalt respect your audience. The anti-hack commandment.
In screenwriting, this is simple - witty dialogue, stylized imagery -- maybe through odd angles and with the film treated to be super saturated or washed out.
In novel writing, the dialogue still matters, the setting becomes crucial to creating a place for your reader to visit that is fresh and new… and worth the trip.
Plot - that’s the tricky one.
Sometimes I feel like no matter what ideas I come up with for my stories, they’ve been done before.
As McKee points out, however, if you can take a plotline and turn it on its head by, blow fresh life into it by having unique characters - the story will be new and original.
I love my characters and believe them to be unique - sometimes cranky but definitely unique.
So fingers crossed, I don’t insult my readers and instead give them a story worth reading.
6) Thou shalt know your world as God knows this one. The pro-research commandment.
There’s two kinds of research here - not just the literal but the internal. I’ve got stacks of books on the Empire, Roman Britain, Quantum Physics, etc. But I would say my most valuable research has been on developing the plotline and characters for the story. And that research has been accomplished through digging inside to figure out what makes each of them tick.
7) Thou shalt not complicate when complexity is better. Don't multiply the complications on one level. Use all three: Intra-personal, Inter-personal, Extra-personal.
Nods head - Since I’m a strong believer in character is everything, I’d say this is the only way to keep the plot moving forward. Make them 3 dimensional, give them inner conflicts, conflicts with each other and conflicts with the world around them. And I’m not entirely convinced I need to resolve ALL these complications (i.e. conflicts) but certainly growth needs to happen in the major characters by story’s end or what’s the point of the story?
8) Thou shalt seek the end of the line, the negation of the negation, taking characters to the farthest reaches and depth of conflict imaginable within the story's own realm of probability.
This sits at the core of my preference in stories. Throw everything at them, make them suffer and watch them grow. I really feel sorry for my characters.
9) Thou shalt not write on the nose. Put a subtext under every text.
Allegory, symbolism, metaphor - tools of the trade. But my favorite means of accomplishing this is through meter. My ultimate fantasy is, years from now, to become so confident in my writing that the very meter of the descriptions, the rhythm of the dialogue, taps into the subtext and gets the underlying message across to the reader on a deep, molecular level. This is probably why I’m such a huge Aaron Sorkin fan. All his dialogue, whether it be American President, Sports Night, or West Wing, is symphonic in quality. Even his actors admit they never dare change even one word because there's such strength in the meter, the pitter patter of sound, in the way he constructs dialogue, that it gave subtext to the scene, to the conflict and the internal workings of the characters.
10) Thou shalt rewrite.
Thank gods.
And I do love rewriting. I’m merciless, brutal, and almost callous with my own material. I can’t wait to get the first draft done so I can rewrite! And it's in that rewrite that I hope to insure that I've not broken any of the above commandments ...
Unless it works! Because sometimes, rules are made to be broken. But only if you've learned them first.
