Insider Report:
How do you challenge yourself as a writer and still stay commercial?
Tolkin:
Am I commercial?
Insider Report:
How do you arrive at creative solutions when you're blocked? Is there an exercise or a trick you use?
Tolkin:
Melville, PIERRE, Library of America edition, p. 163:
In her life there was an unraveled plot; and he felt that unraveled it would always be to him. No slightest hope had he, that what was dark and mournful in her would ever be cleared up into some coming atmosphere of light and mirth. Like all youths, Pierre had conned his novel-lessons;had read more novels than most persons of his years; but their false, inverted attempts at systematizing eternally unsystemisable elements; either audiacious, intermeddling impotency, in trying to unravel, and spread out, and classify, the more thin than gossamer threads which make up the web of life; these things over Pierre had no power now. Straight through their helpless miserableness he pierced; the one sensational truth in him, transfixed like beetles all the speculative lies in them. He saw that human life doth truly come from that, which all men are agreed to call by the name of God; and that it partakes of the unravelable inscrutableness of God. By infallible presentiment he saw, that not always doth life's beginning gloom conclude in gladness; that wedding-bells peal not ever in the last scene of life's fifth act; that while the countless tribes of common novels laboriously spin vails of mystery, only to complacently clear them up at last; and while the countless tribe of common dramas do but repeat the same; yet the profounder emanations of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that can be humanly known of human life; these never unravel their own intricacies, and have no proper endings; but in imperfect, unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate.
Insider Report:
When writing or rewriting your script, is there a guide or marker that lets
you know you're on the right track? What guide do you use?
Tolkin:
William Carlos Williams, The Orchestra (from The Desert Music, 1954).
Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Volume II, p. 251.
For a short
memory or to
make the listener listen
the theme is repeated stressing a variant:
it is a principle of music
to repeat the theme. Repeat
and repeat again,
as the pace mounts. The
theme is difficult.
but no more difficult
then the facts to be
resolved. Repeat
and repeat the theme
and all it develops to be
until thought is dissolved
in tears.
NOTA BENE:
Tolkin's screenplays, "The Player", "New Age", and "The Rapture" have just been published in paperback by Grove Press, New York,1995.
It's titled, "Three Screenplays: The Player, The Rapture, The New Age: ". I know there are bloodhound surfers out there in cyberspace, huntin' for screenplays to study.
Surf No More! Get thee to yon bookstore and BUY THIS BOOK.
Love always,
Editorial
OR CLICK THE LINK BELOW AND BUY IT ONLINE!
It is a treasure trove of screenplays. Get serious and get on with it.
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