Chip's Writing Lessons #34
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Clive Cussler on the Power of Dialogue
Interview | Holding Fire in Your Hands: Four Questions with Jon Franklin
Bookbag | Deconstructing the Writing Process Behind “The Sopranos”
Writing to Savor | “Away,” by Chris Jones, Esquire
Tip of the Week | When Stuck, Organize with Notecards
WRITERS SPEAK | Clive Cussler on the Power of Dialogue
“Don’t use desperately boring descriptions to elaborate on something technical or dole out heavy explanation for nothing detail. The reader will ignore it and be bored. Describe it in dialogue. Division in the mind of the reader flies so much faster, and the reader actually understands, and enjoys learning what the characters say about it.”
— Clive Cussler (1931–2020)
INTERVIEW | ‘Holding Fire in Your Hands’: Four Questions with Jon Franklin
Jon Franklin
Jon Franklin is a pioneer in creative nonfiction whose innovative work in the use of literary techniques at The Baltimore Sun won him the first Pulitzer prizes for feature writing and explanatory journalism. He has authored and co-authored five books, including the classic “Writing for Story.” He’s taught at Oregon State University, the University of Oregon and the University of Maryland. He served as a narrative writer, special assignments editor and writing coach for the Raleigh (NC) News and Observer. In 2001, Franklin returned to the University of Maryland as the first Merrill Chair in Journalism. He retired as an Emeritus Professor in 2010.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
That it’s all about psychology…Yours, the reader’s, the characters’. As time passes, literature and psychology may well merge. Modern psychology grew from literature, after all; people forget that.
What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
John Steinbeck once wrote that he’d held fire in his hands, and I figured it was his right to use any metaphor he damned well chose. Then, ten years later, I did a series of things right and, holy damn, I held fire in MY hands. I think it has to do with focusing a lot of human experience into a small number of words. Under certain circumstances, the writer as well as the reader can experience a momentary transcendence.
The point is that the magic is there, but reaching it requires a lot of technical skill as well as the inspirational kind. I had not really been expecting magic.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?
I’m a science person, in the end. That is, I believe in rationality. But my sciences are literature and psychology, both of which are close to my central interest, the human condition. After all, journalism can and frequently does become art.
All this is to say my own work is very science-like, but the universe it explores is literary. For example, I once used a computer program to pick out the overlapping rhythms of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”
But I think I like “naturalist,” to describe me and my work. Writing is part of the real world, and as such is subject to observation and experiment.
What’s the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
My first editor, G. Vern Blasdell, said that if you find the heart of a character and you’ll have your story; find the story, and it’ll point to your character. Sort of like yin and yang. Each is the backside of the other.
Vern also introduced me to the idea that modern literature is mainly a reiteration of the stories the Greeks told. Don’t look for a new story, you’ll fail. Find an ancient one in new clothes — they are everywhere, and they never wear out.
And then, of course, the only way you learn to write is liberal application of ass to chair.
Did you know about a condition known as writer’s ass? If you sit on your tailbone too long, the tiny vessels in your coccyx become occluded and die. The result hurts, aches, throbs, sometimes for decades and sometimes forever. That’s why Thomas Mann and Ernest Hemingway, among others, wrote standing up. I discovered that when I was diagnosed with it. Talk about hurt!
BOOKBAG: Deconstructing the Writing Process Behind “The Sopranos”
One of the treasured books on my shelves is a copy of “The Sopranos: Selected Scripts from Three Seasons,” published in 2002.
It reproduces shooting scripts of five episodes of the award-winning HBO mob drama, which was destination TV between 1999 and 2007, and which continues to be a long-running cable rerun hit.
Its sterling cast was led by the late James Gandolfini, whose nuanced performance as depressive, violent Tony Soprano was peeled away by therapy with psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi, achieving the impossible: sympathy for a homicidal crime boss. Gandolfini’s bravura anti-hero performance is considered one of the most powerful in television history.
Among the episodes in “Selected Scripts” is my favorite: “Pine Barrens,” about the hapless adventures of Tony’s underlings Christopher and Paulie, after an “errand,” AKA mob hit, targeting Valery, a Russian gangster who works for money launderer Slava and goes sour. They have to dispose of his body in the thickly wooded Pine Barrens forest that blankets more than a half dozen counties in New Jersey.
The pair spend a bone-chilling night in the Pines hunting for the victim — who turns out to have nine lives. In this excerpt, static over cell phones between the pair and Tony leads to an elliptical, hysterically profane mix-up, one of the dark humor throughlines that makes the series so unexpectedly appealing. Michael Imperioli, who plays Christopher, said, "That episode was like a little one-act play. Like a different version of Waiting for Godot."
EXT. STREET - DAY
Tony walks down the street outside Slava’s, talking on his cell phone as he heads to the Suburban.
TONY
(through some static)
It’s a bad connection so I’m gonna talk fast! The guy you’re looking for is an ex-commando! He killed sixteen Chechen rebels single-handed!
PAULIE
Get the fuck outta here.
TONY
Yeah. Nice, huh? He was with the Interior Ministry. Guy’s like a Russian Green Beret. He cannot come back and tell this story. You understand?
PAULIE
I hear you.
EXT. WOODS - DAY
Paulie clicks off, looks at Christopher.
PAULIE
You’re not gonna believe this.
(off Christopher’s look)
He killed sixteen Czechoslovakians. Guy was an interior decorator.
CHRISTOPHER
(amazed)
His house looked like shit.
You can watch a 10-minute clip from “Pine Barrens.”
Beside offering complete scripts that are invaluable role models for any student or practitioner of scriptwriting, “Selected Scripts” contains a four-page introduction by David Chase, creator of the multiple Emmy Award-winning series. In it, he reveals the writing process behind “The Sopranos,” a series that reflects Chase’s admiration for “the foreign films I loved as a young adult for their ideas, their mystery and their ambiguity…”
From Chase’s intro, I’ve boiled down the show’s formula, a step-by-step run-through of the journey that Chase and his fellow writers took to produce a series that ranked first in Rolling Stone’s 2016 list of the 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.
1. Outline story arcs, or “touchstones.”
Touchstone is Chase’s term for what journalists and many other writers call the “focus,” or theme, that is, what the story is really about. As the show’s creator and executive producer, these are his calls. “The main theme of season 2,” Chase explains, is “plateau therapy — it deals with what Tony discovered and acknowledged in therapy during season one and the feelings these insights evoked.”
2. Fill in the outline.
The touchstone will play out over the season’s 13 episodes, each of which features three to four story “strands — What we call an A, B, (the main storylines) C, (a less major strand) or even D storyline, usually a comic runner.”
As a template, Chase uses “The Happy Wanderer” episode, in which gambler David Scatino loses at high stakes poker and pays off Tony with his son’s SUV: “The A strand of the story is the spider-fly relationship between Tony and David and how they both behave according to their true natures…The B story is the relationship between Meadow and Eric Scatino (the two men’s teenage children)…The C strand is Tony finding out he has a retarded uncle, and the D story is the funeral for the father of Tony’s brother-in law.”
3. Flesh out the story.
In the writing room, Chase and the show’s other writer/producers “flesh out the story for each episode, listing the ‘beats,’ i.e. scenes, for the A–D stories, one story at a time, on a wipe-off board. Each strand has a beginning, middle and end and could stand alone as films.”
That explanation helped me understand why The Sopranos, unlike almost all other TV fare, so often delivers the narrative satisfaction of a feature film, that sense that characters have reached a resolution, if not a final stop. At its most frustrating, as with the infuriating finale, episodes stopped short of a satisfying ending.
Each episode has about 35 beats; with the main A and B strands each getting 13 scenes. The C strand gets 5 or 6 and the comic runner D plays out in “just a few beats.”
4. Cut and (Scotch) tape.
The scenes on the board are typed up and then “literally cut apart with scissors” and then “married” together with Scotch tape in the order of the complete script. “For example, a scene from story A could be followed by a scene from B, then back to A, then C and so on,” Chase explains.
Once the writers are satisfied with the scene order “AKA story,” the taped pages are retyped and voila: an outline that the writer, whoever he or she is, must faithfully follow.
5. Writing and whacking.
Scripts may go through 10 drafts, revised with notes from Chase and other producers, before they’re seen by any of the cast or crew. And even after filming, Chase may spend months in the editing room, generating "many cuts all the way to the final — which could include reordering and omitting scenes."
“I firmly believe,” Chase says, “that the more time a filmmaker has to edit, the better a piece will be.”
What impressed me about Chase’s deconstruction was the way the process mixes creativity with mechanical procedures, equal parts brainstorming and Scotch tape. Even the most creative enterprise involves a measure of tedium.
You can read the entire bootlegged script for “The Sopranos” pilot, the only one I could find, to see these elements at work.
As fans waited for the next episodes, their questions mounted. Will Tony sleep with the fishes? Will Carmela run off to Italy with Furio? Will Christopher stay off smack? Will Meadow find her own mob man? Will Dr. Melfi get Tony back on Prozac and into the witness protection program? Now, thanks to HBOMax (subscription required), they can watch reruns of all and watch as each strand of “The Sopranos” stories weaves a dramatic experience that compelled millions of law-abiding Americans to turn a stone-cold killer into a star.
The story-behind-the-scripts is a fascinating process, and one that I think any storyteller can profit from studying. I’m grateful to David Chase for revealing it.
Displaying a refreshing humility for someone who’s achieved such success, Chase concludes his essay by paying homage to a legendary Japanese filmmaker and an attitude about craft dedication that he clearly emulates.
“I remember Akira Kurosawa saying at age 80-something that the great thing about filmmaking is you’re constantly learning. He was still learning, he said.”
And despite The Sopranos’ critical and commercial success, Chase said three years into the series’ run, “We’re continuing to learn.”
WRITING TO SAVOR | “Away” by Chris Jones, Esquire
[Scott Kelly] is not a formidable human specimen. Like fighter pilots and test pilots—both of which he has been—Kelly is fairly short. (Because of height restrictions on Soyuz, and because aerospace engineers are obsessed with mass and volume, NASA won’t consider astronaut applicants who stand taller than six foot three.) Five foot seven, 185 pounds on the ground—more like five foot nine, 170 after his year in space; “like a supermodel,” he says—Kelly is coiled and capable of significant momentum, but he’s also fifty years old. He shaves what’s left of his hair with a blade. He has sometimes worn a mustache, but he doesn’t anymore. He does wear glasses. (Astronauts do not need to have perfect vision, but it can’t be worse than 20/100 uncorrected.) On formal occasions he’ll wear his Navy uniform—he is a retired captain with more than 250 carrier landings to his credit—but Kelly mostly sports jeans and NASA-issued golf shirts. When he pulls into a place like Chelsea’s, an astronaut hangout just down the road from the Johnson Space Center, and sits at a table with Cady Coleman and Mike Fossum, his fellow station veterans, they look like a group of teachers unwinding after school. You would never know by looking at them what they have done.
That’s until Kelly makes the drive to Ellington Field and pulls on his blue flight suit and survival vest and walks toward a T-38 jet, white with a blue stripe and a NASA logo shining on its tail, a little like a man who knows he has the biggest balls in the room. Astronauts are required to spend a certain number of hours in T-38’s each month to keep their flying, navigation, and troubleshooting skills sharp. Some days, Kelly hurtles across to Mobile or Little Rock and then pounds his way back home. On others, he loops through touch-and-goes, taking off and landing and taking off again. He peels into the sky and disappears into the brightness, announcing his return with the roar of his engines, and he whispers across the ground, the faintest of grazes, before he lifts back up where he belongs. To see Kelly in flight is to see a man transformed.
In December, 2014, Chris Jones wrote a long article in Esquire presaging a manned space flight, “the longest space mission in American history,” one in preparation for a someday unfathomable trip to Mars. While the piece begins with a graphic description of the astoundingly meticulous and nigh on impossible toilet habits of astronauts, Jones quickly segues to a portrait of space veteran Scott Kelly. He surprises the reader by saying that this explorer "is not a formidable human specimen" and then quickly demolishes that argument. Kelly may be fifty years old and wear glasses, but he is also a retired Navy pilot with 250 carrier landings to his credit. Jones backtracks, observing that at their local hangout, Kelly and his fellow astronauts “look like a group of teachers unwinding after school.” Jones whipsaws the reader again with a paragraph describing Kelly’s prowess at the controls of a T-39 jet. In just 368 taut and vivid words, Jones describes a man in full, as well as his extraordinary job demands. Note the specific details that signify his status and the action verbs that take the reader into the skies. Next time you face the challenge of describing a character, study how expertly Jones handles the challenge. A good way to start is to copy it out word-for-word, to get the feel for the word choice and rhythm. Modeling a great writer is, to my mind, a magical way of learning the craft.
Favorite bits:
“Five foot seven, 185 pounds on the ground—more like five foot nine, 170 after his year in space; ‘like a supermodel,’ he says—Kelly is coiled and capable of significant momentum, but he’s also fifty years old. He shaves what’s left of his hair with a blade.”
“On formal occasions he’ll wear his Navy uniform—he is a retired captain with more than 250 carrier landings to his credit—but Kelly mostly sports jeans and NASA-issued golf shirts.”
“That’s until Kelly makes the drive to Ellington Field and pulls on his blue flight suit and survival vest and walks toward a T-38 jet, white with a blue stripe and a NASA logo shining on its tail, a little like a man who knows he has the biggest balls in the room.”
“Some days, Kelly hurtles across to Mobile or Little Rock and then pounds his way back home. On others, he loops through touch-and-goes, taking off and landing and taking off again. He peels into the sky and disappears into the brightness, announcing his return with the roar of his engines, and he whispers across the ground, the faintest of grazes, before he lifts back up where he belongs.”
“To see Kelly in flight is to see a man transformed.”
TIP OF THE WEEK | When Stuck, Organize with Notecards
Screenwriters use notecards to map out their scripts. Since narratives are built on scenes, notecards are an eminently useful way to organize your story, whatever the genre. That was the way documentarian Erin Lee Carr broke through writer’s block as she wrote her memoir, “All That You Leave Behind,” about her relationship with her father, the late New York Times reporter and columnist David Carr.
“From the beginning I found myself deeply challenged and stuck — freaked out by the blank page. So I started to use my skills as a filmmaker. I note-carded it. I had the notes above my computer, and I got to do a little ‘X’ when I finished the draft of a chapter; it was this really satisfying moment.”
Notecards are ideal for shorthand descriptors of scenes and you can shift the order to your heart’s content.
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Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
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