Monday, January 31

Screenwriting, Sonnets, Blogs


Today Dr. Burton explained that when it comes to blogs, sometimes quantity is more valuable than quantity, simply because not every post is great, and the more you write the greater chance you have that some posts will be great.  Such is the case with Dr. Burton's sonnets (according to his evaluation, not mine).  This post is an attempt to follow his advice, and, by way of my self-directed learning, offer additional insight to his advice.  I've been reading a book called Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by well-known screenwriting instructor Robert Mckee, whose students have included Peter Jackson, John Gleese, and 26 Academy award winners.

Here is what Mckee had to say about creative inspiration: "Creativity is five to one, perhaps ten or twenty to one.  The craft demands the invention of far more material than you can possibly use."

Mckee echoes the same idea, that we can't sit around and wait for inspiration and creativity to hit; we have to wade through the mediocre to get to the good stuff, which is exactly the case when blogging about Shakespeare.

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Great post. It's the whole 1% inspiration 99% perspiration thing. Rick Walton, an amazingly prolific picture book author, recently visited my creative writing class and compared the creative process to an oyster's creation of a pearl. A bit of grit gets into the oyster and the oyster worries at it and covers it with layers and layers until it's something valuable (to people, at least). So people stick pieces of grit in oysters on purpose to create pearls. These are "cultured" pearls. Likewise, we can just sit around and wait for a piece of grit to fall in--for inspiration to strike--which is likely to take a long time and produce few ideas, or we can have cultured minds and put things in on purpose, working at it until we do produce more pearls.
I think this may even apply to Shakespeare himself. While most of his work (plays and poems) are brilliant, there are some that are better than others. Producing at such a high quantity probably allowed him to become such a master of the craft, even though his "lesser" works are still masterpieces.

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