God help you if you use voice-over in your work

Why storytelling became so damn predictable (and what to do about it)

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I don’t normally write about my writing but I was chuckling to myself about the agony I’ve undergone these past several weeks while attempting to finalize some massive creative projects I’ve been working on.

I’ve spent the past two and a half years working on a major project, two major projects to be exact, and both of them are related to loss and grief. I have had a co-writer helping on these two projects, which has helped us maintain a sense of momentum, allowing us to maintain a slow but steady weekly writing collaboration several nights a week while I worked full-time.

This creative project was something that kept me from losing my mind with the near daily “collapse of society” panic narrative from our media and the constant crisis communications I worked on daily at my previous place of work (I’d say the first year was basically crisis communications *every* *single* *day*, which is an impossible pace to sustain and yet…I sustained it). But since I left work last month, I’ve had a bunch of time to dig further into the two projects, while working to complete a third project I’d put aside in 2020 as no theater productions were occurring regularly in 2020 or 2021.

Photo by Rowan Freeman on Unsplash

So, now I’m in revision mode for this first major project after receiving solid feedback from an editorial organization, while trying to maintain authenticity and originality. It’s a real tightrope because “safe and predictable” (ie most likely to generate $$$) storytelling structures are often boring. I like the weird and uncanny because I think that is the closest we can get to remembering just how strange being alive really is. I like something that makes me think deeply about what it means to be a human being in the 21st century. I also like to subvert tried and true storytelling structure because it tends not to be from a female perspective. It tends not to be feminist and ends up just rehashing a world view that was solidified as the norm long ago.

While attempting to work on the second project, which is nowhere close to being finished, though it’s technically at the page/word count needed to be considered “done,” I started to get really upset at how entangled the characters had become in what seemed like a very traditional story, when what I wanted to do was subvert the structure of that particular genre. Instead, the genre was subverting my attempts to subvert it. I was being schooled in “how not to write,” especially as I’d spent the past five months pounding out page after page only to find that I didn’t really like where the story was heading, and I didn’t really like some of the characters too much either, even though the outline had seemed solid enough.

Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash

The photo above is not me. It is my emotional state.

Anyway, I turned to Lisa Cron’s book Story Genius to try to figure out where I’d gone wrong and it became clear that in the attempt to subvert, I’d created a chimera of a story, with neither genre really fully developed. Was the story a character study or was it a thriller? I know it can be both, but I think it’s actually quite complicated to achieve both well. I also didn’t have a real sense of the lead protagonist’s desires, though I had two supporting protagonists well developed. Not good. So I went back to the drawing board to revise the opening, with the hope that some portions of the story could be retained. I’d rather do an amputation than throw the entire thing out in the garbage. Because that is time I’ve spent and can’t get back.

I began to run through all the tools a writer can use to try to fix a story that’s run off the rails into a dead end. Actually, the story from the second project is less off the rails and more like sitting in a train depot going nowhere and having no real exciting destination ahead of it. Probably the worst state a story can be in. I thought to myself, perhaps perspective needed to be introduced differently. Maybe surrealism needed to be injected into the world of the story, or magical realism, or even aliens or ghosts (or both). I text bombed my writing partner continuously, whose wife probably hates me because I basically blow up my writing partner’s phone at odd hours with all kinds of zany ideas and thoughts, due to us living across time zones. I kept running all these ideas back and forth in my head and getting further and further upset with myself until I finally felt like Charlie Kaufman at Robert McKee’s screenwriting seminar in Adaptation.

Yes, friends. That is the exact inner dialogue I have had recently with myself while writing. Thank you Charlie Kaufman for capturing an authentic experience. By the way, I absolutely love Kaufman’s work. I haven’t seen it for a while but Synecdoche, New York blew my mind in a way that most films just can’t. God bless Philip Seymour Hoffman, RIP. (I met him at a fundraiser in NYC once and he was just so down to earth and authentic, which is super rare at any level in the arts and entertainment world. He wore a slightly stained t-shirt to this glamorous event and spent time giving advice or speaking with people who were “nobodies” like myself).

So now I’m back to trying to figure out how to get the interior world of my characters available to my audiences, and not just through action or dialogue. How to convey things that just can’t be openly expressed to others…since voice-over is considered lazy.

How can one capture the inner travels of a character through time and space, memory and place, of feelings that constitute a life the way Carole Maso does in her novel Ava. I’m trying to do this friends. It is not easy though. If you have suggestions of how to do so or books or movies to watch that accomplish this, drop me a comment.

I don’t have an easy answer other than to be aware that maintaining the storytelling status quo is often the easy route but it’s also the one that is least authentic to you as an artist/writer.

So, I will not be attending any Robert McKee seminars (though my mom did gift his book to me 15 years ago).

By the way, I’d love to get your opinion on something else: