Professor Stephen King

Back on the first day of summer I wrote a post called Screenwriting Summer School and while most schools are in their Fall session now, it’s technically still summer. Heck, tomorrow it’ll be in the 90s here in Orlando so it’ll feel like summer long after the first day of Fall next Tuesday. So we’re still in summer school mode. Today’s class features Professor Stephen King.

While King has given talks before at various colleges and universities, I’m not sure if he’s technically ever taught a class at the college level. But Professor King just sounds right. Before his writing career took off, King did teach high school English in Maine. Here are a couple of quotes pulled from an interview he did with Jessica Lehey in The Atlantic article, How Stephen King Teaches Writing.

“It went best for me when I could communicate my own enthusiasm. I can remember teaching Dracula to [high school] sophomores and practically screaming, ‘Look at all the different voices in this book! Stoker’s a ventriloquist! I love that!’ I don’t have much use for teachers who ‘perform,’ like they’re onstage, but kids respond to enthusiasm. You can’t command a kid to have fun, but you can make the classroom a place that feels safe, where interesting things happen. I wanted every 50-minute class to feel like half an hour.”
Stephen King

 “Always ask the student writer, ‘What do you want to say?’ Every sentence that answers that question is part of the essay or story. Every sentence that does not needs to go. I don’t think it’s the words per se, it’s the sentences. I used to give them a choice, sometimes: either write 400 words on ‘My Mother is Horrible’ or ‘My Mother is Wonderful.’ Make every sentence about your choice. That means leaving your dad and your snotty little brother out of it.”
Stephen King

P.S. Wouldn’t it be nice if every 2 hour movie felt like it was 90 minutes?

Related Posts:
Stephen King’s Doublewide Trailer “I wrote my first two novels, Carrie and Salem’s Lot in the laundry room of a doublewide trailer.”—Stephen King
Descriptive Writing (Stephen King) ““Good description usually consists of a few well chosen details that will stand for everything else.”—Stephen King
Screenwriting Quote #33 (Stephen King)
Beatles, Cody, King & 10,000 Hours

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

Screenwriting from a Wheelchair

“Actually the really cool thing about being more and more gimpy is I really don’t care about my hair loss at all.”
Screenwriter Scott Lew
(Who has ALS, known as Lou Gehrig Disease)

Today on Screenwriting from Iowa…and Other Unlikely Places we’ll learn about an unlikely place not tied to geography.

My last post was on Franklin, Tennessee so it makes a nice segue today to have a Franklin Leonard inspired post.  It helps that I just read this Retweet from @franklinleonard (originally from @theblcklst) :

Next time you even think about complaining about how hard it is to be a screenwriter, watch this. Watch it now too. http://buff.ly/1aKU9n8 

The link is for an artcle at The Atlantic with a video about Scott Lew who wrote the Sexy Evil Genius (2013) screenplay.

“Lew has ALS, a degenerative disease that causes gradual loss of movement, and he can currently control only a few facial and eye muscles. He depends on infrared technology and an assistant to put his words to paper.”
Katherine Wells
The Atlantic/ The Creative Process of a Paralyzed Screenwriter

Scott W. Smith

@franklinleonard

Read Full Post »

Raymond Chandler’s Influence

“I had no notion of becoming a writer,” is how writer Walter Mosley describes his life before reading the following two sentences:

“He was looking at me and neither his eyes nor his gun moved. He was as calm as an adobe wall in the moonlight.”
The Long Goodbye, written by Raymond Chandler

“It took Raymond Chandler to show me something that I already knew but had never been aware of. Adobe walls in the lunar light of the southern California desert had the most passive demeanor—they were the ideal of peacefulness. Then the writer contrasts this nearly absolute tranquility to an armed and dangerous man … For the first time I understood the power of language to reach beyond the real into the metaphysical and into metaphor. Those 24 words alerted me to the potential power of writing.”
Author Walter Mosely who’s published 34 books and won the O Henry award, a Grammy, and PEN Lifetime Achievement Award
The Two Raymond Chandler Sentences That Changes Walter Mosley’s Life written by Joe Fassler in the Atlantic

“Everyone knows who Raymond Chandler is and I began reading him in the late ’40s when I was writing westerns. And I remember thinking, ‘why don’t I switch over to things like the kinds of stories that Raymond Chandler’s doing?’”
Author Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty)
On receiving the Raymond Chandler Award

“He wrote like a slumming angel and invested in the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a gusto and imaginative flair.”
Reference about Raymond Chandler by crime fiction author Ross Macdonald who created detective Lew Archer (The Moving Target)

“What [Quentin] Tarantino may be most renowned for is his focus on highly stylized modes of speech. Greatly influenced by the likes of film noir/pulp fiction writers Dashiell Hammond, Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard, Tarantino elicits vivid responses from his audiences by incorporating mundane banter about ubiquitous popular culture subject matters.”
Michael Peters
An Analysis of Quentin Tarantino and His Films

“Your clothes should be jazzy, very jazzy indeed, Steve. To be inconspicuous in this town is to be a busted flush.”
Raymond Chandler, The King in Yellow 
A short story by Chandler, and worth noting because the name author John D. MacDonald called the famed houseboat in 21 Travis McGee private detective novels was The Busted Flush. (Though the character McGee won the boat in a poker game, some consider it a nod to Chandler by the writer MacDonald.)

And here’s a different kind of Chandler influence from the trailer for Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) written and directed by Carl Reiner and starring Steve Martin:

That’s just what I could come up with in a breif search online. Do you know of other writers who were influenced by Chandler?

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »