“We’re Stupid At the Time Things Are Happening”

I posted this a couple months ago on the Writing Section of my blog.  I thought I would repost it here, because I’ve been thinking so much about it in terms of not just characters, but myself as well.  I did something last week that immediately made me think, “why did I do that?”  Oh yeah, because we’re stupid at the time things are happening.

I listen to a lot of podcasts.  About a year ago, after hearing about it on Filmspotting, I started listening to the Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcast.  In each episode, the host interviews a screenwriter (usually one whose movie has just been released and screened for an audience before the interview).

I love to hear writers talk about their writing and while some writers seem to shy away from talking about their inspirations and processes and the business side of writing, these screenwriters do not.  Jeff Goldsmith, the host, asks them all the questions I want to know the answers to, but would be terrified to ask of writers myself just because they’re the kind of questions I’ve often heard writers complain about being asked.  Things like, “where did the idea for this script come from?”

He also asks them if they use outlines and how much time they spend writing every day.  After listening to only a few episodes, you’ll realize there is no standard process.  Some writers hate outlines and think them useless, some writers think they should use outlines but never have, and others wouldn’t know how to start if they didn’t have the whole story planned out already.  As for how much time they spend writing every day, one thing is pretty standard: for every three hours they sit down with the plan to write, they produce no more than one hour worth of writing. No one to immune to procrastination.

I’ve gained several pieces of insight from listening to this podcast, most of which I wish now I’d written down, because I can’t remember them.  Just today, I was listening to the episode where Jeff interviews Nick Hornby about his adaptation of An Education.  Jeff always asks people about their breaking in stories–how they got into the business.

Out of that came something I’ve thought before, but never with such clarity.  Nick’s first book was a memoir and then his second, High Fidelity, was fiction.  He says that when he was writing the memoir, he could put in every thing he’d ever learned in his life, all of his wisdom.  But, in writing the novel, he couldn’t, because the character didn’t know that stuff and would make  mistakes that Nick wouldn’t.  In the case of High Fidelity, he’d let the girl get away.  He says, “We’re stupid at the time things are happening.”

I experienced this with my first novel, especially, because I was writing about a 16 year old and I am a hell of a lot smarter now than I was at 16.  On top of which, this girl is not me.  In fact, I was smarter and more ambitious than her when I was 16.  She makes mistakes I wouldn’t.  She says things she doesn’t mean.  She believes things that are not true.  Even knowing all of that, it’s hard to keep in mind.  I want to make her a smart girl who no one takes advantage of, who knows that people are there for her, and who doesn’t think that she’ll never recover from this tragedy.  But, she doesn’t know all of this stuff.

Still, with Haley it was easier, because she is at such a different time in her life than I am and her life at 16 is so different than mine was, but it is harder in the most recent novel, because I’m writing about people who are in almost the same period of life that I am and they are smart people.  I do give them insights of mine, because I think they’d have them, but it’s hard not to give them everything I know.  As Nick Hornby says, if he’d given Rob in High Fidelity all of his knowledge, then the central conflict of the story never would have happened.  There would be no story.

It’s not that the characters are dumb.  It’s just that we learn things from what we experience and even the smartest people do stupid things in the moment.  With distance, you forget all the back story and defensiveness.  You want to explain why someone did something in the most logical way, but their motivations don’t adhere so strictly to logic.  The central conflict of the novel I’m working on would fall apart if the characters were 100% level headed and, more importantly, knew what the other was thinking, but they have this huge history that’s shading their vision and they think they know what the other is thinking, but they’re wrong.  It’s hard to stop myself from saving them pain, but that’s where the story lives.