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The Writing Show (WS): This is Paula B. A few years ago, I heard that Linda Ronstadt had moved to New York because living in Los Angeles was making her too soft and stifling her creativity. I never heard whether that helped her, but I began to wonder whether you have to live a hard life, do drugs, or be a bit crazy to be a really creative person, as some people say. Find out what today’s guest, a creativity expert, thinks about my question.
Welcome to the Writing Show, where writing is always the story. I’m Paula B., here with today’s guest, Linda Seger. Dr. Linda Seger created and defined the job of script consultant when she began her business in 1981 based on a method for analyzing scripts she developed for her dissertation project. Since then, she has consulted on over 2,000 scripts, including over forty produced feature films and about thirty-five produced television projects. She is an internationally-known speaker in the area of screenwriting, having lectured in over twenty countries. She has given seminars for studios, networks, production companies, television series, and film commissions, and she is the author of nine books, including Making a Good Writer Great and Creating Unforgettable Characters.
WS: Welcome to the Writing Show, Linda. It’s a pleasure to have you with us today.
Linda Seger (LS): Thank you.
WS: What exactly is creativity?
LS: When we talk about creativity, there are a couple of things we’re talking about. On the one hand, people think of it as originality, that the person has an imagination and they come up with something that we haven’t heard of before. But creativity is also what we think of as the creative process. It’s almost never–maybe a few times– that something comes to us full-blown. Now maybe sometimes in art this might happen, someone actually sees a picture and then they paint it, but most of the time, we’re talking about going through a process where there are little snippets of ideas and originality, and then we have to go through a process in order for them to evolve into an original piece of work, and this is, I think, particularly true for writers.
WS: So it really is a process. It’s not a trait.
LS: No, it’s not just a moment. And people define the process differently. My favorite way of defining it is, let’s say you do a certain amount of preparation. You have to know some things already to make a creative act and to get the process going. You don’t start out of nothing, you start out of something that has to be shaped. And then a certain part of the process is called incubation, where you let it go unconscious, and you let it just sort of sit there. So some people say that, and I believe this, one of the most important parts of the process is that you are not spending all your time working. You have to get away, whether it’s for walks or taking a day off, or people say they get great ideas in the shower, and then the ideas come again. And so you incubate them.
And then there’s what’s called the illumination or the “Aha!” or, “Oh, now I see.” Sometimes people call it the “Eureka!” moment. And then you put it all down. And then you need the verification, which is the evaluation, not only of you–you look at your work, and you say, “Oh, that’s pretty good except for this part; I have to rework it.”–and also, you let the audience for your work see it. And they verify back to you, did you actually succeed [at] what you thought you were going to succeed with. So if you think you wrote a comedy and no one is laughing, you probably haven’t succeeded in the process you started out to do.
WS: So it sounds like creativity can be learned. It’s not necessarily something you’re born with. You’re not necessarily born a creative person or not a creative person. Would that be right?
LS: Well, I think everyone is born creative. I think that if you watch children and you watch their curiosity and you watch their experimentation and their way of exploration, particularly if they have not been oppressed or neglected or abused but encouraged for that, children are naturally creative. What happens is that the school system gets on top of them, and then there’s a group of children that say, “I’m going to line up with finding the right answers and thinking the way I’m supposed to think,” and another group of children, who are often on the outs with teachers and sometimes even with society, says “Wait. I want to think about this differently.” And they have to buck the system, and they’ve remained creative.
They also can regain their creativity. There were tests done, I think it was in the ’60s at the University of Buffalo in New York, that they actually had creativity classes. Now, this isn’t the only place that they’ve been done, but this was a particular issue that I read about when I was studying creativity in the ’70s. And they said that they found you could really increase the chances of people being more creative and you could see more original answers by teaching them methods of brainstorming and by also keeping them from evaluating their work too soon. You don’t want to start with evaluation, you end, or somewhere along the line, but you don’t start with evaluation.
WS: Let me just ask you about the stereotypes of creativity. There is a stereotype that a lot of great writers and musicians and artists are more creative than other people and sometimes a little bit crazy. Is that accurate, or what’s going on there?
LS: Well, society is going to define them as a little bit crazy because they are not working within the confines of what society considers appropriate. You think differently. You sometimes go outside the boundaries. You are willing to look at things that a lot of other people aren’t willing to look clearly in the eye. You’re maybe even a little more courageous. I think that there have been many times we think of the artists as they have to get drunk, and they’re the alcoholic and wild and into drugs and all that. I mean, probably years ago we thought of Dylan Thomas, who basically killed himself with drink. But you can also see that if society continually is your opposition, after a while, you might get a little crazy.
Now, I think things have changed a lot. I think when I was younger and dealing with creativity, that was a concern of mine, and many of us talked about this. But what I see now is that it’s much clearer that society is more open to the creative person. I’m not saying that some kids are not necessarily going to have problems in school–I think they still will have. But I would say I haven’t experienced society bucking my creativity since I was in my twenties. Certainly, I experienced it in high school and grade school, but I don’t think I experienced it too much by the time I got to college. Of course, I was in drama. We were all a little crazy.
But I think the other thing I notice…I’ve always been a fairly sensible person, and fairly sane. I haven’t gotten into some of the other things people do. And I have felt over the years that I have a good handle on my creative process; that I think it’s been free, and it has not been squelched. Of course, I came from a family that didn’t squelch it. My school system did, but I could always go back to my family and color outside the lines and do whatever I needed to do, and that was fine. So I think the family can make up for the fact that you get opposition from the school, and I think no matter what, you are going to get some opposition from the school in grade school and high school, unless you’re extremely fortunate.
But I don’t think you have to be crazy. I do think, though, you have to be pretty free, and some people find that if they have a drink, they become a little freer, and they don’t put the lid on some of their ideas as much. I have actually sometimes said to somebody, “Go and have a glass of wine.” Not seven glasses, but…Or get together with a friend and sort of brainstorm it and have fun with it. If you want to have a glass of wine or a beer or something, I mean, don’t get drunk, because then you’re just going to blitz yourself out and you won’t know much of what was going on. But something that frees you…
There are a lot of different ways you can get that freedom. I think sometimes people say, “Well, I get funnier after a drink,” and I say, “Yeah, but after four drinks, you’re not funny any more.” And sometimes you can, say, change locations, take a walk, look at nature, do something that frees you. Sometimes I even say, “Change your clothes, put on something that is really absurd and go down and start writing when you have your polka dots and your plaids together.” So what you’re trying to do is to create a free atmosphere without evaluation. And that’s why I think sometimes people say, “It’s drinks and drugs,” and you say, “Yeah, but if you go too far, it’s no longer free.” But there is a time sometimes when people will go that direction because they can’t free themselves otherwise. Now, my belief is that you can free yourself without having to do that, and in the long run, it’s not a good idea at all.
WS: Do you think that you have to have a hard life? I mean, obviously, you haven’t, but…
LS: Well, I have.
WS: I meant in the sense that you… Well, it doesn’t sound like you were squelched.
LS: I think the question is, do you need a hard life to be creative?
WS: Right. Do you have to suffer for your art?
LS: Well, there are two different ways of suffering for your art. One way is that life deals you a lot of blows and a lot of suffering, and it is not your fault. Your family died, your sister got sick and is crippled. I mean, we can make up horrible, horrible stories of things that can happen to people. And you didn’t have anything to do with it. Life dealt you a bad hand either because of your parents or because you lived in a certain area and the flood swept your family away, or you were just married and the guy took off on a jet and the jet crashed. I mean, these horrible, horrible stories where life deals people hard hands.
Now, some people get into the truth of that. That is, they go through the process, they engage with that, they learn from it, and they become stronger, and they begin to get insights into it, and so then their suffering is turned into art. And everything for an artist is grist for the mill–the good and the bad. It doesn’t matter. You can use everything for your art form. So there are clearly many, many people who have had devastating experiences that have turned them into creative experiences because they haven’t shied away from them. They’ve really engaged in them. But no matter what, life is going to give you some hard times. And one of my friends and I were talking one time. We said, “Life has not dealt us hard hands.” That is, we have not had those kinds of horrible experiences some of my friends [did]. I came from a functional family. I came from a musical family. My mother was a music teacher. I was in music from the time I was quite young and enjoyed it. In fact, I used to beg her, “Give me another piano lesson.” My teachers at school squelched me, but at home, I wasn’t squelched, and that was the thing that saved me because my family was much stronger than my school system.
But the other thing was that I made many choices along the line that created a lot of struggles and hardships because I had big goals. This friend was saying, “If it doesn’t come to you, a lot of times people who are creative will actually put themselves into situations, or they will have big dreams that force them to go through difficult experiences.” That the nature, I think, of big dreams and trying to be creative and trying to do something original, you will have hardships. It’s just the nature of the process. I don’t know too many people where they just said, “I wrote a script, and I sold my first one and my second one” and all that. I know people who we sometimes think that that has happened to, and then you start asking more questions, and you think “It wasn’t quite like that.”
So what I found is that my hardships came from my school, where I had to buck that system, but at least I had some support. But then I sought out very creative teachers. I would quit a class if I felt I was being squelched–later on, like in college. When I went to seminary for five years to study religion and the arts, I only planned to stay for nine months, but I found this teacher who was so tremendous, so creative, so supportive of my creative process, I thought, “I would be a fool to leave. This guy is going to change my life.” And he did, and he is the one I dedicated my first book to, Making a Good Script Great.
So I think no matter what, it takes a long time to fulfill dreams. It takes a long time to fulfill your creativity, to create a work of art, and if you didn’t have hard times before, you start trying to finish your book or your script or do your painting and get it right, you are going to have some hardships. And you’d better have the discipline, and you’d better be able to overcome the natural depression [and] despair that comes from lots of rejection. You have to learn to find a way to handle that.
I think for me, the other thing was, I grew up in a religious family. Not a squelching religious family–a very free religious family. And then I continued my spiritual and religious seeking. And I think that, depending on where one falls in terms of one’s spiritual life, that that can be extremely helpful because your rejection of your book or of your screenplay or of your painting is not ultimate. It’s just part of the process, and you have a way to keep going on in spite of the fact that you figure, “Everyone hates me, but that’s not the most ultimate thing in life, so okay, I can go on.”
WS: You just mentioned a minute ago that this particular teacher really changed your life. How did that happen? What did he do?
LS: Well, one of the things was he encouraged me to be bold. You’re directing a play, for instance, and you have a really crazy idea, and you don’t know whether to try it or not, and everyone else around you is saying, “That’s not going to work.” And he would say, “Try it.” Or he would say, “Be bold, go ahead, what’s it going to hurt?” So I began to be more willing to go out on a limb and more willing to listen to those ideas that were a little far out and became more confident in my ability.
Of course, they don’t always work, and then you test them. I did a number of plays. I was in seminary for five years. I directed plays. He also opened up some opportunities for me by introducing me to people where I would suddenly maybe be a production person on somebody else’s play. And I got involved with a professional theater and did some of my work there, and he was very encouraging of that. So he in some ways was a little bit like my mother. You get an idea, and instead of someone standing in your path, he says, “Go ahead.” And it’s like he shows you the path is open, and you think, “Oh okay.” And so you feel able to get ideas and to pursue them because the most important people in your life aren’t standing in the way of ideas.
This is why sometimes creative people end up, they get divorces and they disconnect from their parents because they say, “I cannot be creative in that atmosphere, because all I’m doing is getting all this oppression, and I just can’t deal with that, so I’m going to move to another state,” or “I’m going to leave the husband or wife.” People make a lot of radical decisions to save their creativity and say, “I just can’t let something get in the way of ruining the value of ideas.”
Even after I was a professional, there were many times that I would call Wayne Rood, like when I was writing my third book on adaptation. I said, “I’m thinking of saying this.” It had to do with whether you could trace theater back to the lion hunt in the caves, and I said, “Nobody talks about that.” I said, “What do you think?” And he said, “It’s acting, it’s re-enacting. Go ahead and say it. It’s fine.” There were a couple other things I said in that book where I had some evidence that you could say these things, but they are not necessarily what you would find in most academic circles, and he said, “Just be bold.” He said, “I think there’s enough evidence that if you say that carefully, you can be bold.”
WS: That’s wonderful. Obviously, it worked because you have such wonderful ideas. I have two of your books. Let me just mention right now Making a Good Writer Great, A Creativity Workbook for Screenwriters. The ideas are fabulous. I would love to just talk about a couple of your ideas.
LS: Let me just add, though, it took me a long time to find that teacher. I didn’t have that in grade school or high school, and I really didn’t have that in college. I went to a wonderful college. I went to college in Colorado Springs, but I didn’t have a drama teacher who was very encouraging of me. He never said, “Don’t go into drama,” but he came close to saying that. The subtext was, “I don’t think you have talent.”
And then my first master’s degree, I didn’t have that. My mother was carrying it through for many years, but I never got that until in my twenties when I was doing my second master’s degree and my doctor’s degree. And I think the good thing is, and I think this is real important for creative people to know, when you find that, don’t leave it. Don’t just say, “Well, I’ll take one class.” Go for it. And I think that was one of the things that made a difference for me. When I saw what he had to offer me, I didn’t just stay for a year. I stayed for five years, and that put me in great financial straits. I used to say I was not poor; I was destitute. I had very little money for five years. Your other friends are earning money and doing well and getting married and having babies and having houses, and you’re in a little apartment turning over every quarter for five years, and that’s difficult. But I knew that was the most important thing to pursue. So when you find it, you go after it.
WS: Your story is so encouraging, because it worked. You made the sacrifice, and it worked, and you’ve had a wonderful career.
LS: Yes, it did. Yes, I am extremely happy with it. It took a long time to make it work, but now that it’s my 25th anniversary of my consulting business, I just love my life, and I love my work, and I love my clients, and I love the seminars. But that’s another extent of creativity. You create your life. You create your work. You create how you’re going to do it, knowing that it’s not going to be easy to do that.
WS: Let’s talk a little bit about how a person breaks down those barriers and frees their mind and gets creative. As I say, you have some wonderful ideas in your book. Let me just start out by asking you, what are convergent and divergent thinking?
LS: Convergent thinking means you give the answer which is the correct answer. So somebody says, “What’s two plus two?” and you say “Four,” and “When was the Declaration of Independence signed?” and you say “1776,” and you get your facts right. You learn to converge down to the exact correct answer, and you are accurate.
Divergent thinking are questions that open up your mind that have thousands of answers. If you are doing a script, you say, “How many different ways could I have this person killed? Hmm…. We’ve see the guns and this and this and this. Well, let’s see, what’s my other possibility?” And of course, if you are doing murder or horror or anything like that, you have to be willing to look at the dark side, and so you really start having to think in a different way.
A very famous particular exercise of divergent thinking is to name fifty uses for a brick. Now, people start with the obvious, and the obvious is where you build a house with it, and maybe you build a driveway with it, and then they sort of stop, and then maybe they do a doorstop. A lot of people will write down doorstop, but then pretty soon, you start getting really odd answers after you get past where you are going to throw it at someone. And what happens when you ask these kinds of divergent questions, the first things out of someone’s mind will usually be the obvious, and that’s why you have to keep pushing your mind to say, “When I get past all that, then what would I do? Where does my mind go after all the first ten obvious things?” And then you start getting a lot of really fun answers and much more creative answers.
So a good exercise in training yourself to be creative is to come up with these kinds of things. If you are writing, say, “How many different ways could these two people meet? I want to have a love story, so okay, we’ll set it up as a blind date.” Oh my gosh, how many times have we seen this? But if you’re not evaluating, and you’re just writing them down, then say, “Of course, the first things out of my head are going to be the obvious. I want to go beyond that, so I am going to start pushing myself and saying I want thirty more ideas that I haven’t thought of before.” And then you can start evaluating the ideas. You can even have fifty ideas down, and you start circling them: “Now, this is interesting. This is different. I haven’t seen this.” And if you’re in a class doing brainstorming and you ask that question–all the different uses of a brick–what you can do is start asking what kind of answers they come up with, and sometimes one person’s answer, maybe one other person in the room thought of that, maybe five others, but then you start looking for, “What are the answers that only one person in this room has come up with?” And then you start zeroing in. Of course, then you have to evaluate whether or not they are usable and are they good answers or just silly. But you don’t go there first; you go there later on.
WS: One of the things you mention, also in Making a Good Writer Great is pairing things that don’t normally go together, and you cite some films where there were some crazy things… Oh, there was one thing, I think, with spaghetti ….
LS: Well, one of the things about the creative process–the moment of creativity, that “Aha!”moment–is usually a moment where two things come together that we have never thought of intersecting before. One of my favorite movies of the ’80s was “Ghostbusters.” Whoever thought of scientists going after ghosts in New York City who turn into snowmen? It wasn’t the snowman, it was the doughboy–the Pillsbury doughboy. And you think, “Ha! Whoever came up with that?” Well, they took New York City, they’ve paired it with the Pillsbury doughboy, which they obviously saw in some commercial, and then they put it together with what they knew about ghosts, and they put it together with capturing ghosts. And they thought, “How do you capture ghosts? Well, it’s like a mousetrap.” They put all these things together that have never been put together, and that’s really that creative moment. You see a connection between two things you have never seen connected before, and you go, “Eureka! Never saw it that way.”
And of course, what’s interesting about creativity is that artistic creativity and scientific creativity are very much the same. They’re that moment. Scientists have that moment like, “I never thought if I did this, I might actually create this vaccine.” Or “If I did this, I could build a better bomb or a better something-or-other.” They put together things that have normally not been paired together, and that means a very flexible mind to do that.
WS: What are some other films that do that?
LS: Well, I suppose to some extent most films do. They are pulling together things that are unlike other things. For instance, I just finished a book where I’m looking at three Academy Award-winning movies–we think the title is going to be And the Oscar Goes To… , but we just found out there are some other books with that title–but I’ve looked at “Sideways,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “Crash.” You look at “Crash,” and you say, “All these different stories colliding? Someone’s got a real creative mind going on behind that.” Or the combination in “Shakespeare in Love.” Let’s think about what it means to be a contemporary writer in the film industry, and let’s pair that with Shakespeare starting out in London in the 1500s writing a play that is going to break through the way that most plays were done. In their case, it’s that they felt that “Romeo and Juliet” was his breakthrough play. And you could even say, “A story about someone going up to the wine country. The obvious thing is, I guess they are going to drink wine and eat.” But things don’t turn out quite like what they think. So it’s the creative process that’s saying, “What else could happen to them?”
Now, to some extent, a lot of this creativity is also based on our experience. “Shakespeare in Love” was based on the experience of a writer, Mark Normandy, who wrote the first draft, saying, “I can identify with a writer starting out.” He got the idea from his son, who just simply said, “Hmmm. Shakespeare starting out in the theater world in England.” And Mark began to think, “Hmmm, that’s kind of like what happens with a writer starting out in Hollywood.” So he saw a connection, and he kept letting those two worlds collide.
“Sideways” starts out with a novel where a guy has been going up to the San Ynez Valley—Rex Pickett wrote the novel–and having certain experiences with the wine country and pinot noir and all of this, and he suddenly begins to take the experiences he has had and put them together and create a story. And then the screenwriters come along, and they look at that experience, and they said, “We have our own experiences.” It’s truly an adaptation, but of course, some of the creative things are also happening with screenwriters as well. They have another creative process.
WS: We talked a little bit about some of the ways that people can jump-start their creativity. You mentioned getting ideas in the shower and trying to put disparate things together. What other things can help people get creative?
LS: Well, one thing is to have a discipline–an artistic discipline. Writers need to write. They don’t just walk around the living room and think of wonderful ideas. They really need to have some time with their writing. Some writers have trouble creating because they really think there is no point in writing unless you have five hours or a whole day to write. You don’t need that much time. If you have a writing discipline–if anyone had a writing discipline of twenty minutes a day three days a week–that’s a writing discipline. They would be amazed how much they got done just sitting at their computer and writing.
Now, they need to jump-start their creativity by doing some thinking and preparation. Journal writing can be very good for people’s preparation. Another thing that can happen is dreams. Dreams can give you lots of ideas. Write down your dreams every morning. Another thing to do is find out what time of the day is your highest peak creative time. I’m a morning creative person. I can get a lot done creatively by really using my mornings, so I would be really stupid to start my writing at 4:00 in the afternoon. I would not have a creative thought at 4:00 in the afternoon.
So what I do when I’m writing a book, that’s how I start my day, and I have to be really disciplined about it. If I’m not writing a script, I’m a lot of times starting my day by first reading some emails and then working on scripts. But when I’m writing a book, I don’t dare start my day with emails or anything else. I have to go straight into the book. But before I start my day, I have kind of a meditative time when I get out of bed–and it’s partly a spiritual time–but it’s also a meditative time when I think about what I’m going to write about. I do it in sort of…there is that place in meditation where your mind just flows, and you are just letting it go where it wants to go, and usually what will happen is all of a sudden it comes up with, “This is what I’m going to work on this morning.” Or before I go to bed or even the day before I’ll say, “Okay, tomorrow I’m going to work on such and such.” So my mind better be working unconsciously on that idea, because when I sit down at 8:00 AM or 7:30 in the morning, I want to have that idea fresh in my head. So I allow that to play around, and then by the time I go down to start working, I’m excited. The flow is already happening before I get to my computer.
But I do the same thing when I work on someone’s script as a consultant. I’ve read the script the day before and started notes. The next morning, before I go down to my computer, I just sit up in bed, and I meditate on that script, and I ask myself whatever questions I don’t feel I’ve resolved yet: “What needs to be done–they’re not hitting their first turning point. How could I play around with the script in my head?” And I would say it always comes up. There’s always an answer, and I have learned to trust that there will be an answer. Now sometimes just writing you get the answer. You just start writing garbage, and pretty soon, the things that make sense start to flow. And you don’t get too upset over the garbage; I think that is really important. You will have garbage, so just accept the fact that you might write a whole chapter of garbage, and the next chapter might start to flow. So you don’t let garbage stop you. You just keep pushing through, and then eventually you’ll start noticing somewhere along the line, something good is going to come out. I believe in that process.
WS: If I came to you, and I said, “I really want to be a writer. I just want it so badly, but I’m just not an imaginative person. I can’t imagine things.” What would you say to me?
LS: The first thing I would tell you is to start doing some writing every morning when you get up out of bed. And I would tell you to get two books and do all the exercises in them. The first book is my book, Making a Good Writer Great; do all the creativity exercises in that book. The other is Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way. Do all the exercises in her book. And I can guarantee you will become more imaginative after a couple of months.
I just think imagination is basically the human condition. I really believe that, and so it really is a matter of just letting it go and finding your voice. Saying, “Where is my imagination?” If you’re a comedy writer and you’re writing drama, you probably are not going to have the same imagination. If you are a novelist and you’re writing scripts, you’re going to notice, “You know what? It just doesn’t flow right.”
One of my art forms, probably the main one, is nonfiction writing. Now, I think I’m very creative when I work on other people’s scripts, and that’s one of the things I love about consulting, but in terms of my own personal art, sometimes people say, “Why don’t you write screenplays?” And I say, “I don’t think I’d be a very good screenplay writer.” I’m really good working on other people’s scripts, but my thing is writing nonfiction. I love working with ideas, and I think that over the course of my books, my writing has become richer in a lot of ways, and maybe even clearer about ideas, and even sometimes funnier. I think some of my later books have allowed humor to creep in more than maybe when I started writing. I just tend to have more fun with my writing.
One of the books that was very helpful to me, Anne Lamott’s book called Bird by Bird. It’s about writing, and she has such a cute sense of humor. She uses metaphors, and she’s just a lovely, lovely writer. I was reading that book I think maybe when I was writing Making a Good Writer Great, and it motivated me and inspired me to have a little more fun with my writing and to not be afraid even to put myself into the writing personally and to admit sometimes some of the mistakes I have made.
I would say another thing is to use images more in my writing, to use shorter sentences. I love to do sentences every once in a while that are not true sentences. And you know, your Word program underlines it in green—“That’s not a real sentence”–and I want to say, “And you’re not very creative.” Sometimes I want to tell Word, “You don’t know what to do with creative people, because that sentence is not one you recognize.” But I’ll tell you, you know when your readers are going to know what you’re saying. So as long as it communicates…. and it’s fun. It’s fun to change the rhythm of your sentences, and it’s fun to do alliteration in a sentence. In fact, one of my favorite sentences in Making a Good Writer Great is–I know I said it a little better in the book—but, “There are three things a writer needs: something to write with, something to write on, and something to write about.” I don’t know if you remember that sentence. Now, that sentence originally was one whole chapter. It was a really stupid chapter. It was about the color of pens you use and whether you get a red spiral notebook or a blue, and it was kindergarten stuff, and my readers weren’t with it, and I kept looking, and I said, “Hmmm.” Then I thought, “I wonder if I could collapse that whole chapter into one sentence,” and I finally came up with that one, so then the book started on my second chapter. But I had so much fun, and I thought, “No one is going to cut that sentence.” And of course, they didn’t. But if my editor had tried to cut it, I would have said, “You can cut any other sentence, but you may not cut that one.” That’s one of my favorites.
WS: That’s really interesting that you collapsed an entire chapter into one sentence.
LS: And see, the other thing is to be willing to do that. You don’t fall in love with your writing or whatever you’re doing to the extent you can’t change it. You have to believe in your creative process to say, “If I remove this chapter, I can write another chapter. I’m perfectly capable of doing that.” So you don’t let that get in your way.
I think the other thing not to let get in your way is fear. It is a natural part of creativity, and certainly from what I know about writing, it is a natural part of writing to be terrified. When I sold my first book, Making a Good Script Great, I had written loads and loads of articles. I had never written a book, and I realized I was scared to death. I thought, “How do I write…” I think there’s nine chapters in that book, there might be ten, but I thought, “How do I write all those chapters, over two hundred pages, when all I’ve done is written ten or fifteen pages at the most?” And I thought, “You can write when you’re terrified. You make more mistakes on the keys, but it doesn’t keep you… You are perfectly capable of putting your hands on the keys of what was then the typewriter and writing, and so you may as well just write and be scared.” And there are a lot of people who say, “Well, I get scared, so I don’t write on those days.” And I say, “So what? Everyone gets scared.”
What I’ve found on all my books is that the amount of time I’m scared varies. [With] Making a Good Script Great I was scared from June to November. The only chapter I wrote when I wasn’t scared was my last chapter. Now, it got rewritten, but literally, I was terrified through that whole book until the last chapter. I think in creating the second book, Creating Unforgettable Characters, I might have been terrified for three weeks. By my fourth one, From Script to Screen, I think my anxiety attack was maybe a weekend. And then as I went on, sometimes it’s just one evening, or it’s a day, or it’s two days, but what I’ve learned to do is when I get really terrified, I give myself three days to get over it, and if I don’t get over it, I go back to writing anyway. My husband would notice that I would be a little out of breath and look very scared, and he’d say, “Oh my gosh. What’s happening? Should I call the emergency room?” And I would say, “No. I’m just going through a panic attack over my writing. This is part of the process.”
It’s less time now, but I haven’t yet written a book where it hasn’t at least been an evening or a day. Sometimes I get it down to that, or over a period of time of several evenings, but I would say it’s not so much months or weeks any more. You just say, “It’s fine.” And I think that’s another thing you learn is that you don’t get upset. You don’t get upset about your terrible drafts. You don’t get upset about your anxiety attacks and your sheer terror, and you put your sense of humor into it, and you say, “I’m in process. I’m in the middle of my creative process. This is what happens. I’m not going to get upset about it.” You just keep on. I think that’s one of the biggest things about learning writing and to be creative. You just keep on. You stick with your writing discipline, and if some days don’t go well, so what? That’s part of the process. If sometimes you can’t think of something, you say, “It’s just part of the process.”
I think that writing Making a Good Writer Great and dealing with creativity released a lot of my own creativity because after I did that book, I just have learned to say, “I’m in process. I’m in the bad part of my process. I’m in that part where everything that comes out is just awful, but isn’t that cute? Isn’t that funny?” I have sometimes written a whole chapter of a book where I thought, “I bet that is the worst chapter ever written of any book in history of the world. So I guess there’s only one way to go, which is up, because it doesn’t get any worse than this.” And then by the next chapter, it started to get wonderful.
And that’s another thing. So much of any kind of work is, you work, and you rework, and you rework, and you stick with the process, and you hone. Some of my friends who are very creative writers, I’ll say, “How many times did you rewrite that scene?” And I remember one of my friends who won an Emmy Award, she said, “I think twenty times. I honed, and I rehoned, and I went back to it, and I changed phrases, and I changed them back, and then I did this, and then I did that. I know that scene was at least twenty times.” I think every chapter I’ve ever written in a book, probably every chapter was rewritten at least five times, if not ten or more. There may have been one or two little sections in a few of my books that didn’t get changed much. I think one of them I was awakened at 2:00 a.m. and it just kind of came to me. I remember just writing it down, copying it the next morning. And of course, I got up, and I thought, “That’s interesting.” That was one of the few sections–that was in one of my other books–but that happens sometimes. And it is true, if you get awakened in the middle of the night with the muse, don’t go back to sleep. Get up and work.
WS: You mentioned humor a minute ago, and I was wondering, does humor require a different kind of creative process from other writing?
LS: Yes. It demands that you see the world a certain way, that there’s a certain humorous insight into the world. And people have different senses of humor. I mean, there’s black humor, and there’s silly humor, and there’s farcical humor, and there’s basic everyday. You see something every day but you put a little spin on it.
I think the first thing with humor is you need to know what your sense of humor is and how far out it is and how outrageous you are. I was watching Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run” the other day. It was on TV, and I was just howling because some of what he came up with, it was so outrageous. I really enjoy that kind of thing where you think, “Whoever came up with such a silly, ridiculous idea?” One of his problems why he ended up in crime was because of carrying a cello around New York or something. I mean, the strangest combinations of ideas that he works with sometimes.
But I think the other thing is that when you can release your mind and don’t take yourself too seriously, it’s also very helpful as a writer. You have that sense of humor about things, and you just don’t get stuck, and think “Oh, my gosh, this is so ultimate.” You say, “No, it’s not ultimate. It’s just a book, it’s just a screenplay, and it’s important, but it’s not the most important thing in the world. So you try to get a perspective, and I think humor just helps tremendously to know when you’re taking yourself too seriously or when your ego is out of control, and you say, “This is ridiculous.” You put the whole thing into perspective.
WS: Do you think that watching funny movies would help somebody with trying to write humorous stuff?
LS: Yeah, and I think watching a lot of funny movies and seeing what appeals to you. I’m not very fond of bathroom humor. I don’t find it very funny, but I do tend to like outrageous humor, just sometimes even silly kinds of things, like a “Ghostbusters” or some of Woody Allen’s movies. I think Woody Allen, earlier some of his movies were maybe farther out, like “Sleeper” was sort of like that, but I think some of it is you have to know what your humor is, and then you try to integrate that.
WS: Screenwriting in particular is a very visual sort of writing, and I know that it helps people if they can think visually or envision what they’re saying as a film. How can you fine tune or sort of enhance your visual thinking skills?
LS: There are a lot of exercises that one can do, and I think that they are excellent. When I was doing a lot of studies of creativity in the 1970s, I bought several books on visual thinking. Now, probably the books then are out of print now, but I do have a number of things about visual thinking in Making a Good Writer Great. One of the things I would do is practice the exercises. Some of the exercises are seeing what your mind can visualize first. Like if I said, “Can you visualize a yellow rose?” And you might say, “Yeah.” Then I would say, “Okay, imagine the yellow rose turning to purple, turning to blue, turning half yellow, half brown,” and you can see where your visual memory gets stuck. And then if I said, “Imagine a horse running, imagine a stagecoach going across a dusty road,” sometimes what I found was I was better with still images than with images in motion. You start putting the horse galloping, and I had trouble, but I could clearly see the horse standing still.
So then I would practice thinking of visual images. I’m not saying I did it every day, but I did it a fair amount. I would go over and over those exercises. And another thing one learns with visual work is that you begin to see whether you have scientific visualization or whether you have artistic visualization. Scientific visualization is they might show you the front of a cube, and you have to imagine the back of the cube, or they show you you are ready to tie a knot, and they ask you where the rest of the knot goes to make the knot. That kind of stuff I really had trouble with. It’s three-dimensional work, and it’s more stuff that scientists have to know how to do. Right away I knew. I thought “My creativity and my visualization is not the scientific.” But the others I could learn, and I could keep working with. And that made a big difference in my ability because a lot of times, I have to see the script. Not only am I seeing a part of the script, I actually see the whole script as a whole. It’s almost like a doctor looking at an x-ray and trying to zero in and say, “Now where’s that little problem? Oh, it’s here above the fourth vertebra.” So I think another thing one tries to do is you learn visual thinking, and then you try to understand how your visual thinking works and what you’re drawing on and how do you keep it working. My visualization is going work better at 9:00 in the morning than 9:00 at night, and I’m aware of that. I don’t generally work in the evenings because that’s not my high time for my mind working.
WS: When you said you see the whole script, like an x-ray, you’re talking about being able to visualize the entire structure?
LS: Yes. It’s a very unusual thing I’ve developed over the years, and I think this is another thing about what happens creatively when you understand how your process works and you’re in the right profession. If you’re great at writing comedy, and you write comedy, and you understand how your process works in comedy, then obviously, you’re well-suited to writing comedy. When I created my business as a script consultant, I understood what was I really good at and what I really loved, and I was the first one to do this. This job didn’t exist, but it suits me. There’s something about the way my creativity and my way of seeing works that’s almost like x-ray vision. Not quite like Superman, but there’s something about my work that suits me so well, and I think it’s because I created it. When I tried to get jobs where I fit into other people’s mold of what an executive looks like or a producer looks like, it just wasn’t the right match. I think that’s why no one would hire me. They took one look at me and thought, “Not you. You don’t fit here.”
Now, I went a more difficult route, because when you have to create your own business, it can be more difficult. But what I began to realize was that the business I created was organic to who I was. Now I’d done a lot of preparation for it, and then over the years, I fine-tuned it, and so it’s just such a joy to me because it’s who I am, and it’s how my mind works and how I think. I would be silly to say, “Now I think I’ll become a novelist or something,” because that’s not how my mind works. There’s a very specific way that my creativity works, and that’s what I do, and that’s how I use it.
WS: That is wonderful.
LS: Yes. I’m very fortunate. I wouldn’t say lucky or fortunate. Maybe I would say I was blessed that it just happened that somehow after a whole lot of hard work this particular business worked, because you can work hard and then it doesn’t [succeed]. Your business doesn’t take off, but there is a lot to be said for trying to let you organically become the product of who you are, so that whatever you’re doing, and whatever your art form or your business is, it grows out of who you are, and you’re using all those many skills and all their nuances.
WS: Do you have any other anecdotes you’d like to share with us about either screenwriting or creativity?
LS: I have often used my dreams to find creative solutions. What I do is, before I go to bed, I ask my dream life, “Give me the answer.” And then I make sure I have a flashlight and an old pad or something by the edge of the bed. So when I wake up in the morning or in the middle of the night, I am able to put that down and actually get it down as soon as I think about it.
I was directing “Fiddler on the Roof,” and I had read what the stage was supposed to look like, which was basically bare except for this roof, and I thought, “This is just not very interesting.” I was supposed to meet my set designer and my costume designer the next day and didn’t know what I was going to tell them except to say, “I don’t like how it’s described in the play book.” And that night, I had a dream that as the play went on, there was something on the stage that disappeared, so that as the people–the Jewish people that had to leave Russia–left, they took with them…and I didn’t know what it was. It was like the very end was an empty stage, but that’s not where it started. And I realized what I was going for was that their culture was deeply embedded in Russia, and when Russia gets rid of them, they get rid of some of the richness of their culture. So I went into my meeting, and I mentioned this dream, and my costumer says, “How about seven banners, all using Chagall designs and signs and symbols and all that across the back, and then when people leave, as they pack up the banners, it’s as if they’re packing up their household goods.” And that’s what we did, and it was very clever. But it was the dream put together with the collaborations and other creative persons. So trust your dreams.
WS: Oh, that’s a wonderful story. I love that. I bet it was fantastic to see, too.
LS: Yes. It was a very nice production, and it was because it brought in that whole Chagall flavor that had usually been integrated with “Fiddler on the Roof” in one way or another. It was pretty exciting.
WS: Any other thoughts, Linda? Anything that we haven’t talked about you would like to mention?
LS: I think a good thing is just get some of these books, but don’t just read them. Literally do the exercises. They are going to be so helpful to anybody at any level. Whether you’re a beginning writer or beginning artist or an advanced one, just do the exercises, and then dedicate yourself. Value your creative self and just keep feeding and nurturing it all the way through.
WS: And your Web site address is?
LS: LindaSeger.com, and they’ll have all different ways they can enter it. Probably most of your readers are going to go into the section that says “Screenwriting,” and that which has to do with the screenplay writing side, but I have also written some spiritual books, so you can have a choice of going into that direction, which is going to take you into other places. You can go either way, but the part about writing is lots and lots of different things, including some nice photographs.
WS: And you give seminars, of course. Workshops.
LS: Yes, I give seminars. I just finished giving a seminar, the 27th country that I’ve been doing since 1988, and I’m going to South America for the first time in May. I’m going to Bogotá, Colombia, and Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. I’ve been waiting for many, many years to get invited to South America, so it looks like it’s finally going to happen. It’s been a long journey to wait for that invitation, but it finally happened.
WS: Oh, that’s wonderful. Do you have your seminar schedule on your Web site?
LS: Yes, I think it should be on there. It’s supposed to be, and as things come up, I put them on.
WS: Thank you so much for being with us today on the Writing Show, Linda. This has been fascinating, and I thank you so much.
LS: Thank you.