I worry about being “good enough” for meeting the writing standards of a mysterious “they,” the authorities in my head—and the standards of my harsh parents, who would today despise my academic clutter and my unmanageable piles of books that aren’t shiny, that don’t fit on my available shelves… As a schoolboy, when my classmates carried me on their shoulders after a winning goal, I dare not tell my parents, who would have snorted and said, “They wouldn’t have carried you if they had known your room was cluttered.” Yet, in truth, I remain a book loving academic and a “creative”.
I know a “creative”: a writer I see on zoom in my monthly writing support group. His day job is being a television set carpenter. Here in Hollywood North, according to a 1980’s CBC radio documentary, we have splendid cast and crew: yet Canadian shows are as boring as CBC television. Apparently the vital creatives, the script writers, have gone to the US.
Recently, I read advice for actors and writers, from scriptwriters David Mamet and JMS. (J. Michael Straczynski)
Mamet’s thesis for actors is: They learn by acting. He tells the sad story of an actor waiting tables, who was offered a six week gig in New York but turned it down in case he got an important audition. Six weeks later he was still waiting tables, but had lost six weeks of acting practise and wages.
According to Mamet, while an actor needs training in the fundamentals, he does not, if at university, need to stay on past his degree to learn from “authorities.”
Things like “symbols” and “meaning” are the province of the writers, but an actor is best advised to get out of the tower and into the arena. There he will get instant feedback as to whether he is pleasing a living audience, not ghostly authorities.
JMS tells the story of hearing a young lady, her tuition all paid for by her parents, saying that now that she has received her masters degree (post graduate) in creative writing, she can start writing. He managed to keep a straight face…
When he taught his class in writing, he gave extra marks to anyone who wrote anything anywhere else, such for magazines or the campus newspaper. For one thing, this gave real world experience in meeting deadlines, sending off hopeful manuscripts, and being rejected. As with actors, classes for writers in higher “abstract theory” are of limited value. JMS was only there to teach writing fundamentals.
For JMS the arena, for a developing writer, is workshop groups that will meet for a semester or a year or more. Their value is the feedback. Not for anything classroom authorities would say about “symbols” or “is this good?” But for useful feedback like “Is this clear?” And “Is the character realistic in his sudden plot turn?”
Mamet and JMS are emphatic: the lifestyle of acting and writing is scary. No one talks of a “successful plumber” because the work is straight forward and there is a manual you can trust.
For Mamet and JMS the closest they get to a manual is their overriding advice to be pure and true. For an actor, this means being true to what’s in the script, without embellishment. For a writer, this means being pure to what he knows and putting his truth on paper. As for accidents onstage, the audience loves an actor having a true surprise, just as readers love a truth that was unexpected to a writer when he began his manuscript.
Being pure is not easy. Actors try to remove barriers to feeling. Hence a real actor in his excitement may jump on the couch. Writers try to remove social blinkers, to write what they see, not what their culture proclaims. Hence Twain scandalized his neighbours when he wrote of “N-word Jim” being equal to them.
If there is no manual, then there must be, as Mamet says, “no ancestor worship.” He means no mistaken comforting goal of one day being as wise and skilled and calm as those who came before. For the giants in my field were no different from all the actors and writers I know today: Scared. Uncertain.
Life is not the comfort of following a marked path to completion, not like getting my merit badges to becoming an Eagle Scout, (Queen’s Scout) approved by my minister and community leaders.
I will write no Great American Novel, no Field of Dreams where I meet my father. What I know, and this excites me, is that I can learn fastest by getting into the arena, as I am doing with my zoom group. Everyone in the arena of life is scared, including my parents who had no manual for their lives, nor for child raising. If they were as fearful in their “now” as I am today, then I must re-examine their harsh scriptures.
In reality, I will never feel joy when I houseclean, nor despise my extra books, nor fire them into a dumpster to tidy up… I realize I won’t ever learn to bust a gut all day, every day, trying to be a Great Housekeeper. I’d rather focus on what I can do, by applying myself to my pages, than break myself against stone tablets of yesterday’s pronouncements. I think that realizing daily, ever more fully, that I deserve to put my man-hours towards a creative life, even amongst my clutter, is as liberating as anything I learned in university.
To seek truth in the arena, is to live to some purpose.
… …
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Sean Crawford
On the great plains,
April,
2025
Well said, Sean.
Cindy: Ya, I’m pleased with this one.
I ran it past the “arena” of my fortnightly “for mostly creative nonfiction” group, who advised my to flesh out my passing references to my parental ancestors—I hadn’t realized people would be curious about them.
Although my fiction dialogue is basically competent, I am excited about “upping my game.” Last night I attended my first of class a six-week course on “writing dialogue” by a master of stage.
Ken Cameron told that in his day, although he took theatre, there were no courses at university for playwrights. He had to learn about making practical scripts on his own.