it only took me several years to figure this out

In my old life as an aspiring playwright, a brilliant director I was working with once said that I had a strong, innate sense of structure.

He didn't mean it as a compliment.

Because he was trying to get me to rethink an okay but fairly expected story in a completely different way, and my sense of "proper" storytelling was standing in the way of that. It was shocking, actually, to understand that my natural inclinations could be "correct" even as they blinded me to exploring new possibilities, and stopped me from listening to how the story wanted to be told.

I had to teach myself how to escape from structure. I wrote a lot of crap, admittedly, and forced myself to stop worrying so soon about how it all fit together. I constantly had to fight my reflex to judge, and simply keep writing anything that worked on any level, anything that felt like it had a spark.

And then I realized that this was a skill I had already learning in my advertising work. That's what brainstorming is all about. That's what sitting with a piece of paper and a magic marker is all about. I never sit down to write without daydreaming and doodling first.

It was strange, applying a money-making skill to my private writing where I had all the power and the ultimate decision. But that realization was helpful and led to some interesting things.

Structure shouldn't be imposed on the words, even by one's self, or made apparent before the words are said. Just think how many movies, shows and plays you can predict after seeing their first five minutes. There's nothing more boring than knowing what's coming an hour and a half later.

As our old friend the drama critic Heraclitus reminds us, latent structure is the master of obvious structure.

If you want your writing to be great, if you want to not just hold people but keep them coming back, then your structure should come out of the words themselves. It should be suggested, found, uncovered after the words are understood.

To the audience or the reader, and even to the author, structure should be discovered.

writing in restaurants

I first bought David Mamet's Writing in Restaurants at a time when I was doing a lot of writing in (not surprisingly) restaurants and coffee shops. And it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, in terms of improving the writing I was doing in these places, but it was far more inspiring than that.

It was a call to arms for meaning. At a time when special effects were conquering movies, and were well on their way to taking over theatre as well, Mamet demanded that you as a writer concentrate on story, i.e., what happened. Description (not just flowery description but any description not demanded by the action of the story) is not only irrelevant but an impediment to the reader or viewer. It tells that person that they can not pay so much attention, that there are words and passages that don't mean as much as others.

The line that gets me to this day comes when he talks about how people (even over 20 years ago) were tending to respond to the question, "How was the movie?" with an answer along the lines of "Fantastic cinematography."

Mamet's response is, "So what? Hitler had fantastic cinematography."

To this day I am suspicious of style that calls attention to itself. I don't much like portfolios that are consistently pretty no matter what clients's work is being shown. And I think that everything can be shorter; it's better to compress and let intentions be found within the language, instead of shoved forward. That's where the poetry in Mamet's work happens. Because when it works, as it (mostly) does in the classic Alec Baldwin cameo in Glengarry Glen Ross, I think it really is poetry.

It's easy to parody the butch, tough guy quality of Mamet's writing (and as Steve points out he's even capable of parodying himself), but with Writing in Restaurants, he helped me think, for the first time, about what I was doing when I sat down with a pen and paper. He slapped (or maybe punched?) me in the face with the fact that style is empty, and that writing has to have purpose.