On Writing and Transformation…..
Musings on the creative process for PFC readers…..
THE DESIRE TO WRITE….
We begin flush with excitement, thrilled at the opportunity to express something in a way the world has never known. As we go deeper into the story, the forest grows thick with ghosts from our past. We can become haunted by the ancient fear that we are not up to the task. Surely we are destined to fail. We find ourselves, whether consciously or not, in a duel to the death with the beliefs of our ancestors. This is inevitable, because (are you ready for this?) Story is Always about Betrayal.
Inherent in every transformation is the betrayal of a lie.
We can become paralyzed by this. Or it can thrill us. We can become thrilled by the truth. Whether it is conscious or not, the desire to write is connected to the desire to evolve, to untangle the lie that we have been carrying around about ourselves. The lie is that we are not enough, that we are not forgiven, that it is never going to happen for us, that we should just forget it, pack it up, go back from wherever we came.
The story asks everything of us for a reason.
If it didn’t, we would never surrender.
Through story, we engage our unconscious in confronting our ego, our desire to get something that we want, only to discover it’s impossibility. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to surrender our old ’story’ about ourselves, to let the old identity die, so that a new one can be born.
This is challenging. It is courageous. It is something that no one out there will ever encourage you to do. It is something that no one will ever expect of you. It is the soft whisper at the outer edges of our imagination, calling us to drive ourselves deeper into the truth. It is something that our conscious minds push away, inviting distraction because we are afraid to grow.
But guess what?
Our soul wants to grow. Our soul hungers for something more than belonging. It hungers for it’s true place, for a connection where there is no compromise of it’s fundamental nature. It aches to know life in a way that we can’t grasp with our conscious mind. It aches to evolve, and it is not going away.
Story is alchemy. If we trust the process and stay with it, our unconscious will tell us all we need to know.
TRANSFORMATION….
A fundamental understanding of transformation is crucial to having anything more than an intellectual relationship to structure. No one has yet been able to isolate the transcendant beauty that draws us in and lies at the heart of every great story. It is one thing to analyze the anatomy of a story, but is it possible that story also contains magic, some ineffable quality that rises from a source that we can’t explain?
Story is the most powerful way we have to express ideas. We can actually see the journey that a human being takes in getting from one place to another, and this journey inevitably involves some kind of transformation. When we think of the word transformation, it can evoke images of some grand occurence, a miraculous event, a vision of enlightenment. However, transformation is simply a shift in perception. That’s it. Nothing more. And yet, when we have seen something one way our entire life, and then, in an instant, see it another way, it can seem miraculous, while also seeming quite ordinary, as in, ‘duh, yeah of course, now I see’. When a transformation occurs, the tension vanishes, the fight disappears, and we are left with a fundamental knowing that was not there before.
Through the journey of the story, the hero (and ourselves), come to understand something that we were previously asleep to.
Einstein said, ‘you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it’. Every story begins with a problem, a problem that wants to be solved. Our challenge as writers is to understand and accept that our hero wants something, wants it desperately, and the stakes are life and death. If our hero does not get what thay want, their life will be unimaginable. If the stakes are any less, we will not care. It is that way in life, isn’t it? If we don’t get what we want, we cannot imagine going on. And at some point in the story, the hero comes to realize that in fact, it is impossible for them to get what they want. They are faced with a dilemma. Do I give up, or do I surrender? There is a difference, isn’t there? And this is a very important distinction. Surrendering does not mean giving up the want, it means letting go of the idea that we must have it to be free. Transformation occurs when we recognize on a fundamental level that merely getting what we want is not going to solve our problem.
If all that happens in a story is that the hero gets what they want, they will be in bondage to what it is that they wanted. What matters in any story is transformation, i.e; the hero coming to understand what it is that they need. What we are collectively interested in, on a soul level, is whether or not the hero is going to get what they need. When the hero is willing to give to themselves that which they need, it then becomes possible for them to have what they want, if what they want actually belongs in their life. It is this reframing of the meaning of the want that makes story such a powerful tool. It is in shedding or surrendering the old victim identity that the hero is able to accept the reality of their situation and adapt.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
It is amazing how much deeper a movie connects even if this underlying truth is covered in some inane want such as getting customers into a photography studio and making money and you have all sorts of hilarity in the process.
I’m talking about Jaane bhi do yaaron, and people see it is a black comedy but I think it is one of the most uplifting movies because in the end they don’t give up but surrender as you pointed out so succinctly. I think they realize what they need and are ready to evolve.
Nice post.
you hit the nail on the head…
“Whether it is conscious or not, the desire to write is connected to the desire to evolve, to untangle the lie that we have been carrying around about ourselves.”
Einstein said,
thanks Suchita…nice quote!
Pankaj,Dabba I havent seem ‘Fires…, but will soon..
also Ichi’s film on sexual deviancy, ‘Odd Obsession’, way ahead of its time…
and the “Burmese Harp’ gorgeous – the most non Japanese of Japanese directors…
Viczee ur post is as psychedelic as the movies that you like. way to go man..
hi Pankaj, psychedelic..now why would you use that word…?lol:(skeletons in my closet!)
my tastes are pretty eclectic and diverse, everything from David Lean, Billy Wilder to Kubrick to Oliver Stone, Coppola, Werner Herzog,Guiseppe Tornatore, Polanski,Terence Malick,Alejandro Inarritu,Alfonse Cuaron,Fernando Mereilles,Tim Burton,Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam…the list goes on and on…so many movies, so little time!
Lighten up Bergman! – Demolition of A Holy Cow…click on the link please….
http://film.guardian.co.uk/patterson/story/0,,2125669,00.html
Lovely piece of writing. At the start, the very beginning of any story, standing at a precipice of some hopeful unknown, we go into the dark. Visiting the vacant, unaware, excited…
And if, and only if you surrender to your story and the words that seem to form in an unconscious, does the darkness turn into light… ‘Wait without thought, for you’re not ready for thought…” Excerpted from T.S Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’… And so it is with the birth of any writing. The wait. Until we’re ready. Then the thought. And the action of trying to convert thought to words. Excruciating agony, sometimes blissful ecstasy.
And then starts a struggle of a different kind, that every screenwriter is familiar with. Dickinson called it ‘The Auction of the Mind of Man’. And so, we’re sold!
But as long as the writing is ours alone, the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.
Do write more… Like that sweet old man says in the McDonalds ad here, ‘I’m loving it’!!!!
Viczee….nice.
I am reminded a quote from Faust(Goethe) where Faust(who signfies the creative urge) says that he will be damned if Devil can lure him to say
“Remain, so fair thou art, remain!”. Minute the transformation stops… our hero/we stop to evolve.
Onir,Bhavani thanks for the lovely quotes, made my day…
I recently went for a screening of Steve Buscemi’s new film, ‘The Interview’ which was a remake of a Theo Van Gogh film (Belgian director recently assassinated by a muslim fundamentalist)
The reason I must write about this is coz almost the entire film was shot inside an apartment, Steve had three dv’s running simultaneously to capture spontaneity and nuances,the film was basically made on the editing table,was dirt cheap and is basically about two people just talking to each other!
It explores the peaks and valleys of the volatile interaction between a washed up political journalist and a B movie actress who instantly dislike each other but through the course of one night explore concepts of truth,beauty,integrity, the media etc…now here’s an example of sheer kinetic dialogue and spontaneous,unfettered reactions between two human beings that can keep the viewer glued to the screen like no ‘nailbiter’ ever could. Polanski also did ‘Death and the Maiden’ admirably in an enclosed space, but the beauty of ‘The Interview’ is that it has no heavy,morbid political backstory to lend it gravitas…it just rages forward on it’s own self generated momentum..
This one’s worth a watch for just the sheer balls in pulling it off.
And here’s a posthumous thumbs up to Theo….
Steve Buscemi is one of my fav actor/director. I love both his previous film. And his Sopranos episode(Pine Barrens) where Christopher & Pauli get lost in the woods is my fav Sopranos episode. Infact after watching LONESOME JIM David Chase decided to go for the same casting agency. I missed the screening of THE INTERVIEW 2 weeks back at LA Film Festival. Can’t wait to watch it.
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Last Film – THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE(Frank Sinatra) 8/10
Music – www.pandora.com
have yet to see Interview but as a director I really loved Buscemi’s first feature, “Trees Lounge”. His best acting performance for me has been “living In Oblivion”
Bhavani/Shri/Suchita/Onir/Mainak/Pankaj/Dabba etc here’s a link for all women writers/actors/directors…. and men too!
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2126370,00.html
And another one that demolishes the myth of a so called ‘master’ that you guys simply must read….
http://film.guardian.co.uk/patterson/story/0,,2125669,00.html
Viczee thanx for the links.