Garthwaite | Official Trailer | TMK Pictures

I'm super excited to share the trailer for Garthwaite, a movie I'm in!! This will be my first appearance in a feature-length film, and I'd like to give a huge thank you to Nolan Pugh and J.G. Murphy for giving me the opportunity to be a part of Ben Kurns' and TMK Pictures' latest work. I'm a big fan!

Specificity In Writing

     Spe-ci-ficity!

     If you've ever taken an acting class, you've probably heard a spiel or two about how important specificity is in deciding your character's actions; the way you speak, how you interact with your surroundings, the way you pick up a pencil and scrawl your character's signature, can all provide a wealth of information about who the character is, what they want, where they come from, etc.  In acting it's necessary that the actor create these specificities for their character because scripts tend to be pretty bare-bones.

     But when writing a novel or short story (or even dialogue for a script), specificity is every bit as important.  In fact, when writing a novel or short story or poem, etc, specificity can be the difference between an okay story, and a GREAT story.

     Which sounds more compelling?

     a)  "He walked in with his gun and looked around.  There were some hand prints on the wall and some stuff on the floor.  It took him a while to realize the blood was fresh."

     OR

     b)  "He entered silently, scanning the room with gun at the ready.  It was bare, containing only exposed copper wiring coated in dust and a few metal chains.  Seven gluey red hand prints decorated the filthy yellow walls, and it was thirty full seconds before it hit him--the blood was fresh."

     The second paragraph is much more compelling, isn't it?  Yes, part of that has to do with style and suchlike, but without the specificity of detail, there wouldn't be much to stylize!

     The more specific you are when describing something, the more easily the audience can envision what you see.  And details can carry significant weight--the difference between thirty seconds and thirty-seven seconds, for example, is an ocean--thirty seconds is usually either timed out using a stopwatch, or used as shorthand for "roughly half a minute."

     Thirty-seven seconds, though--that says "this is the real time that had passed, and your narrator knows it for a FACT!"  Exact times exude confidence--exact details exude confidence, correctness, a feeling that we're being told how it is.  It makes the audience take notice, and feel like they can trust you, because obviously you know what you're talking about when you can tell us exactly what material the walls are made from and what country that hat was made in.

     Take a look at your work.  Look for places where the details have been hand-waved, "some" this, "roughly" that, etc.  Ask yourself if a generalization fits the passage best, or if it could benefit from a few more specifics.

     Hint:  The more important something is, the more detailed and specific you'll want it to be.  Unless of course you're writing a mystery and trying to lay down some red herrings....

Podcast Tips

     I've posted before about the things I've learned podcasting, but when it comes to the arts, there's always more to learn, so here are a few more tips to help you on your auditory journey.

1.  Speak Slowly

     If you've ever acted before, you've probably received a note from your director at some point or another that you need to speak slowly and clearly--if not, then this is your Temporary Self-Appointed Mentor-Director here to tell you that when you're acting, you need to speak slowly and clearly.

     Of course, you don't want to take it too slow, or people might fall asleep, but when we know our material we tend to talk waaaayyyyyy too fast (especially if we're nervous), which makes it more difficult for others to understand what we're saying.

     In film and on audio recordings this is less of a problem than on stage, because in a recorded performance the audience can rewind as many times as they need, but the more they have to do this, the less invested in the story they become--and the more irritated, which is never good.

     There are times when your characters may need to speak extremely quickly, of course, but avoid fast speech in narration where you can, and make sure that, unless unintelligibility is a conscious choice, you're speaking slow enough for most people to catch the meaning.  Speaking clearly, without slurring your words (except where characteristically necessary), will help with that, too.

2.  Always take multiple takes

      The underrated beauty of a live performance is that anything can happen.  Everyone on a set will become obsessed with doing everything perfectly every single night, but some of the most perfect moments and wonderful ad-libs happen because something went wrong or just differently than expected.  It happens in film on occasion, too--look at Heath Ledger's "smack the remote" moment during the hospital explosion in The Dark Knight.

     But the beauty of film or audio recordings is that things can go right--or wrong--but it's all captured on your recording devices and synced to your computer for as long as you decide to keep it.  The beauty of film or audio is that you can pick and choose the pieces you want from any take, cut and paste, and no one can stop you.  You can reap the harvest and serve the best crop from every row.

     So never shortchange yourself; take multiples.  Any time you record, take at least two takes, more if you can, and try to change it up every time--it doesn't do you any good to have two or three identical recordings.  Variety is the spice of life!  Variety is life!  Exogamy is how we've survived this long as a species, and interbreeding is the reason the cheetah is on a path to extinction!

     Take the best and leave the rest on the cutting room floor.

3.   Put in the time or get in the line

      As I mentioned previously (double-linking is a dangerous game, but I'm feeling brave tonight), you end up putting far more hours into podcasting than you'll get out of it--hours writing and editing the script, hours recording, hours editing, just to distill it all into a 'cast that's 20-50 minutes long.

     It's a big job, but if you want to have a quality cast you have to do it.  You can always half-ass it, of course, that's an option, but chances are really, really good that if you half-ass it, you're going to drown.  Even really good podcasts that people pour their hearts and souls into will drown in the sea due purely to circumstance, so if you want to stand out, you have to put everything you've got into it.

     Podcasting is an art, and art takes work.

Vulnerability in Art

     Art demands every piece of us.
     Art, and the making of it, commands respect, and insists on nothing less than everything we are; it's why we, as artists, choose to work dead-end jobs while we bang out that novel; it's why we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a school everyone told us wasn't worth it; its why we eschew safety and isolate ourselves from the outside world.
     Art demands nothing less than one hundred percent.
     This doesn't mean that being an artist means having to give up friends and family, or needing to work a dead-end job or study art in school or live a difficult life, but it's because art demands so much of us that many of us choose to do these things.  It doesn't mean we can't live, though we often have to live harder, faster, more fully, while making time to create and support ourselves at the time.
     What it does mean is that in order to create art, we must be vulnerable.
     Art is cutting yourself open and bleeding on the page, on canvas, on stage, on screen--art is destroying yourself and giving away pieces of your soul.  If you can't be vulnerable in your work, you won't produce art--stories, sure, pictures, plays, but not something novel, fresh, stimulating--that's what art is.  Art makes you think, makes you feel.  Art is a piece of yourself, carved out of your heart and plastered up for all to see.
     In order to create art, you have to be willing to go there, to accept whatever story wanders into your heart without censorship or fear, because to an artist, nothing is taboo--nothing can be taboo, because even if you're promoting the tabooness of something, you have to be able to recreate it, to explain it, to get into the heads of those who partake in the deeds.
     One of the things I'm learning in my acting classes is how to be vulnerable--I'm not a vulnerable person in nature, I was always taught to be strong and keep others out of my head, but when you're acting on the camera you can't do that; you have to look another person straight in the eyes, and you have to maintain that eye contact except at very specific moments, no matter how hard it gets.
     To be an actor you have to be vulnerable all the time--there are times you'll have to strip naked, times you'll have to bleed out, times you'll have to bumble around and look like an idiot, and as a writer it's the same deal; you have to write characters that are totally unlike you, characters you hate that you have to make three dimensional, likable even, and characters you love that are flawed out the ass.
     You'll have to write about things that make your skin crawl, you'll have to revisit traumatizing moments in your life to access the raw emotion that makes your characters feel real, you might even have to seek out new traumas in order to understand what your characters are going through.  You have to be willing to cut yourself open, and then cut again, and keep cutting and cutting until there is nothing left of you to give.
     But the beautiful--and terrifying--thing about art is that there will always be more of you to give. Creativity isn't a limited resource; the more of it you give, the more you get back, and every time you consume the art of others it changes and recharges you.  Every experience you have, good or ill, gives you something new to write about, draw, paint, new fodder for your acting, for whatever it is that you create.
      Art is not easy; it can very, very difficult, in fact.  But it's what we do, because we love it, and because we need it.  I've never met another artist that didn't have things burning underneath their skin that didn't have a fierce and driving need to get it out, out, out, before the wind caught it up and it consumed them.
     There are a lot of reasons we produce art--to be seen, heard, validated, to make change, to make waves, to keep things the same, to express oneself, to deal with what one has been through in their own life, to help others--and art is never twice the same.  Your entire life can't be creation, because if you never lived or experienced or consumed you'd never have anything to write about!
     But you have to be willing to let yourself give the page everything you are.  A lot of it may never see the light of day--we edit and have editors for a reason--but if you never bleed there will be nothing worth editing away.
     Art demands commitment, it demands sacrifice, it demands love and hate and raw primordial emotion the depths of which are murky and barely understood by the person feeling them--but most of all, it demands you.  Because you are the only you, and trying to be anyone or anything else is inauthentic, false, a lie--art is about truth.  If nothing else, it's about the truth of you.
     So you do you.  Bleed on the page.
     (You know you want to.)