Billy Wilder’s Ten Rules of Good Filmmaking

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My friend Beverly sent me this list, with a note, “Works for novels, too.”

Billy Wilder’s ten rules of good filmmaking:

1: The audience is fickle.

2: Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.

3: Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.

4: Know where you’re going.

5: The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

6: If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

7: A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.

8: In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re

seeing.

9: The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.

10: The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then—that’s it.

Don’t hang around.

“The healing magic is attention….”

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penA conversation this morning about fear and what to do with it, and then this quote in my afternoon reading:

“The pain is in the aversion. The healing magic is attention. Properly attended to, pain can answer our most crucial questions, even those we did not consciously frame. The only way out of our suffering is through it. Conflict, pain, tension, fear, paradox–these are breakthroughs trying to happen. Once we confront them, we realize that the reward is worth the scariness of the unanesthetized life. The release of pain and the resolution of conflict make the next crisis easier to confront.” -Marilyn Ferguson (quoted in Rico, Pain and Possibility)

Writing it down is, of course, one way to pay attention.

Quotable

Quotable

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“It is learning to discipline ourselves to stay with a question long enough to determine what insight it has for us that is important. Otherwise we will simply know what everyone else knows about it. As Goethe puts it, ‘All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart knows more.'” -Joan Chittister

PNWA

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My manuscript did not win in the PNWA historical fiction category, but this morning I’m feeling pretty good about the entire experience .

I was a finalist!

I heard some inspiring speakers, including Greg Bear and Deb Caletti.

I met Margie Lawson, a psychologist, writer, and writing instructor I had never even heard of. She gave workshops on topics such as visceral emotion and rhetorical devices, all of which I already know (don’t I?) and yet I (gasp, groan) have fallen back into my prologue and first two chapters. For now, my nagging doubts about how to proceed with my unassailable rewrite are scattered.

Of course I bought a big bag full of books and got some of them autographed.

I met other writers who are on this journey, too. (No writer writes alone–conference motto.)

I thought often of my daughter Pearl at the American Idol auditions. When anxiety threatened (I really would have liked to win a prize, competitive person that I am), I thought of Pearl bravely singing in front of the AI producers, one of thousands of other unknown teens and 20-somethings.

And this morning, I got up early, filled my thermos with coffee, walked out to my potting shed, and spent two hours writing.

It’s all good.

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