BIRTHING CREATIVITY
The woman lures men into shackled sex scenes involving knives, which leads to a great deal of blood loss, their hearts, and their lives; she cuts their hearts out of their chests. A brusque detective has been hired by a rich woman to locate the killer. Yours truly finds herself in the back room of an Austin bar with thirty strangers who’ve come to read a young man’s first movie script. It's my opportunity to see how independent films are born in Austin combined with vicarious lessons on clarity in writing. The scene was also about being brave enough to take your naked little baby creative work out into public.
Austin is a creative seedbed, and one part of the garden is independent film. While the city is renowned for its live music scene and the SXSW conference, that giant hubbubblery (almost 200,000 twitter followers) of film, music and interactive media, it encourages creative risks day in and day out. You can catch a whiff of the daily bread when you check out the titles of works in progress at the Texas Film Commission; currently you’ll see Murder Trust, Crime of the Century, Cottonwood, and a couple of cable series, one on antiques another about unfaithful spouses, among others. However, it’s in small circles of creative midwives where these ideas are given their first oxygen.
I’d said, “Yes, I’d love to read for you,” to the first-time screenwriter, who’d promoted the event to my transmedia group which is composed mostly of technical specialists who share their expertise in film, online media and gaming. He posted his title, but not a synopsis. I thought,”Great, I adore reading aloud, and I’m good at voices.” He posted his drawings of some of the characters. It would clearly be highly stylized and darkly sexual. The script arrived a couple of days before the reading, and he’d assigned me the voices of four or five minor characters. I could see the style in the script, but I couldn’t grasp the arc of the story. This baby was not going to just pop out pink and screaming life.
The script was projected on screens around the room by the Austin Film Meet organizer. Having a passionate and expert mentor is crucial at these pivot points in your creative emergence. You don’t know what you’re doing, but having someone help you with the mechanical aspects enables your move to Step Two – exposure. After his sweaty introduction, we began the reading. Like party guests, we all took great relish in our roles and paid no attention to the host as we put our best voices and interpretations into our assigned characters. The reading lasted a little under two hours, and there it lay. We’d brought it to life.
The Film Meet organizer then opened the room to comments. Having been a writing coach, I’ve developed a style of asking questions of authors rather than thrusting criticism. In my experience, criticism, no matter how constructive, is not the best way to get a writer to begin thinking about what does not function in his opus. My question about the detective’s motives opened the floodgates for the rest of the team. Apparently, the bones of his story didn’t hold up the body, in anybody’s opinion. The young screenwriter had never had his work discussed. He panted out explanations of everything he had thought as he’d written his script.
The moderator gently but firmly told him this was a listening and learning moment for HIM, not for the rest of us. I intentionally use the word TEAM here, although the guy may have felt like it was a firing squad. It’s okay, I wanted to tell him, YOU want your piece to be strong enough to take on the road, right? We do too. We are not here to hurt you, or kill your baby. We want you to succeed. After you take your red face home, you can decide whether you want to hear what we said to you.
As an artist, you have to decide if you just want to give birth to ideas, or if you’re willing to raise them too. That is your creative choice, each and every time you conceive.
I don’t know if the young screenwriter is ready to be a parent yet, or if he’s still just a spawner, but I was so happy to be part of his script reading. I was glad because he’s been bold enough to just fling himself out there. I was glad because Austin wants him, and me, and other artists, to take risks, and offers circles of trust like this one I’ve described, so we don’t kill ourselves when we take our first leaps of faith.
When a city or a school or any community provides a nurturing environment for creative germination, it ensures the survival of the arts. That is Austin’s creative life.
