THOUGHTS ON REMOTE COLLABORATION

By Olga Agafonova

Over the last year, I’ve used miscellaneous tools to keep in touch and work on a screenplay with my co-author and I’d like to share some observations about that experience.

First, I want to point out that Cheron and I met in person two years ago through a mutual friend. We would not have known about each other or be comfortable enough with one another without that real, physical connection. I have seen online invitations for screenwriters to work together remotely and that is too much of a shot in the dark for me. There is a lot we do when we begin getting to know someone: we appraise someone’s character and establish trust with that person.  With writing, of course we must also consider if our writing styles mesh well together.

This brings me to my second point: Cheron and I took time to discuss her vision for the screenplay and what she wanted the characters to be like. We negotiated the number of primary characters and then I briefly outlined what I thought each character was going to do throughout the film. This was sufficient to begin writing the first draft. 

We kept in touch every few weeks by email and via WhatsApp, which gives us more immediate access to each other throughout the day than email. Initially, we used different free programs to work on the screenplay but eventually converged on Final Draft. At $249.99 per license, this was expensive but since we both plan on writing screenplays in the future, it is worth the investment. Critically, Final Draft has a simultaneous collaboration feature where multiple authors can work on the same version of the draft in real time. The auto-formatting features for dialogue, action and other screenplay parts have been indispensable as well.

Would I have preferred a weekly get-together in a café to go over the details of our work? Absolutely. Listening to someone’s feedback, their tone of voice and the language they choose, being able to read their body language – all these things are important to good communication. By that standard, however, I could not have participated in this project. Cheron lives on the West Coast and flying out there regularly is of course out of question for financial reasons.

So, would I recommend writing with someone remotely? Yes, if you feel comfortable with that person and your ideas about the work are compatible. For me, that means meeting the person in the real world first and seeing what they are like. Others may be more adventurous but the bottom line is the same: you must be comfortable with one another as people to begin and sustain your collaboration. 

ON WRITING, FLOW AND COFFEE

By Olga Agafonova

If I have a muse, she kicks in at the same time caffeine is absorbed into my bloodstream. On occasion, I can be completely immersed in what I am writing and I would like to imagine I am getting closer to entering the state of flow. Flow, or “being in the zone,” is when good things happen – you are focused on what you are doing, you enjoy what they are doing and your environment is conducive to keeping you in that state.

Smart employers are helping their staff reach flow to boost productivity. Smart writers should reflect on how to achieve the state for the same reason. Flow won’t happen with multi-tasking: you should be focused on doing one thing. Flow won’t happen if you are bored because that means you are already disengaged. 

Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception and Oliver Sacks in Hallucinations experiment with psychedelics to transcend self. Of course, I am not going that far: I just want a mild kick from a legal substance to help prod the muse. What I have tried includes variations on Bulletproof coffee and coffee brewed in a Clover machine.

I did not like the Bulletrpoof recipe. Per instructions, I dutifully added fatty-acid-containing organic butter to brewed coffee, poured some patented coconut oil on top and let it swirl in a mixer. The coffee, no surprise, tasted like butter and whatever cognitive-enhancing effects it had were overshadowed by the butter. Just in case I did something wrong, I also bought ready-made butter-containing coffee at Whole Foods and still, I could only taste the butter.

The Clover machine-brewed coffee, available at Starbucks, was more promising. About thirty minutes after drinking a cup, I did feel a noticeable rise in my alertness level. I have been drinking mild coffee for years and it takes a lot to have any effect on me. The alertness did not involve jitters or nervousness – it did exactly what a good coffee beverage is supposed to do.

There is also mushroom coffee: a beverage made from medicinal mushrooms like Lion’s mane and chaga. (I have heard of chaga being used as a folk remedy for the prevention and treatment of cancer in Russia. The fact that it is catching on as a nootropic substance elsewhere in the world is interesting.) High-quality mushrooms are hard to get and there are subtle details about which parts of the mushrooms matter: the fruiting body vs. the mycelium, the spindly parts that are underground.  The drink is supposed to taste like burnt toast – not an appealing description but enthusiasts say it’s flavorful and delicious.

My plan is to continue to experiment with caffeine-containing concoctions and see what happens with the writing. I promise to report back with results.

           

On Seeing People

By Olga Agafonova

Over the last couple of weeks, I spent some time reading about nuclear warfare – the escalation of tensions with North Korea first gave me anxiety and then an idea about a short story. I needed to know what happens in the first few minutes after the detonation of an A bomb.

Michie Hattori’s first-person account of the bombing of Nagasaki is as harrowing as one would expect but it’s not the descriptions of death and suffering that struck me the most.  After the war ended, Michie studies English and ends up marrying an American attorney. Here is what she says about her relationship:

“ […] His work took him all over Texas and to surrounding states. I found myself more and more left at home when he traveled. His circle of American friends seldom included me.

One day, after seven years of matrimony, he presented me with divorce papers, saying our marriage had been a mistake. […] ”

Our marriage had been a mistake. After plucking out the girl from Japan and bringing her over to the U.S., half a world away from everything she knows, this guy decides it isn’t going to work out after all.  To me, this passage means that Michie’s husband never took the time to understand who Michie was. It’s deeply disturbing how commonplace this is – it is as if we collectively don’t care to get to know each other well enough to see the complexity of each other’s lives.

As writers, we don’t get to say that men are ultimately unknowable and leave it at that.  We try to get better at reading people so that we can create engaging, persuasive literature, fiction or non-fiction.

In 2012 Andrew Solomon released Far From The Tree, a book remarkable for its candor. He wrote about children who are different from their parents: some were gay, others disabled, yet others prodigies and so on.  I was surprised that Solomon managed to get to the essence of these relationships – the gifted children who resented their parents for their explicitly conditional love; the parents of severely disabled children who resented the kids for changing their lives forever.

Solomon took the time to listen to the stories that these people told. All of the narratives included in the book are multi-dimensional – not one descends into sentimentality and platitudes about overcoming challenges in the face of adversity. There is no “putting on a happy face” here: people tell Solomon what they think and feel and it is often not pretty.

I can’t think of another way to learn to see people for who they are except to talk to them. To talk to them about the stuff that matters: the fear of death or poverty, the loneliness of parenting, the unhappy marriages, the disappointing adult children. The effort we make in reaching out and understanding someone is bound to pay off not just in better writing but in being better humans.

What’s Worth Seeing

By Olga Agafonova

Recently, I’ve been asked to contribute to an adaptation of a TV show script to a feature. I’ve never done anything like that before, so I began to think long and hard about what makes a good film.

What I’d like to write about is how life slips away and we don’t do the things we hoped to accomplish, about the big, good, beautiful dreams that end up being illusions. 

In the 2016 film The Founder, about the origins of the McDonald’s chain, the transformation of Ray Kroc, played by Michael Keaton, is engrossing, exactly the kind of writing and directing that transcends mere entertainment.

This is more than another story of a man corrupted by ambition. For Kroc, success is just out of reach, just another sale or two or twenty away. He craves something more than his nice home and nice – but not good enough – wife. Keaton’s facial expressions, his shifts in mood are central to the film. When Kroc tells his wife about the McDonald’s brothers’ fast-food assembly-line innovations and she dismisses this, you can tell just by the look on Keaton’s face that he will remember this slight and won’t let it go easily. Indeed, toward the end of the film, Kroc coolly tells his wife over dinner that he wants a divorce.  

Seeing these subtle shifts on the screen is not the same as writing them but I hope that being able to pay attention to these things will soon start translating into more compelling characters. I struggle with my characters. I know what I want them to be, I sometimes see a fuzzy image of them in my mind but I do not yet hear them and I certainly don’t hear them telling me how they’d like me to describe them.

The McDonald’s brothers dream of a restaurant that serves surprisingly high-quality burgers and fries turned into something grotesque. The franchise is now associated with poor nutrition, low pay, obesity and poverty. Happy healthy people don’t eat at McDonalds anymore– they’re being sold feel-good stories by Whole Foods, where business somehow shouldn’t feel like business.

Kroc did accomplish a lot, at the cost of defrauding the brothers of their invention and their royalties. Keaton, by the end of the film, looks confident and ruthless. Gone is the sugary-ness of a salesman who wants just one minute of someone’s time. Keaton is a less handsome Dorian Gray who rather enjoys what he’s become.

This complexity of character, the elevation of a story about the food industry into first-class drama – that’s a film worth writing and watching.

            

Describing Pain

By Olga Agafonova

Earlier this week I wrote a script for a five-minute film that I need to shoot by myself. Because of technical and financial limitations, almost everything associated with a movie set is absent – I am lucky to have found someone who has graciously agreed to play the main character.  

The script is a monologue by a woman that heard a voice in her head during a difficult time in her life. I didn’t want this film to be about someone’s descent into madness: a five-minute experimental short by a newbie film-maker is not the place to tackle that. What I did want to get across is the depth of the woman’s pain as she remembers how her marriage fell apart. 

About a year ago, I had an experience that I struggle to describe in the script: in response to someone’s words, I felt searing pain in my heart. I remember it taking my breath away and thinking that all that language about broken hearts might stem from the physical sensation of pain.  It was strange – the sounds in the room faded away and all I could focus on was the physiological response. There was a heaviness and a weakness, almost a dizziness even. I don’t know if the blood drained away from my face but I felt like it had. This range of symptoms is not in the script of course and I worry that the few words I have in there do not convey the intensity of the emotional experience my character is having.

I’ve read a fair number of depressing books over the years but I can’t say that I’ve picked up on the techniques that make it easier to portray emotional distress. My character is not hysterical or furious; she doesn’t implode or whimper or curl up in a ball of grief. I don’t have hundreds of pages of backstory to help me out either. All I would like to capture is a moment where time stops and the bad news sinks in. 

Having never worked with actors, I don’t know how much I need to say – I just hope that the person can somehow feel what I’ve just described and that she can re-enact it vividly.

           

Why I Don’t Blow Bubbles

By Olga Agafonova

I don’t do fluff. I don’t say it, I don’t write it, and I don’t like it when someone sends fluff in my direction. One of my professors once called the phenomenon “blowing bubbles.” As in, “Ellen was blowing bubbles at me the whole damn time and we didn’t get anywhere.”

Over the years there were plenty of people who thought I was rude. I don’t see it that way: rudeness is being crass or deliberately offensive. The refusal to blow bubbles means that I cut through the crap and tell it like it is so that we, whoever we may be, a) are on the same page and b) can see things for what they are instead of floating off into the wonderland of subtext and hidden meanings.

The farce and the tragedy that plays out when people don’t see what’s right in front of them is the basis for many movies.  Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine is a fine example: Jasmine is intentionally oblivious to the fraud that her husband Hal commits because Hal finances her expensive lifestyle until one day she discovers his extramarital affair, rats him out to the authorities and loses everything when the guy commits suicide in prison.

It’s hard not to think of all the people affected by the Madoff Ponzi scheme after watching that film – some no doubt had no idea and simply trusted Madoff with their money; others, notably his tech employees, did know what went on but chose to stay silent and comfortable until everything went to hell. [1] The Madoff family paid dearly for the failure to ask tough questions: one son committed suicide two years after the scandal broke open; the second son succumbed to a cancer relapse.

The 2015 movie Spotlight is about The Boston Globe’s investigation into the child molestation cover-up by the Boston Archdiocese. What Spotlight makes clear about the scandal is that it went on for decades in large part because nobody had the courage to dig in and say “Something’s not right.” The leadership of the diocese moved priests to different parishes, the faithful didn’t want to challenge the clerics because they wanted to believe these were good men, and law enforcement did not want to get involved in a religious community’s matters.

And so it goes. Financial fraud, child abuse, infidelity, corruption and lately, breath-taking political scandals – these things don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen because we’ve gotten comfortable with people blowing bubbles at us: we think that someone else will stand up and say the right thing, someone else will write that angry letter to a senator, someone else will pen a critical op-ed. But that’s not how reality works. And that’s why I’ve written more than a few letters to my elected representatives with exhortations against supporting recent executive orders. I can only hope that they are paying attention.

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[1] Fishman, Steven . “Ponzi Supernova”. Audible. http://www.audible.com/mt/ponzisupernova. Last accessed on 23 February 2017. 

The Script Rewrite

By Olga Agafonova

Back at the end of October, I got a professional screenwriter to review my first screenplay. The good news: the science-fiction elements are fresh and exciting and merit development. The bad news is that nearly all the dialogue has to go as does the entire second act. Also, the main character is too detached for the audience to care about him. Lots of work to be done.

And that’s what I’ve been up to in the last few weeks. I’ve read Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain for sci-fi goodness, I’ve signed up for a structural writing class to address plot problems and I’m using Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing to bring my characters to life.

The Lajos technique asks the writer to describe each character’s physiology, sociology and psychology in detail. For example, my protagonist Ryan Callaghan is a 40-year old male with a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins. His mother died when he was three, his father was never home; he was raised by his maternal aunt who encouraged him to study the sciences. He is an agnostic who doesn’t care about politics, a scientist who enjoys the company of other straightforward, talented people, a private man who recoils from violence and fanaticism.

The idea is that if you provide enough background for a character, he will begin to do certain things naturally in the play while avoiding others. In other words, the character will be true to himself. So, I can’t have my guy join a religious cult half-way through the play because that’s not in his nature. I can, however, have him behave in an arrogant and judgmental way because that’s one of the weaknesses I’ve built-in to his psychology.

In the structural writing class, we are being taught to chuck Syd Field’s three-act model and to instead use as many as nine acts, each escalating the conflict somehow. The point here is that using so many acts, each with its mini-escalations building up to the climax in Act VIII, makes for a more dynamic screenplay. So, if the play is about Joe Schmuck’s miserable life, in Act I an old lady backs up into his car, in Act II, he is passed over for a promotion, in Act III his house burns down, and so on until in Act VIII he’s ready to jump off a bridge but then something happens and it all works out in Act IX.

Having invested six months of effort and a bit of money into my screenplay, I really do hope all the work pays off and I get a better result in the second draft. I’d like to enter the play in a couple of competition next year and see what happens. The West Coast beckons and I’d like to heed its call.

The Opening Scene

By Olga Agafonova

At the beginning of September, I finished the first draft of my screenplay. My goal now is to revise and polish it until I am comfortable enough with the result to consider submitting it to various competitions. To that end, I have enrolled in a screenwriting class through the Academy of Film Writing.

The class focuses on the first thirty pages of a script, roughly the first act of the play. Our first assignment is to analyze the opening scene in several movies. What I saw in five movies I like is as follows:

Michael Clayton (2007)

We hear Arthur's manic monologue as the opening titles flash on the black screen, which forces us to pay close attention to what Arthur is saying. The first image is downtown wherever, the skyscraper offices of the law firm that Arthur and Michael work for. The tone is ominous, tense.

Up in the Air (2009)

Images of clouds and bird eye's view of various locations in the United States. Our protagonist is clearly going to be doing some traveling by plane. The mood is upbeat, so we expect this movie to have at least a few light-hearted moments.

Solaris (1972)

Underwater vegetation with a camera pan to a man standing by the pond. No soundtrack. Nothing so far suggests space travel or any science fiction theme.

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Peaks of mountains covered by clouds. A voice talks about the rumors of a doomsday device being developed by the USSR.

Trading Places (1983)

Sequence of New Jersey images with classical music playing in the background. Most images are regular people going about their day. I'm guessing the music and the sequence is there to setup the contrast between Eddie Murphy's and Dan Aykroyd's characters.

Of all these, I find the opening for Michael Clayton the most effective because Arthur's monologue is so powerful and tells me everything I need to know about the law firm. The entire screenplay, written by Tony Gilroy, is taut, compact -- the dialogue is right where it needs to be in terms of content and length. This is definitely something I'll be shooting for in my second draft.

Gotham Writers’ Workshop Screenwriting I Class

By Olga Agafonova

In an effort to put my writing life into higher gear, I spent some time looking at writers’ retreats for people who are just getting started. I could not find what I wanted: a quiet, small retreat by the ocean, preferably somewhere on the West Coast. So, I did the next best thing I could think of and signed up for an online screenwriting class with the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, which operates out of New York City.

The current iteration of “Screenwriting I” runs from June the 14^th to August the 23^rd. It’s a cool $399, plus the $25 registration fee. Every week we have a reading and a relatively short assignment. Students exchange ideas on the bulletin board and there are two mini-projects that will be critiqued by both the instructor and the entire class of fifteen adults, most of whom have full-time jobs.

I don’t really have any idea of how to become a screenwriter: there is probably a canon of cinema that I’m supposed to revere and emulate but frankly I don’t give a damn. Instead, I’ve been reading scripts for movies that I like: Michael Clayton, Up in the Air, The Bourne Identity, One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest and on the more romantic side, Sleepless in Seattle.

The biggest challenge for my first script is going to be handling conflict and action: my story is about how one man deals with the loss of his fiancée after all the women in the world disappear. There is a lot of sci-fi stuff going on throughout the script but that’s not the point; this is, above all, a movie about a person coming to terms with his loss and finding a meaning in life. So far, I’ve been pretty good at the sci-fi bits and not so great about getting the internal drama across to the imaginary viewers.

I remember when I watched Gravity I was struck by the scene where Sandra Bullock’s character is alone in her space capsule, without any motivation to live and then she hears this baby over the radio transmission, a father who is trying to soothe the baby in some foreign language. I think this is before or maybe after she hallucinates George Clooney’s character explicitly telling her to keep on living but anyway, those few quiet minutes when she’s reflecting on her life and everything she’s lost, that’s powerful stuff and it’s at the core of that movie. Gravity isn’t as much about the dangers of space exploration as it is about life and death and how we handle both.

That’s the kind of movie I’d like to write a script for by the end of this summer. Here’s hoping I will reach that goal.

Rejecting the Life of Quiet Desperation

By Olga Agafanova

A story I heard on the radio the other day made me think about how many people have resigned themselves to muddling through life, some at a surprisingly young age.

I remembered meeting this stereotypically awkward programmer who shied away from nearly everything, unwilling or unable to change his habits, not taking the risk of inviting someone into his world.  His colleagues considered him to be very good at his job and very bad at living.

He made me wonder how things would play out for a guy like him in a setting other than a Southern suburb: what if he lived in some charming small European town, where old men while away the evenings playing checkers and couples stroll through generous public parks? Would he feel more at ease in another society where people are forced to interact with each other simply because there are more of them living together per square mile? Would Tokyo with its thirty-seven million dwellers in tiny apartments be too much but the island of Cozumel in Mexico, with a mere 100, 000 people living in tropical paradise, could be just right?

Or, perhaps it really is all in one’s head and the measure of success is to what extent we can squeeze the best of out what we get handed by fate. The rule ought to be that you’re better off taking a stab at something than not. Every day does not have to resemble an issue of National Geographic: it can be as simple as finally auditioning for that community theater troupe or joining a writing group such as the SCWW Columbia II. Some people are very physical and they express themselves by doing physical things. That’s not my life but I do admire those who have the inner drive to climb mountains and run triathlons.

Life is rarely spontaneously delightful: we have to make an effort to experience it, instead of just sleepwalking, stumbling from one decade into the next, until one day the end is near and the regrets kick in.

Another memory comes to mind: once, I observed this unhappy woman in a checkout lane. Her kid was nagging her, the supermarket was crowded and noisy – all mundane things -- but there was something about the expression on the woman’s face that caught my eye. She was not just tired or annoyed, she was defeated, not by an insignificant interaction with the cashier but by life itself.  Her eyes did not shine or twinkle: they were dull and dark, all joy having gone out of them a long time ago. The woman clearly was not looking forward to the next day or the next thirty years.

That, to me, is the life that is absolutely worth avoiding. So let us keep on writing and keep on trying to have an abundant, purposeful life.

A Playlist for Inspiration

By Olga Agafonova

Certain kinds of music conjure up entire cinematic sequences in my mind and I’d like to share a few of these compositions with you along with some comments.

“Loud Places” by Jamie XX from the album “In Colour” (2015)

This understated, soft and yet vivid song brings to mind a relationship that blossomed in a remote cityscape, two lives intertwined in London, New York, Singapore. There is that one apartment light in a city of a million lights and I watch the couple, her making him a part of her life and him experiencing things he never had before. Then it all falls apart one day and she is there all alone at a bar at the top of a skyscraper looking for him in a crowd and finally spotting him arm-in-arm with a stranger.

“Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed/In My Time of Dying”

This is a gospel song recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in 1927 and covered since then by numerous artists, including Josh White, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Dylan. Led Zeppelin’s version is exploding with almost too much energy for a song about a man contemplating his end but I do like the repeating “Oh my Jesus” and the “I can hear the angels signin’ ” at the end. I don’t hear the angels signing yet but I do like the idea of going out with that kind of fearlessness. 

“The Four Seasons: Spring” by Max Richter from “Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, the Four Seasons” (2012)

I like the entire album. Richter’s variations on Vivaldi are exquisite: he brings enough of himself into the music to make it startlingly new and raw.  A thousand stories can bloom on this fertile soil – after all, this is classical music, abstract enough to project whatever we want onto it.

“Endless” by Dave Gahan from “Hourglass (Studio Sessions)” (2007)

I’ve been listening to Depeche Mode and Dave Gahan for over a decade now. Their albums from the 80’s have an excess synth-pop sugar for my taste but starting from the mid - 90’s onward, their music has matured into something deeper. The acoustic version of “Endless” brings forth images of hovering above the Earth at night, being drawn to the stars and then being in the back of a taxi, going together with someone special in some other world, some other life where things work out the way exactly the way we want them.

The Latest Addition

Meet a New Columbia II Blogger

OLGA AGAFONOVA

Olga Agafonova is a front-end developer who loves good books and smooth coffee. Professionally, she is interested in 3D modeling and animation.  Creatively, her background is in the visual arts and she is excited about learning to tell stories through fiction. 

Olga's first blog post for SCWW Columbia II follows.

Book Review of Pete Earley’s CRAZY: A FATHER'S SEARCH THROUGH AMERICA'S MENTAL HEALTH MADNESS

By Olga Agafanova

Some years ago, I used to see a woman on a street corner who bore an uncanny resemblance to a former professor of mine.  The two had similar physical characteristics and they were close in age: it would have been difficult to tell them apart from a distance. It is unlikely, however, that they will ever cross paths: the professor was a promising scholar, a rising star in her field; the homeless woman had the absent gaze of someone with a profound mental illness. Without intervention from some entity willing to provide long-term care, this person is likely to spend her life shuttling between psychiatric emergency rooms and homeless shelters, never becoming stable for long enough to start rebuilding her life.

Pete Earley’s Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness is a good place to start exploring the plight of the mentally ill in America. The book is not academic in its approach: Earley gives us enough historical and contextual information so that we understand why things functions so poorly but his tone is intimate and his outrage is genuine.

For example, we discover the magnitude of the jail problem as he begins to visit the Miami-Dade detention center. While the jail has an entire floor dedicated to housing psychotic prisoners, we find out that they receive little treatment except for cheap alternatives to the drugs they are prescribed. If they refuse to take the medicine, the prisoners may spend months in isolation cells, often naked (ostensibly for their own good) and raving mad.  Although Early spends relatively little time discussing policy choices, we can understand exactly how the existing mental health system fails when Early shadows several men as they bounce to and from the streets and detention centers.

Early is at his most compelling when he talks about the hopes and dreams he had for his son and how he had to make adjustments to them when the scope of the son’s illness became clear.  Reading the perspectives from “the other side”, that is, the views of the police officers who confront mentally ill offenders and the attorneys who passionately argue for a crazy’s person right to remain crazy was illuminating.

 I find it interesting that as a society, we happily treat people with advanced dementia, even though they may claim they are feeling great, but equally delusional people with diagnoses like schizophrenia are left to struggle on their own. Both categories of illness are outside of an individual’s control and yet we draw a distinction between them in our mental health and justice systems.  If we could care enough to align our laws with the science of mental illness, we might be on our way to becoming a more compassionate society where people like the homeless woman on that street corner may get another shot at life.

Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness

By Pete Earley

384 pp. Berkley. $14.