What would no artist ever admit to? by #KylePhoenix

 

The cheats you use.

To every work there’s shortcuts and loopholes you find.

Things you absorb from other people. I was trying to find the heart of a mother daughter conflict in a novel and happened to watch a Netflix short on women having painful sex/problems. It gave me an in to the mother who was very one dimensional in my mind’s eye.

Sometimes you find whole scenes or thoughts in movies and you’re like—-Mine!

Then you redo it a little and it clicks in nicely. I hear great lines all the time that I test out in my character’s mouths.

I know that if I free write a conversation long enough with an intent (I just typed 10 pages of a first date discussing sex, gender politics, theoretical science, sexual abuse, sexual positions) I’ll get some good stuff.

Technically to me it can feel like rambling—-it might even appear that way if you, the reader, saw the first hard writing of it. But I’m going to take that 10 pages and divide it up into 2–3 dates because I need these characters to get to know each other, over time. I’m then going to dress it up with three different settings. I’m then going to clean it up with observations and insights, the reader will never know it was one long rambling deluge.

I know how to tweak a scene for maximum effect, whether cuteness or carnage.

The reader thinks it was a build up—-I actually went in to the whole script on a Wednesday and was thinking—-hmm, I need a grenade in here, where, oh, where can a grenade go? Boom. Right there and I plopped in a grenade and set it off.

Sex is a weapon in writing.

Whether the presence or absence I can interject a scene, brief, fleeting or hardcore and graphic, and it snaps the reader to attention. My trick then is to write sex in differing ways, different power dynamics, different outcomes. To achieve what may look like a volume of carnality, I’m often dipping into my own, friends, family members sex lives.

Real creativity is 50% new idea creativity and 50% assembling of other stuff, creatively. Together it looks new and different.

#KylePhoenix