Promising to share anecdotes about writers Robert Ludlum and Stephen King, local author Stephen Smoke assures us we’re in for a treat. If he wasn’t a part of the seminar, he says, he’d definitely want to attend.
Smoke is referring to the Surfwriters writing seminar taking place this Saturday, August 11, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Malaga Cove Library in Palos Verdes Estates.
“The Surfwriters is a 50-year-old writers group,” says Ildy Lee, one of the organizers of the event and currently president of the Southwest Manuscripters. “We support each other and inspire each other to write, and we have very interesting speakers come to us. Every four years we put up a Surfwriters writing seminar, sponsored by the Palos Verdes Library.”
Every four years. That puts it in a category with the Olympics and the World Cup. This year’s literary Olympians include Jorja Leap, discussing non-fiction; Patsy Bellah, giving her insights into self-publishing; Diana Zimmerman, on writing for the teenage market; Stephen Smoke, uncloaking the mystery behind mystery writing; and actor/writer Ted Lange, guiding us through the process of developing a successful play.
“We’re going to learn a lot,” says Ildy Lee; “we’re going to ask a lot of questions and get inspired, because we all want to be published writers. This is our goal, and anybody and everybody who is interested to come and hear us, please do, whether you are a writer or not, a budding writer or a well-known writer. We’re all going to get something out of this.”
Tricks of the trade
It turns out that I’m going to get something out of this, too, because Stephen Smoke and Ted Lange have agreed to share some of their insights and reflections in advance. Whatever art form one pursues, it needs to find an audience. Okay, quiet everyone; let’s listen in:
“I came to Los Angeles to be a rock ‘n’ roll star,” Smoke says. “It didn’t work out, but I ended up being a writer and during the seminar I’ll tell a little bit of how that came about.”
Smoke has authored 20 novels, which should confer rock star status in some circles. He’s also written several non-fiction books, directed feature films, written songs and recorded an album.
“When I took creative writing classes and fiction writing classes from people,” he says, “without fail, none of them had actually had anything published. They were long on theory… And I thought, it would really be nice to have a book about writing a novel by somebody who’s actually written one.” And so Smoke put one together.
“I have all these tips and tricks,” he says, and explains that when he’s at an impasse with a character he’ll play a song that conveys the emotional tone of that character, and in about 20 minutes he’ll have the solution to his dilemma.
“That’s an exercise I came up with myself. There’s a bunch of these things – this is how I write and how I get through writer’s block, how I get from page one to the end.”
The methods he’ll talk about are the ones Smoke developed over four semesters teaching at the Palos Verdes Art Center. But Saturday’s focus will be on what it takes to create an effective mystery – Smoke used to publish Mystery magazine – and that’s where his anecdotes on Ludlum and King will come in handy.
In dramatic fashion
“I’m dealing with theater and how to write plays,” Lange says. “I didn’t set out to be a playwright; I evolved into one. Part of it is, I’m an actor, I’m a television actor; done a couple of television series.”
Most prominently, Lange was one of the stars of TV’s very popular “Love Boat.”
“Sometimes you’re standing on the stage and a line’s not working,” he continues, “and you – the actor – come up with a line that works better. The director and the producer go, Hey, that’s good, keep it in; and you start saying, Well, wait a minute, he’s the writer, wasn’t he supposed to come up with something?”
With a half-hour sitcom, for instance, the show can rise or fall depending on the effectiveness of the humor or wit of the follow-through.
“Sometimes the setup is improper,” Lange says; “sometimes the punch line doesn’t work and you tweak it and figure it out. So, from that process I got confidence and wanted to set out on my own and do some writing because, particularly being black in Hollywood, there’s a certain kind of niche that they put you in as an actor. So I would be supporting whoever the white character is, or if I was doing an all-black show, sometimes the comedy was way over the top. And sometimes you just don’t want to do that; you want to do something else.”
That wasn’t the only reason he decided to try his hand at playwriting.
“I’m 5’7”,” Lange says. “When I’d go out on auditions I do a good reading and the producer says, That was very good, but we’re looking for a taller guy.” Lange pauses for effect. “Wait a minute, I did all this stuff, acting classes and all… Al Pacino isn’t that… What are you talking about?” – the last bit spoken with an Italian accent.
It would be frustrating for Lange if the actor chosen for the part didn’t have the chops – only the height. And so, naturally, when Lange himself began to write for the stage:
“My first five plays were all about a black guy, 5’7”, [who] walks into a room…” And everyone at the table laughs.
“Eventually I grew out of that,” Lange continues; “and that’s what happens, the more you write. I started getting confident enough to write for other people.
“What I’m going to do at the seminar is talk about the art of writing, the craft of writing, and then the practical knowledge of once you write something, then what do you do? It’s like, you write the book, then what to you do? You want to get it published. Well, you write the play; what do you do? You want to see it staged, you want to hear a reading of it. So I’m gonna talk about the practical knowledge that goes into what it takes to be a playwright.”
I haven’t been this enlightened by a playwright since August Wilson.
Start with a foundation
The alarm clock goes off. It’s a new day. Then what?
“One of the things that I do,” Smoke replies, “is I make sure that I edit the things from the day before, right before I start writing the new stuff. There’s a reason for that… Editing is very analytical; writing is like I’m floating down a stream and watching.” There’s a writing flow and an editing flow, and the latter, Smoke says, “leads me to what I’m gonna write for the next day.”
There is, of course, an outline, a navigational chart of sorts, but what Smoke really wants to emphasize is the importance of knowing your character, and so he creates character biographies that he can constantly refer back to.
“If I get into your character’s car,” he says, “and I turn on the [radio], do I hear conservative talk radio? Do I hear NPR? Do I hear rock ‘n’ roll? Do I hear classical music?” Each of these choices, he adds, “tells me something about that person.”
This captures Lange’s interest. “The layering of character. Even if you don’t use everything, you know this person. And when you put them in a scene later on, you know what they’ll do. You don’t make them go down a road just to fill in an outline.”
It’s all part of the groundwork. “You take your key characters and you write down things,” Smoke says. “What does this person drink? Where did they go to college? Did they go to college? What kind of car do they drive? And so character biographies is a real big part of what I talk abut in the course.”
A man of many hats
“I try to do an interesting thing with characters,” Lange says. “A friend of mine once said to me, Ted, if you write something, the more specific you are the less chance a director has of screwing it up. So if I write, The guy gets into a car, they’ll make the car probably something you didn’t want. But if I say, The guy gets into a red Volkswagen, you start finding characterization. So I try to be as specific as possible, but at the same time I have to be changeable depending on who gets cast in the part.
“Also, because I’m a director, I like to direct what I write. But I separate them; I don’t write for my directing, I write for the play. It’s like, ‘Wait till the director gets a hold of this, he’s gonna have a big problem,’ but I don’t care because I’m not writing for that guy, I’m writing for what the play is about.
“Then,” Lange continues, “as a director I say, ‘Why the hell did I write that, when now I got this big problem?’ That’s not gonna be a playwright’s problem most of the time, but [it can be] for me. What you have to do is tell your story the best way you can. That’s what I do.”
After the script has been hammered out, Lange hires smart actors to come over to his home and they do a reading. Why smart actors? “Because a smart actor knows what questions to ask.” An egotistical actor, by comparison, may just want more lines or even more scenes. A smart actor may have helpful suggestions or offer useful criticism.
“I try to answer the questions,” Lange says, and this often leads to his first rewrite. “Then I have another reading. Let’s just say the first time I have a reading there’s ten questions. The next time there’s five questions. When I get down to two questions then I can bring in an audience.”
But the playwright isn’t out of the woods yet.
“Things you thought worked in rehearsal,” Lange says, sometimes don’t work on stage. “The audience is either ahead of you or they didn’t get it, and clarifications have to be made or a different setup has to be done.” It may seem like an endless round of fine-tuning, but as Lange emphasizes, and as all of us should know, “these are all in the process of creating a play.”
Ted Lange, Stephen Smoke, as well as Jorja Leap, Diana Zimmerman, and Patsy Bellah, have a lot more to offer, and when it comes to writing can we ever get too much good advice?
The Surfwriters Writing Seminar takes place on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Malaga Cove Library Gallery, 2400 Via Campesina, Palos Verdes Estates. Cost, $50 with lunch. For reservations, call (310) 378-8098 or (310) 831-5002
