Stealing from your own life

I like books about writing and recently I got a new one, "Bang the Keys" by Jill Dearman. She's more in the floaty school of writing instruction, more Julia Cameron than Gotham City Writers Group. In other words, more apt to write about meditating to get in touch with the unconscious of your characters than the architecture of plot.

Both matter. It's a good book.

But I was struck by a quote she gave from the filmmaker Pedro Almodovor, who wrote and directed Bad Medicine, a movie I watched with Phillip last year. Almodovor was talking about using his own life as material for his films and he said:

"Anything that is not autobiographical is plagiarism."

I laughed aloud at that. I assume he is kidding, but probably not by much. Almost all writers borrow heavily from their own lives and the lives of people around them....but mostly, I would guess, from their own. At least in terms of feelings. You might not have fought in the Vietnam war but if your soldier-character is feeling frustration, you'd better know how it feels to be frustrated. Better be able to tap into the last time you felt that particular emotion, the thoughts that led up to and away from the feeling, the way it manifested in your body.

Another thing I've heard - not sure where but I think it may have been Julia Cameron. Something about how writing is more about getting things down than it is about thinking things up. I'd phrase it a little differently, saying that there are essentially two schools of writers: those who get things down and those who think things up. I'm obviously more in the first school but my new writing group has brought me into contact with genre writers who are more clearly "creative" in the sense most people use the word - i.e., they sit there and make things up. They make up whole worlds with different laws and money and genders and physical constrants. I'm not sure if they base the people who populate these worlds on their own emotions or not.

Maybe something worth asking at the next meeting.

I'll be drummed out of this group soon, no doubt. I have no luck with writing groups. I think my questions irritate people.