Reay Jespersen

Years back, I heard about a writing format that was an entire story contained within 100 words or less. The format began, the bit of research I did told me, when writer Neil Gaiman (whose work I’m enjoying more and more - check out his site, he has a link to a free version of his novel American Gods) had written a story on a Christmas card, which happened to be in the range of 100 words in length.

Always interested in trying out a new writing format (which was, along with the encouragement of Alex, what got me into writing screenplays), I started to play around with the sub-100 word style, which I found quite interesting. It tended to require overshooting the needed word total and then cutting back some here and using a different word to encapsulate a phrase there. I also found that while the pieces I was writing could technically be called stories, they more often tended to be pieces of stories, which in order to have their full impact, required the reader to extrapolate the before and after of the events within the story. All in all, a very interesting discipline.

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Human life givers,
Women make the world go ’round.
Some are also hot.

Place of solitude.
All is well with the world now.
The morning shower.

Coffee: “A lifeline.”
“The creativity juice.”
I’ll have a tea, thanks.

This Sunday the planets finally aligned, and we were able to get the shoot done for Barry’s camera test. Hopefully he’ll have a sweetly edited version available soon, which I can post here.

He’s heading to Europe next month to get more shot for his documentary, which makes me jealous. No word yet on whether or not he’ll spring for Jackie and me to go with him, though it would be a swell gesture of friendship.

Jackie: even in full-on winter gear, the sexiest Production Assistant ever.

Barry with his home-made stedicam rig. He will make you one for $8000.

You ever get the feeling you’re being watched?

One day it’s nice out.
The next, snow and freezing rain.
March in Toronto.

Barry Sanders is a friend of mine who’s got various and sundry things going on in his life at any one time, and each one he adds himself is invariably creative.

His latest thing was to construct a poor man’s stedicam device, literally constructed out of material you can buy at home renovation stores, for his video camera. While the point of the device is actually for a larger project he has in mind (for which he’s going to Amsterdam next month; my creative notions have taken me as far as downtown, while Barry’s takes him to the other side of the world), he wanted to give it a small scale test run to see how it, and his various audio equipment, worked together.

He approached me and asked if I’d be up for writing a short monologue script, and either act it out in front of his camera, or get someone else to do so. A few days later, I’d written a couple of monologues, and a few days after that, we’d decided upon which one to use.

Problem being, while we were initially going to shoot the thing a couple of weekends ago, I asked to put it off a week due to unexpectedly late hours at work, and the lack of prep time that left me with. Then we were going to shoot it yesterday, but Barry discovered a problem with one of his mics which has to be dealt with before the bit can be shot properly.

Hopefully we’ll have a chance to shoot it this upcoming weekend, though with plans already made for the bulk of it, the window of opportunity is relatively small.

Fingers crossed.

Tracy, an aspiring writer friend of mine, has recently challenged me to take on the exercise put forth by one of the writing groups she belongs to: write a minimum of 100 words per day for 100 days. You can’t write 200 words one day and then take the next day off; what you do on any day only counts toward that day’s total. And if you ever miss a day, the 100 days starts over again.

I thought it was an interesting challenge, and as some may know, I’ve enjoyed numerous writing challenges (typically self-imposed) over the years, so I was quite happy to accept hers. Thus far, now I guess heading into my third week (give or take - I’ve got it written down somewhere specifically so I don’t have to keep the specifics in mind all the time), I’ve kept it up. And not only am I getting more writing done than I normally would, given my tendency is to wait to be struck by both inspiration and the time to write - which can probably be chalked up to most writers’ penchants for procrastination - but I’m finding that the process of writing is in itself giving me more ideas.

I’m normally hit with ideas pretty routinely. I’ve got an ever-growing collection of small notebooks to jot down ideas when they occur to me, to the point where if I had every day to myself to write, I still couldn’t hope to use all of them. But this regular process of writing every day - which is of course supposed to get you into the very habit of writing every day - helps to lubricate my imagination even more. So I’m not only enjoying meeting Tracy’s challenge head-on, but also the work it’s accomplishing, as well as the more cohesive ideas I’m getting from the process. My wife had articulated it best a few days ago, saying it was nice to see that the ideas I’m getting now are more complete and usable, rather than the notions for lone characters or scenes or coo character names or other tidbits I’m typically struck with. It would seem that creativity begets creativity.

Awesome.