“I type on plain white paper with three holes punched into the left side of the sheet so I can place the finished pages into a loose-leaf notebook and move them around if I decide to change my continuity or if I want to replace the scenes already written.
Also, I never write a script in continuity. I always write my favorite scene first. I always ask myself, ‘What is the single most important, most moving, most dramatic scene in the film, the single scene people will still be talking about a week later?’ I write that scene first, no matter where it might play in the finished script.
And I put it into the notebook. Then I write my next-most-favorite scene and put it into what may end up being its appropriate position. And so on and so on until I have to start connecting those fragments.
The last thing I write are these connections and I spend hours thinking of them in terms of images and locations.”
– Stirling Sylliphant, quoted in Stirling Sylliphant: Fingers of God by Nat Segaloff
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“As a beginning writer I assumed every writer began with some form of “Once upon a time…” It seems safe to say that readers assume that writers create stories in the order those stories are eventually read. Beginning at the start. Ending at the end. And it took me years to get past that tendency.
Now I realize that my best stories start from a thousand places, like crystals forming in a solution. Each of these small sub-assemblies reaches out in all directions until it bonds with other sub-assemblies. At any time, the scene I’m writing might eventually fall at almost any place in the finished book.
If you accept the nonlinear way of writing, then any small observation or anecdote you work on today is valid. It’s you putting together a few pieces of the puzzle. Say, the red pieces, or a few edge pieces.”
– Chuck Palahniuk, Plot Spoiler Needletter, 19/02/24
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Both of these quotes were read on the same day.
I finished Nat Segaloff’s excellent biography on the Oscar winning (In the Heat of the Night, 1967) screenwriter Sterling Sylliphant.
I received Chuck Palahniuk’s (author of Fight Club) newsletter the same evening.
Writing advice decades apart.
Starting with the most exciting scene.
Collect fragments and assemble the story later.
Both writers avoid the dread of the beginning.
Straight into the action.
Conversations With Quotations 