The world recently lost who I would name as the single most influential figure in the history of motion pictures, Roger Corman, but I am not here to substantiate that claim (perhaps I will one day). And before I get too far, let me say I've never actually met the man, but have admired him and his work for a very long time. He and James Whale are my two all time favorite directors, but Corman did much more than just direct film, he also produced and yes, he even sometimes wrote the screenplays. So today's blog is a collection of information I've learned about writing from stories about his work and interviews I've read and seen with him and how he has influenced my own work. Perhaps you may learn something from it as well, or at least hear some neat tidbits about Corman you did not previously know.
Sometimes you need to write a lot very quickly. In case you don't know, Corman is probably most famous for his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations from the early 1960s, which he produced and directed. One of my favorite stories about him concerns filming of The Raven. He had three weeks to complete filming The Raven, and he finished several days early. Instead of breaking up production, he wrote the script for another film, The Terror, and filmed most of it with the same cast and sets for the remaining days of the shooting schedule. In order to do that, he had to write the movie script very quickly, so he stayed up and wrote that entire script virtually non-stop for an 80 minute movie in just 48 hours!
I understand that a novel is much longer than a film script, in most cases, but it inspired me to see just how productive I could be when I really set my mind to it. So I once set myself a schedule to try and punch out a rough draft of a novel within Corman's film shooting schedule of just three weeks. That was one of the most productive writing bursts I have ever had before or since. I wrote up to four chapters per day. And I succeeded in (a very crappy) completed rough draft in just three weeks time. It had to be edited heavily before I could send it out to agents or publishers, but eventually, that rough draft became The Sorcerer, my first completed novel-length manuscript, which has at least garnered some interest with a publisher, but as of this time, is not yet published.
There is no writer's block. Roger Corman did not believe in writer's block. I believe there is such a thing as writer's block but it can be overcome, and anyone who wants to be a writer must find ways to overcome it. That does not mean that I do not occasionally sit in front my of computer staring at the scene for hours during a writing session. But I have my own methods of overcoming that. Corman's take on overcoming writer's block was actually quite simple, and would probably work for fiction writers in most instances. He once said (and I am paraphrasing here), if you are suffering from writer's block, simply watch a movie and change all the nouns. I would modify that to reading a book or a short story. Chances are, in my experience, when you are done "changing all the nouns" as Corman put it, you will end up changing a lot more as well. You will not be able to help changing other attributes about those characters and locations and other nouns and events in the story as well. In other words, you will likely wind up with a completely different story that was simply inspired by the story you set out to recreate.
Now, I'm pretty sure your next question is whether or not I have ever used that method of overcoming writer's block. My simple is answer is that those files are sealed and marked as highly classified.
Follow your passions. Look at Roger Corman's body of work and you will see he did a lot of genre work, mostly horror with some science fiction, but also some westerns, biker films, gangster films, etc. He even did a number of parodies, sometimes parodying his own work. You can see what his interests are from his body of work. It is no secret. He wrote about his interests, his passions. His passions were known to all, just by looking at even a small portion of the body of his work.
One of the things that first drew me to Roger Corman was that I have similar interests, particularly with horror and science fiction. It is also easy to discover my own interests by looking at my body of work, or by looking at my Facebook group, Classic Camp's Classic Horror Emporium https://www.facebook.com/share/h6TNimwEL5Zh8DxQ/.
So there you have it, three writing tips I learned from film director, producer, and screenwriter Roger Corman. I think they can be useful to any aspiring, or perhaps even a few experienced, writers. Feel free to leave comments below on your thoughts about this, Corman, or anything else.
