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Real Writers in Action: Paul Bower
Paul Bower is a playwright and journalist. In Winter 2003, his one act play “A Search for Buried Treasure” won a first-place award from the National Hebrew Catholics Association. He has had countless articles published in The Saint Catherine Review, The Saint Joseph Messenger, and The Ave Veritas, and his article Eyeless in Gaza made the front page of The Wanderer in the summer of 1998. Prewriting When generating ideas, Paul likes to find a quiet place where he can think undisturbed. “I try not to force anything,” he says, “but I find that if I merely sit around thinking long enough, ideas start to form in my head. Sometimes I'll have an idea percolate for up to a year before actually writing anything about it, sometimes I'll start writing the second I start to think of a specific scene and just take it from there.” The ideas start out very abstract , but gradually his mind fills in the pertinent details. Paul doesn’t always have control over when inspiration strikes, however. “Some of my best ideas have come to me in the middle of social situations, which is a pain, because I will invariably excuse myself from a room to scribble them down if I can.” His writing ideas often begin with characters, and he lets the characters guide the direction of his work. “What seems natural for those characters to think is the standpoint from which I base my approach to whichever topic I happen to be grappling with.” Organization Paul rarely ever works off of a written outline, preferring to keep a loose mental outline in his head instead. “For creative writing I can only remember two times over the years that I've been writing that I actually wrote out a loose outline for something.” His mental outlines require a few specific guide posts before he can start writing. He needs to know whether the piece is about conflict or harmony, and most of all he needs to know who his characters are. Paul says he needs the “basic idiosyncratic elements of each of the characters that I wish to write about. Something that separates them from the general idea of ‘man’ that I have come to understand down through the years. Something that makes them unique. Those traits are basically what I think about. Also, key lines that I think they'd say, something clever that encapsulates them.” Drafting Before going to work on anything, Paul tries to make sure he’s well-rested, and that he has coffee and plenty of cigarettes on hand. He does his writing almost exclusively on a computer or typewriter, and only uses pen-and-paper in emergency situations, when he is traveling or otherwise lacking in access to a computer. “I find that the ideas come so quickly, and I'm so eager to get them down for fear of losing them, that pen-and-paper ultimately annoys me.” Paul’s impulses towards self-censorship are incredibly powerful, so when working on a first draft, he tries to just get as much down on paper as he can without thinking about it, otherwise “the internal editor that constantly calls me a hack [will] force me to delete everything I just wrote every two minutes.” He will occasionally make small revisions while drafting, but for the most part, he just keeps writing until he feels he has “something significant down on the page.” One interesting aspect of the Paul’s drafting process for his drama is that he tends to write scenes all out of order, to be rearranged later. He takes his time with his writing and doesn’t set a rigid schedule for himself, although he usually finishes a piece in a few weeks. As he writes, he tries to cover many different angles of a story, approaching it from the perspective of as many different characters as he can. Revising Although Paul has no set limit for the amount of time he spends drafting, he seldom spends more than a week in revision, usually going through only two or three drafts. Once he has everything down in front of him, Paul starts rearranging scenes and revises them heavily as he does so. While this process is somewhat unusual, he assures me that “it tends to work out well.” When revising, Paul looks for inconsistencies and areas “where I am not being as honest as I could be.” His primary concerns are “making sure the story forms into a cohesive whole, that each scene follows the other in a way that either makes a lot of sense, or makes one think in a different way about why I would have followed one scene with such a contrasting one.” Paul tends to be a bit secretive about his work, and rarely seeks outside feedback. “I will often show sections of my work to others, but never the whole piece. Often, especially with screenwriting, I am writing the script for a producer, which means he has to see it as it is coming along, so I will let the producer read the whole thing as many times as he wants.” Editing When editing, Paul likes to listen to neo-classical music “or something similarly complex” as he reads through his work. He doesn’t pay attention to story or character, but just looks for mechanical errors. “I find that if I can look at my work as not my work, I can catch spelling or grammar mistakes much easier.” -- Fall 2006 |
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