Theory And Method

Conversations With The Smart Crowd

I was talking to Dr. CC at the launch of 'Glissando' and the conversation turned toward just how you teach something like creative writing. He was trying to offer up a method of shaking ideas loose on a regular basis to get past the inner censor that stops the creativity from flowing, and he sheepishly offered that there was no real theoretical basis why such a method should work.It seemed rather incongruous coming from Dr. CC who is always so forthcoming with eloquent theories on most things literary.

As with all these things, people who work in creative ares all necessarily develop methods of doing things but they don't necessarily connect to literary theory. Professional people who work in screen writing all have methods for producing requisite pages for the screen but they're not directly related  to any theory on screen analysis. This phenomenon is actually quite common were the theory of something is actually grown apart so much from the method of something that the theory actually doesn't offer much except more censorship of ideas.

This got me thinking about my time way back when at AFTRS and it struck me just how much time we spent on critical theory of analysing the screen a posteriori to the production but spent so little time developing a method of film making. There were many practitioners at hand whose brains you could pick but nobody was offering a comprehensive view of the method(s) to film making. I imagine it is still the case that they teach way too much theory and not enough method.

That is all 'in general', but I do want to offer something that might be of interest. Having a method is likely going to bail you out of trouble more often than having lots of theory. Whatever the creative area you're working in, it's worth having at least 3 methods to address the triangle of needs: Cheap, Fast, Good. It's true you can only have a combination of 2 out of 3 in the triangle of Cheap, Fast, and Good, but in undertaking any project you should have a method for doing it Cheap-and-Fast, or Fast-and-Good or Good-and-Cheap. The vast majority of creative projects will at least ask of you to take one of these options, and therefore it is of great value to have a method for doing something at least 3 ways.