A series of lectures given in December by David Milch are now available online. Milch is famous for his work on Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Deadwood, and most recently John From Cincinnati.
These lectures are brilliant, challenging, hugely entertaining, and sometimes maddening. There's no question that Milch is a talented writer, but his real gift is telling stories in the old-fashioned mode of the raconteur. He's the loudest guy in the bar and he can talk all night to anyone willing to listen. And of course it has to be bar because Milch comes from the school of writing for tough guys -- hard drinkers, drug abusers, wife beaters, guys with "boundary issues." If you want to be a writer you better come from alcoholic parents who beat you to sleep every night while they gambled away the family fortune and left you with a child molester for a baby sitter. If you're going to write, you've got to get down and dirty, and bring it, because Milch is the kind of guy who will wrestle you to the ground and beat you with his words until you cry uncle. This is serious stuff here.
There's a lot of psychologizing in Milch's thought process. For him, the writer is a deeply wounded person who through childhood traumas has been made to feel apart from the world. Writing is the process the writer uses to bring himself back into the community by transforming those wounds into art. The goal is to be authentic. To be honest and true and not use your writing to bury those wounds or disguise them. You've got to bring them right out into the harsh light and make what's personal and hurtful to you, universal and profound to the reader.
But Milch is not just lecturing, he's telling stories, and the wilder and more obnoxious he gets the more you realize that he's putting on a demonstration. He's proving a point. Your reactions to him are the Q.E.D. of his method because he wants to provoke you. That's what good writing is supposed to do.
No outlines!
That's the thing that gets you, as you sit there listening, trying to be a good student of the "How To Write" school. He offers up no paradigm, no thoughts on 3 act, 4 act, 5 act structure. No recommendations on how to break a story down into beats. For Milch that's the Ego's way of keeping you from writing. You have to get past all of that and write. Writing is writing. Thinking about writing is NOT writing. You've got to dig down into your Id and let it speak.
It's a nice antidote to Dramatica and the Hero's Journey and all of the Structuralist methods you're likely to encounter out there in the marketplace. On the other hand, I remember a lot of wannabe writers from my student days who shared Milch's personality but none of his talent. They wanted to be Beats, to write from their hearts, experience everything, tap into the wild untapped imagination of the world, and sing, sing, O muse. But their work was sloppy, unedited, and often unreadable. They had no discipline, no willingness to rewrite, to critical eye for murdering darlings. Everything they wrote, they assumed, was good, because it had come in the heat of inspiration. Going back would just kill it.
In the end, they failed Milch's last test which is to take what's meaningful to oneself, and tell it in a way that's meaningful to others. He borrows from Coleridge's distinction between Fanciful associations which are mechanical and personal and Imaginative associations which are organic and communal.
Milch also has interesting things to say about St. Paul, Kirkegaard, Melville and many other poetic theories that I didn't quite catch the first time. Well worth another listen.
[via Jill Golick's Running With My Eyes Closed]
