“UH-OH” AND “MESSY/TIDY”

Michael Hollinger

When I visited my son’s first grade classroom to talk about writing, I knew I wanted to keep it simple. So I decided to tell the students about two principles I consider essential: “Uh-oh” and “Messy/Tidy”. Like most essential principles, I think these two warrant reconsideration even by experienced writers; very often I find myself stuck in a play only to realize that I’ve overlooked some basic truth I thought I’d mastered years ago.

“Uh-oh” affirms the idea that problems are interesting, much more so than things going smoothly. All great fairy tales, stories, and plays have good “uh-ohs” – they’re the moments that make you lean forward a bit and wonder what’s going to happen. (After Goldilocks has helped herself to the bears’ food and fallen asleep, they come home and survey the damage: Uh-oh!  Little Red Riding Hood shows up at Grandmother’s house and notices that the old lady’s features seem bigger than she remembered: Uh-oh!) Virtually every movie preview tells us “Here’s this guy or gal, and here’s what his/her life is like…until ONE day, this crazy thing happens: Uh-oh!" And we’re off to the races.

I forgot this principle when I was writing my play OPUS. In the opening scene of the play, three male members of a string quartet audition a young female player and offer her a job. When I first wrote the scene, she accepted immediately and the scene was soon over. And boring. “Why’s this scene boring?” I wondered. Then I remembered the “Uh-oh” principle. What if she turned them down instead of saying yes? By making this change, the scene became much more interesting, I learned about a side of my female character I hadn’t been aware of, and I set up a whole storyline that would pay off later in the play.

“Messy/Tidy” applies to all creative endeavor. In creating anything – a play, poem, song, painting, even a terrific meal or lovely garden – our minds have to do two contradictory jobs. One of these jobs is generating lots of raw material, the other is trimming, editing, altering and shaping this material in order to deliver the most powerful experience possible. Because finished products seem so, well, finished, it would be easy to assume that these works sprang out of their creators’ minds fully-formed. But in actuality, most artists (including chefs and gardeners, among many others) make a great deal of mess on their journeys toward “perfection.”

One of my best friends is a painter, and I used to be amazed at how paint-splattered he’d get when working on a big canvas.  He seemed like a great painter to me – how come he got so messy? But it would be a mistake to judge the quality of a work by how neat the creator managed to remain while making it. In fact, paying too much attention to the final product in the early stages of a creative act can stifle a lot of creativity – like trying to garden without getting dirty. Good gardeners get dirty. And writers who second-guess themselves and edit (censor) themselves when they’re first generating ideas risk depriving their work of some of the spontaneity, wildness and organic quality it might otherwise have had.

Of course, finished products usually require a great deal of care and polish as well. So I try to make sure that I keep these two contradictory jobs – the first wide-ranging and exploratory, the second exacting and editorial – separate in the writing process. Messy messy messy, THEN tidy tidy tidy. Let the child go nuts, then bring in the grownup to clean up.

Michael Hollinger promises that his new website, www.michaelhollinger.com, will have content soon!