Nurturing The Inner Artist

Jake: Hi, I’m Jacob Krueger, and thank you for tuning into a very special episode of The Write Your Screenplay Podcast. This is our 100th episode. I’m so incredibly excited, proud and grateful to all of the listeners that have made this possible for 100 episodes. So, I was thinking, “What am I going to do for my 100th episode?” I wanted to do something special? So, I decided to go back to the source. And for that reason, today I’m going to be interviewing my mom, Audrey Sussman. I’m excited to talk to my mom on this podcast for a couple of reasons. First my mom taught me everything that I know as an artist. I have the only Jewish mother in America who found out that her daughter was going to be a doctor and responded, “Oh, my God, but you could have been an Opera singer!”   So, I’m incredibly lucky to have had a mother who supports my artistic life, and that is something that a lot of people don’t get. in addition to that, my mom taught me everything I know about writing, and not because my mom is a writer, but because my mom is a hypnotherapist. Her work is about the stories that we tell ourselves, not on the conscious level but on the subconscious level, and how those stories take us on journeys of change-- how we can actually change who we are by changing the stories. In this way my mom taught me how to induce a trance in a reader: how to allow a reader to experience a fictional story as if it was real. She taught me how to use image and sound and feeling, and the other modalities that allow writing to feel real and stories to feel real. She showed me how to build structure-- how the human mind puts structure together. And she taught me how to do rewriting-- not how to rewrite a script but by how to rewrite your life! How to change the way you tell yourself the story of your life—not by making it fake, but by finding different layers, and different values to the truth. Another reason I’m very excited to have my mom here is she teaches classes at the studio. She teaches two classes: The Inner Game which is our class about how to take care of the inner challenges to your writing—the subconscious challenges, the fears, the confidence, the procrastination, and also how to connect to your characters on a more profound level. And she teaches our Writing Lab, which is our experimental laboratory where we really push the edges of how writing works.   So, thank you, Audrey, so much. It’s weird to call you Audrey-- but thank you, Mom, for joining us here today. Audrey: I’m really delighted to be here. As I was listening you tell the story of how you learned from me, it is interesting because all I was doing was being a mom who knew how to listen. That just was natural––it was such a natural way of interacting where you are always looking for the good in the person. You are always figuring if a person is feeling a certain way, especially my child, there must be a reason for it. Looking for those stories that you might have been telling yourself-- that was just how I parented and I was always looking for the good. And it sounds like you do the same with your students. I hear you when you teach. Jake: That is probably the most valuable thing that you can learn as a writer. It is so easy to find the bad, and a lot of us, as parents to our inner creative children-- if we ever said to another child what we say to our little inner artist child, someone would be calling child services immediately. And part of being a writer is learning how to be a good parent to that creative child. Because we do need to be a parent to that child; we can’t just neglect that child and leave that child out in the wilderness, or that child will experience a lot of the negative things that happen to artists. We have to be a parent to that child, we have to help guide that child towards the places that they need to go creatively, to learning the skills that they need to learn to succeed. But, a lot of us get way too aggressive with that child, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Audrey: I was thinking of a story. A parent plants some seeds in the ground, and they are supposed to be flowers. And three days go by, and the parent is like, “Well why aren't these flowers yet?” And they dig them up and they’re still seeds! Covers them up, waters them. Next day, waters them. A week goes by and the parent is like, “What is going on here, where are the flowers?” and he starts stamping on the dirt. That’s sometimes what we do to ourselves. “Why don’t I have this done? Why didn’t I write the pages I said I would?” And instead of just watering the seed and saying, “Hey let me just spend five minutes doing something, fifteen minutes, let me look for the good,” we are stamping on it, because we are angry that the flower hasn’t bloomed. It doesn’t work like that. Jake: I think that metaphor that you just gave of digging it up is such a powerful metaphor. Because we do this to our scripts all the time. You start something and it is something you believe in, but it is in an early form. It is still a seed. It isn't a plant yet. Or, you expect it to be a flower, but it turns out it is a beautiful tomato plant. And instead of trusting that the material is going to take the shape that it needs to take, sometimes we end up just digging it up, or reinventing it, or throwing it out, or giving up on it, or trying to shape it into something that it doesn’t want to be. Audrey: You know, it’s funny, when I was a kid I used to write poetry. And I never thought much about it; I never thought it was good or bad, I just wrote. And that is the freedom of a child-- who knew that this was poetry! It is beautiful poetry. Some of it was a little deep and sad, but I look back on it as an adult and I think, “Oh my, if I sat down to write with all that stuff we do to ourselves as adults, I wouldn’t have had that beautiful poetry.” Which makes me think about-- I call them filters through which we see life. You know, if you write something and then you think it is great, and then you look at it the next day and you are like, “Oh this is a piece of trash!” Don’t throw it away. Because three weeks or a year from now you might look at that and you are like, “Oh my God, did I write this?” Even daily our own filters change. Jake: Yeah, it is interesting because that happens with feedback as well. Most scripts that go out aren't really ready to go. Most people rush it. They still have the seed, and they are trying to pretend it is a plant-- it is very easy not to put enough time in as a gardener, or to kind of see the beginning and go, “Let me duct tape and chewing gum some leaves on there and we will just pretend it is full grown.” But, every once in a while you have a script that really is ready to go. You have really done the work and you have created something that is beautiful to you,  that is surprising to you in some way-- that maybe goes even beyond what you expected it to do. And sometimes that happens and you have to recognize that other people have filters too. You are going to get a lot of very negative feedback sometimes. And it is important to recognize what happens as an artist that if you let all that feedback bounce you around, if you react at every bit of advice and every bit of feedback. Don’t get me wrong , I believe in mentorship. I would be nowhere without my mentors. And that is what we try to provide here at the studio, that kind of mentorship so that you have people to bounce ideas off of. But, there is a big difference between bouncing ideas and being told what to do. And there is a big difference between the kind of feedback that opens a door for you, and the kind of feedback that tries to force you to do something that serves somebody else’s filters but not necessarily your own. Audrey: And that is one of the things in The Inner Game that we are doing. If any artist knows the core is safe, the core of who they are is safe, it is so much easier to hear feedback, because it’s not about you. And so in The Inner Game what we are looking at is: how do we change the voice in the back of your head, so that you know you are safe no matter what? And then you can hear what we call criticism or whatever, take in the parts that work and still stay true to your voice and what you believe. Jake: I always think of it like going to the ocean. It is wonderful to get wet, but you can’t take the whole ocean home with you. So when I’m getting feedback, I want to let the waves wash over me.   It is a process. Like all writing, it is a process of trust. You need to trust that the part of you-- the parts that you hold on to, the parts that actually seep into your clothes, or that actually gets you wet when that water washes over you-- those are the parts you need right now. And sometimes that means letting other parts wash back out to sea. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be really valuable things to learn later. But there is a trust process that happens-- that the sea is going to bring those ideas back to you. If you just keep on pursuing your art that those waves will keep coming in. Audrey: Oh my goodness I must have been in my late 20s, I was taking a class, every week I would just argue with the instructor and I was like, “But this doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense.” At week number six she said probably the same thing and I said, “Why didn’t you say that five weeks ago?” And she said, “But I did!” Either she changed the wording slightly or finally I was ready to hear it. Jake: I had a teacher like that too, Joe Blaustein, who was a wonderful painter that I was lucky enough to study with in Los Angeles. And I learned a lot about feedback from Joe because Joe would never tell you what to do. Joe would come around, he would look at your painting and he would be like, “Just take a look at this area right here,...