“Sometimes in acting or painting or writing, you just subliminally lose yourself. You do not know where you are.” — Sylvester Stallone.

By PJ Parrish

When I was transitioning from my newspaper career to novel writing, I went at my first romance novel with blind enthusiam and deep ignorance. Back in those medieval times, we didn’t have the internet. Shoot, we didn’t even have computers yet. I didn’t network or get advice and encouragement from a critique group.

I did go to a Romance Writers of America conference once. Let’s just say it was an experience and leave it at that. My freshman effort, The Dancer, got plucked out of a slush pile by an editor at Ballantine Books and off I went.

Until I crashed and burned. I switched to mysteries and turned out some really putrid manuscripts until I found my footing. I also found Mystery Writers of America and didn’t feel as alone anymore.

One thing that always kept me going through the ups and downs was my pure love of storytelling. I’ve been telling fibs since I was a kid. I started putting stories down on paper around 8th grade. But I think I came by my love of storytelling via movies.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid. Wherever we landed, we always found the nearest movie theater. My working mom would drop us off at the “show” where we’d get previews, cartoons and two movies, all for 25 cents. Hours later, we’d stagger out into the twilight, sick on Jujubees and popcorn, and mom would be waiting there in her Chevy Bel-Air.

Sitting in the dark, I saw the light about great storytelling. Why did Imitation of Life make me cry? Why did The Haunting of Hill House scare me witless? Why did I root so hard for Will Kane in High Noon? And did Klaatu make it back to his planet okay?

We talk often here about screenwriting, and what we novelists can take away from it. Dialogue, of course. But we also can learn about the economy of building a scene, how to create empathetic and heroic characters, how to keep an audience’s (reader’s) attention.

My childhood came roaring back to me because I read a article about Sylester Stallone. He has a biography out now called The Steps. (Yes, those steps). Much of it focuses on his horrifying childhood of abuse and neglect. His father beat him, his mother abandoned him, and he was eventually put in a psych ward as a kid. But what strikes me is how he endured these emotional punches and harnessed it into a driving need to become something. Somebody.

He wanted to be a writer. One of his first jobs was as a theater usher for $34 a week. He watched hundreds of movies and started dissecting them. He believed he was too ugly to be an actor. But storytelling? That was what tugged most at his heart.

“I learned more about filming there [in the movie theater] than I could have in any classroom,” he said. “I went home and filled hundreds of notebooks, trying to learn how to write. There are no shortcuts to learning your craft…you have to put in the work.”

Here’s a very short clip of him talking about the writer’s journey. Worth a listen:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=22772360996924Li

This is how he got to Rocky. You’ve likely heard the story behind the mega-hit. Broke and desperate, he wrote it in just three and a half days after watching the 1975 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and underdog Chuck Wepner. United Artists bought the script but wanted Burt Reynold or Ryan O’Neal to star. Stallone held out and the rest is history.

In his book, Stallone talks a lot about developing your craft. He’s big on creating heroic but flawed protagonists.

“I was very lucky, in the golden age of films, when dialogue was important,” he said. “But the dialogue didn’t move me as much as the actual physical embodiment of overcoming odds.”  His approach to character focuses on vulnerability, internal conflict, and real flaws—exemplified by Rocky Balboa, who famously loses the final match in Rocky to preserve emotional and story integrity.

And where did he learn this wisdom? From sitting in a dark theater in 1958 watching the cheesy adventure-fantasy flick Hercules, starring Steve Reeves.

“It changed my life,” he said. He was 12 years old.

So, if you’re sitting there staring at a blank screen or if you’re stalled at chapter 8, go watch a good movie. I can highly recommend The Day The Earth Stood Still. (1951  version)