Like Iris Murdoch, Robert Altman has produced two very different sorts of works: small-cast pieces such as Streamers, Secret Honor (with a cast of one), and Fool for Love; and large-cast movies such as Nashville, Mash, The Player, and Short Cuts. Cookie's Fortune falls in the second category.

I know you guys think it's weird to go see a movie and find lessons in it about the craft of writing, but I find it weird to watch a movie and not be aware of such lessons. I think it's very enlightening to watch how the opening of Altman's film (maybe the first half hour or longer) immediately captures the viewer's interest, long before any story line begins to emerge. It's a good example of how, aside from such things as voice and structure, a piece of writing (whether fiction or poem) can engage the reader simply because it contains interesting details, i.e. tells or shows the reader things he wasn't already familiar with. Joyce understood this. Flaubert understood this. Edna O'Brian understands this. John Irving understands this. William Stafford, at least when he wrote ``Ceremony,'' did not understand this.

In principle, it ought to be easier fill a poem or story or novel with interesting details and make it visually interesting than to do the same with a movies, because with a novel or story there are no budget limitations: everything comes out of the writer's head. But in practice, the fact that things in a movie usually have to be obtained in the real world tends to be a plus. The director and other creative crew have to go out into the world seeking what they need, and then they come across things they'd never even thought of. Over and over again one finds that some of the most notable things in a film were things that the crew came across by accident, such as the moose in the opening credits of Northern Exposure. The director, or the cinematographer, or the art director will say, ``Hey, maybe we can use this.''

Or an actor will make a mistake in his lines and then the other actors and director will play off that. For instance, in Midnight Run, Charles Grodin had a line that was written, ``As an accountant...'' but instead he read it as ``As your accountant....'' and De Niro picked up on that, saying, ``Hey, you're not my accountant...'' and Grodin and De Niro went off on a long riff from that beginning which turned out to be one of the most memorable interactions in the film.

With Altman this sort of thing happens especially often, because Altman doesn't like to plan his shoots very carefully in advance. He'll look around the set and something will strike his interest, and he'll say, ``Let's see if we can use this some way.'' People who have worked with Altman often comment on this fact, saying that if, for instance, the set is supposed to contain a file cabinet, then that file cabinet had better be unlocked and have something inside, because Altman may decide that it would be a good idea for one of the actors to go over and open it up, even though there's nothing about that in the script.

Certainly in writing a story, I sometimes do the same thing. Something shows up in a story, and I hadn't planned on it even being there, but I realize that I can use it, make a big deal of it, riff off it, use it to change the direction of the story. But one of the things I think that I as a writer can learn from movie makers is that when I get stuck on a story (or even when I don't), something that can help is to go out into the world and look for things that are interesting. And if I come across something interesting, try to find a way to work that into the story, even if it initially doesn't seem to have any relevance.

When I first started writing fiction, I was taught Poe's principle that everything in a story, every single sentence, should be there for a reason and contribute to the overall effect one wants for the story. But now I'm starting to understand that although having a well structured story is nice in a way, it's something that's more important for the writer's satisfaction than the reader's. The reader wants something that's interesting, and it's more important to include things that are interesting than to have a carefully worked out game plan.

Another thing I can learn from Altman's films is that there are a lot of different ways to be interesting, so that different films (and different stories and different poems) can be interesting for different reasons.

In Short Cuts, Jack Lemmon does a marvelous monologue in a hospital cafeteria, and the camera just locks in on his fact and stays there so that the audience can concentrate on what Lemmon is saying. In The Long Goodbye, on the other hand, Sterling Hayden was clearly not much good at doing the sort of improvisation Altman asks from his actors, and when he has a long dialogue with Elliot Gould, he rambles on here and there in a fairly boring fashion. So to keep the scene interesting, Altman has the camera constantly circling around the two characters and zooming in and out. Some critics have tried to find a deep thematic significance to the weaving of the camera in this scene, but to me at least it's fairly obvious that Altman was trying to make the scene visually interesting to make up for the fact that the dialogue was a bore.

When I write fiction, I know that I'm good at writing dialogue. I learned long ago that dialogue needs to be unpredictable. If the reader can read one character's line and pretty well predict the second character's response, then the dialogue is going to be boring. Also I've learned that a good thing to do is, after I've written my first draft of a piece of dialogue, to cross out roughly half the words. In particular, any sentence that starts, ``Yes,'' or ``No'' either needs to be changed or can be omitted altogether.

What's hard for me, though, is to make my writing visually interesting and interesting in terms of action.

Well, it seems to be taking me quite a bit of time to get to comments on ``The American Poetry Wax Museum,'' so I guess I'd better leave that for a separate message.