Having read my recent post on how to be a writer, many of you have sent me messages asking for more details. This is a positive development. When you decide to become a writer, the first, natural step is to fret about how to become a writer. But we cannot stay at this stage forever; we must advance to the next step, where we obsessively inquire about the minutiae of a writer's habits. We ask successful writers an inane number of questions about very particular, and largely irrelevant, details concerning the writing process. You being here, at this more advanced stage, means you are getting closer to your dreams of being able to not only say you are a writer, but actually believe it and have those beliefs based in reality.
Any bog-standard writer can tell you the basics: get up at five a.m., meditate for an hour, write a sentence, have breakfast, re-write the sentence, masturbate out of boredom, go online for three hours and affirm you are a writer by watching videos, posting articles, and making comments. This is all simple, obvious stuff. I have been telling aspiring writers this for years. It finally occurred to me last week, after so many questions, that people in general cannot comprehend the most basic tenet of writing: the writing actually writes itself. (That and only write on a Mac. Everything else is heresy.)
Allow me to give you an encouraging (yet disheartening) example. Back in 2018, I decided to try my hand at writing a film script. I sat down at my desk as usual and gazed at the screen. I would like to take credit for the script that emerged, but I must humbly admit that I was a mere conduit of a process borne out of necessity. The story flowed out of a series of deductions, much like Socrates guiding an interlocutor towards the truth via pure reason. Not sure how this works? Let me show you.
Your story needs a protagonist, right? Voilà! You have your main character. He's a man, because (duh!) I'm a man, and I'm writing this. But only half the population is male, so perhaps a female lead would also be good. To make life easy, they should have some sort of relationship. They could be friends or related, but let's make things easy and say they are in a relationship — an Eve for my Adam. I don't have children, so they can't have any children. Why not? Maybe that's a source of conflict. Of course! They are in a creative field like me and have been too focussed on their careers to have kids. But careers in creative fields are hard to find, so perhaps one of them had to settle for another career. The lack of children at thirty-five is not such a big deal in 2018, so I will have to make them a bit older.
Now, where to set this? Well, for real commercial success, it will have to be in English. And set in the United States. Creative Americans, as we all know, only live in either Los Angeles or New York City. Nobody outside those city limits is intelligent enough to be a writer. L.A. is too sleazy, so we will go with New York. If they're New Yorkers, then they have to be somewhat neurotic, like every single resident of NYC. Neurotic New Yorkers are tremendously self-aware, so we will need to have a psychologist character, or, at very least, characters who are well-versed in psychology. It has to be psychology. It's the master narrative that explains everything. (I've been shouting this ironically at psychologists until I'm hoarse for years, but they stubbornly refuse to get offended, asking instead why I think that.)
So, now we have a creative couple, struggling to have a child. This source of drama dampens the joyful, creative spirit I want in this film, and as I am a creative person and must insist that creativity is affirmed. We can work in some whimsical quirks, but perhaps another creative character might help. They will have to be young, because true creative spirit only resides with those who are coming of age. A girl. I'm not a girl, but inspired young people are all women nowadays. She's also quirky, and her journey must be a triumph for her creativity. It logically follows that she will act as a surrogate child to the couple. Her story will be hard to reconcile with the main story, but that is a plus, as we want to avoid anything like a conventional plot because my life is not a conventional plot and looking that far beyond myself is too much work.
You might well be impressed by that little creative exercise, the ideas spawning from virtually nothing more than simple reasoning. However, that which is easily accessible to me is accessible to others. That same year, someone else beat me to it. Private Life is virtually what I had in mind, including the dour couple. They even cast Paul Giamatti, who I knew would lap up such a role, and some actress who looks likes she's had the same cold for twenty years. The film very cleverly includes black characters. If you aren't black, like me, it can be a struggle to write a black character. Private Life has black characters, but they don't have any lines, they're only in one scene, and we are given absolutely zero information on their relationship to the main characters. They are just there at the Thanksgiving dinner. Perhaps some white people in the States give each other black people acquaintances as presents?
Private Life is plot-shy and driven by vignettes, which is great, because you can indulge all the little ideas that you have. The emotional through line in the film is the desire to be a parent. The story ends with the couple waiting nervously for a woman who promises to give them her baby for them to adopt. The credits roll as they wait, and we sense that the mother will not show up, as our protagonists sit awkwardly in a midwestern diner. This ending differs from what I had in mind. In my story, the male lead consoles his wife with a speech about how a life of little moments and observations and mildly eccentric characters is its own reward. She replies "True. There is nothing else to live for but those moments when you are as bourgeois and self-absorbed as we are."
I hope you, fellow writer, take encouragement from this episode. It ended badly for my ambitions, but that need not be the case for you. I feel confident that your script about a couple living in New York and/or Los Angeles could get made. Just look at the recent Marriage Story. Let it write itself and shoot it off to production companies. Like a self-aware latecomer sneaking into party, slip your dime-a-dozen story in with all the others — an unobtrusive addition that nobody notices or cares much about.
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| Me "enjoying" Private Life. |
