Writing, Living, Writing

Writers block is not a thing. It happens, but only because writers describe our self sabotage as having a block.

I have sat at a desk or at a cafe table for hours, wordless, as all writers have. I have never been thoughtless, though. One method of channeling my thoughts I have found is talking to someone I have never met. Those first few seconds with a stranger are like nothing else. They give you a smile or a look of disgust or something ambiguous in between. I wonder what they are thinking. A second passes, then you wonder, “What does it look like I am thinking?” Then my mind is off and running, making up a story which lead this person here, to this city, to this bookstore.

So that is my resolution. Stimulate my writers brain by encountering novelty. New people, new faces.

I have thought for years about this quote, spoken by Robert McKee in the Spike Jonze film “Adaptation.”

“Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your f***ing mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every f***ing day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every f***ing day, someone, somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life. And why the F*** are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it. I don't have any bloody use for it.”

The rant is a blindly partisan answer to a common dilema in storytelling. How much incident do we contrive in order to make our story thrilling, distracting, moving? And how long do we dare explore the stasis of a characters life? after all, the drama of many lives is that of being stuck and needing to formulate and then execute a plan out of the stuckness.

I agree with McKee. Unquestionably, things happen every day. Most of them are not violent or sexy or life altering. Most of them are deeply subjective. Zooming in close enough on a character and letting them reveal themselves as a dreamer and a cynic and a leach is the most satisfying path in all storytelling.

The two books I return to the most often, Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby and Highsmiths The Talented Mr. Ripley, are both set up this way. We observe the minutiae of lives that are spent arguing with others and convincing and conniving and dancing and flirting. And then when we know these characters intimately, but still are wondering how they will respond to their next trial, violence and betrayal burst into the story, like the natural beasts that have always been inside us all, submerged beneath an obedient coating of civilizational socialization.

So write about what you see and live through. Little jealousies and affections and awkward meetings and project partners at work who you can’t stand. And then imagine a story that takes the small frictions and turns them into wars and fights. And Green Lights.