Nothing Sexy: The Writing Process

In the previous post, I mentioned one of the many things I envy about movie making: montages. They can be sad, heartbreaking, exciting, inspiring, and revealing. Montages may seem like a cheap way of skipping the details, of taking the work out of actually showing the complexity of time, but if done well, they can be incredible moments of brevity. Pixar has long been lauded for its ability to tell stories and show the passage of time in its movies. There’s the scene in Toy Story 3 showing Andy growing up and growing out of his use for his toys. There’s the scene in Up where we see Ellie and Carl’s entire relationship in the span of four minutes. And you can’t talk about montages without mentioning any of the Rocky movies. One montage shows Rocky going from out of shape bum to a bona fide boxer who can run up steps and jump around a lot. Another montage shows the juxtaposition of Rocky training in the elements while his Russian counterpart dopes up and trains with “technology.” He even gets freeze frames.

Now I’m still figuring out the best way to present passage of time in written form, but I think my biggest lament is the lack of a writing montage. I mean in movies. Well, let me clarify. How do you reflect the process of writing? It’s amazing watching the “making of” videos for movies, music albums, art work. You can watch the process, hear the progression, as the inner-workings of the endeavor are fleshed out. Oh, look. It’s the three guys I love from that band I love messing around with their instruments creating that riff I love. Awesome! Oh, look. So that’s how they made that scene where the cars flip over that boat through the explosion!

Writing? It’s just not sexy or exciting.

Sure, movies have made writing look cool, but I assure you, it’s not.

They show a man (or a woman—women can write too) with disheveled hair, running a hand through sweat soaked strands, two-day old stubble insulating the face, and he’s leaning forward, perched on the front of the chair. The type writer. That dingy, battered nemesis. It stares at him. He despises it. That barbaric beast of a machine that challenges our author to form some sort of sentence that could change the world. His lips purse in determination. He scoots the chair forward and his fingers begin to type away at the keys. The hammer slams against the parchment. But it’s rubbish, drivel. It simply won’t do. He rips the page out of the typewriter, wads it up, and throws it in arbitrary corner x. He feeds a new piece of paper into the machine and sets to work again. The carriage shuffles to the edge of the paper; he slams it back with a ding. More rubbish. Another wadded up piece of paper in the corner. Another clean sheet. One more wad. The pile slowly grows. Soon it’s a small mountain. The author grabs at the bottle he’s been drinking from only to find it’s empty. In a fit of defeated rage he smashes the bottle against the wall and screams into his hands. Oh, and there’s an ash tray full of cigarette butts. I almost forgot the cigarettes.

Ah, writing.

Now you might be saying, Mark, that sure seemed kind of cool, gritty. Sure, movies have done a great job making the writer seem cool, or the act of writing the next great novel something intriguing, but I assure they will not be making a “Behind the Novel” anytime soon.

In front of me, I have a Camelbak water bottle, a Starbucks Refreshers Strawberry Lemonade, and a laptop. I don’t use a typewriter, and I’ve never thrown away a manuscript. My biggest enemies are YouTube and Facebook. I have nothing eating at me, at my soul. I don’t write out of my pain as a sort of catharsis. I’m not addicted to alcohol. I haven’t lost my wife (though I may do so if my writing doesn’t ever take off). My first novel was about a detective who loves big guns and fast cars—all things I know nothing of, unless you count a 194 horsepower, 4-cylinder Hyundai.

Nothing sexy.

Adaptation, starring the usually laughable, but here perfect, Nicholas Cage, does one of the best jobs at portraying the writing process—the desire to create literature, to avoid the clichés, the frustration of the overnight success, the daily distractions, the difficulty to even put something down on the page (right now, I’m writing this blog post to avoid working on my book). But this representation in the movie doesn’t show you writing. It narrates what you are watching through inner monologue. If you watched me at Starbucks, I would ask that you stop. But if you persisted, you would see nothing. You would learn nothing. You would grow bored. You would question whether everything you see in movies is accurate.

Writing is hard. Being a nurse is harder. Being a construction worker is more taxing. Writing is not hard. It’s not physically taxing. But it’s not easy. It’s a learned process. It’s a practiced art. It is work. And maybe the montage would consist of the early and later works, though for some authors, it seems their best work is early on.

I don’t feel I have something monumental to get out on the page. I want people to read what I write. I want to write true literature, things that can be described as “haunting” or “taut” or “a tour de force.” (Tour de force as a descriptor for my work has been one of my goals since I can remember. I find it hilarious.) I also want to write five day beach reads. I don’t want to write Pulitzer winning fiction on the assimilation of cultures in the US. I don’t want to write clichéd Michael Bay books. I want to write something in between, entertaining, but thought provoking. I want someone to pick up one of my books to be entertained and find that they were also deeply moved. I want someone to pick up one of my books to be deeply moved and find that they were also entertained. And you can’t really capture that in a montage. You can’t film it. But that’s the process. The grind. Or maybe lack thereof.

Nothing sexy.