I hate movies about writing.
I love them too.
I hate them because they’re inaccurate. They don’t show the reality of what it’s like, to sit here in front of the white screen, with the little cursor blinking, like it’s expecting something from you. You don’t know what you have to give that day, what does it want?
I love them because they feel so close to striking what the real feeling is. When you sit down, and the story just flows. The words come faster than you can think them up, like lines you had jotted down weeks earlier are laying themselves. It’s weird, man.
But no, that happens at the beginning of a project. And the end.
But the middle?
There are so many unfinished works out there, because the daily grind of putting words when the story gets slower, and deeper, is too abysmal. It feels too much like, well, work. Sometimes you might hit a patch of black ice, and you slide through a particular stretch of road; that’s scary, because it reminds you of what you’re missing, and how much you don’t want to lose that feeling.
I hate the movies because they make the act of writing look more like the finished product, than the dull, cell-blocked spreadsheet that it really is. The act of creating something, anything, looks an awful lot like a timesheet at your 9-5, more so than it resembles these movies, or than the end result itself.
I love them because they fool me into believing, for a moment, that I am doing something close to writing, almost like research of the craft. It feels good for a little while.
It’s quite the conundrum. And I don’t see a way out of it, since it clearly still plagues even paid authors (Martin, Rothfuss, low-hanging-fruit no. 3).
The only way out still remains to be through.
Thanks for reading.