Consider this a little personal diary entry made public. Long story short: I’ve hit a snag in the project I’m working on, and after some floundering I’ve decided to write about it as an attempt to do away with it. Some authorial self-therapy; maybe, if someone happens to have pertinent advice, an attempt at a communal outsourcing of my current hang-ups.
For reasons I may or may not get into here, I’m currently writing a book on filmmaker James Gray. After many months of research I’ve finally started “writing” it; but my trouble has been, or has become, my inability to be satisfied with what it means, practically speaking, to “write” a book. Over the years my writing methods have evolved—through a combination of repetition, intuition, and sheer disgust and boredom at what passes for film writing these days—into some weird, indescribable technique. For example, last year I wrote a pretty long piece on Brian De Palma’s Domino (which can easily be found elsewhere on this page) which, for everything else it may or may not be, is certainly the most pertinent example to date of the way I wish to and try to write.
A peak behind the curtain: that piece was written, from conception to completion, in about two months’ time. I’d estimate that the first month and a half was spent doing what could be termed research and pre-writing. First—bathing in the subject matter, in areas both pertinent and peripheral to the specific topic at hand, amassing fact knowledge while simultaneously letting my emotional knowledge of the subject grow; an immersion, in other words, via reading and thinking. Second—compiling information, jotting down notes; anything I came across, or thought up, that seemed to be of potential value to the final piece, everything from nuts and bolts production information to the farthest flung half-baked philosophical musings of mine that felt spiritually relevant to the project. Third—what I call the “vomit” stage; a process learned both negatively from my post-collegiate distaste for “proper” writing and positively from a few short-lived bouts of intensely diaristic and private film writing that I (very) occasionally did in the past; basically, this vomiting is a kind of glorified and chaotic freewriting where I let loose and try my best to channel my most intimate and poetic inclinations in relation to my thoughts on the particular film/subject at hand—essentially, an attempt to squeeze out everything contained in me that’s interesting, edifying, insightful, thought-provoking, etc. on the film at hand; an attempt, at all costs, to not be boring. I don’t stop this third step of the process until I’m fairly satisfied that I’ve gotten it all out. This usually results in a Word document filled with word vomit, a collection of mostly complete gibberish sprinkled throughout with a surprising amount of coherent and cohesive patterns of thought and even, for my standards, some respectably decent strings of words. And that’s that—all that remains is to trim, polish, and organize it into something resembling publishable material. Very little official editing is done; I prefer, for the sake of reader excitement, to leave the piece with the feeling that it could have just tumbled out of my head, “flaws” and all—which to some degree it did.
In all candor, I was really pleased with what I was able to achieve with that Domino piece. Beyond “good” or “bad,” I firmly believe that it was at least interesting and edifying; people seemed to respond to it in a beneficial way. I detail my process with that piece because, after a few years of finding and refining that particular philosophy of writing, I felt that I had once and for all proven its worth to myself.
I don’t like getting too autobiographical online for many reasons, but a reasonable degree of openness may be necessary to explain what led me to attempt to write a book as my next project. I “graduated” from college in spring 2020, the last two-plus months essentially lost to early pandemic-era shut downs. The amount of leisure time I possessed from the months of March to August was unprecedented in my adult life—I used much of it exploring ideas for different personal projects that, to make a long story short, ended in me starting my Domino piece that August. I moved out of my parents’ house shortly after into my current living situation. All this time, the realities of what the present world was asking of me stared me down, summarized as getting a job—“job,” of course, meaning something society could easily smile upon, preferably attained via the self-advertising of one’s collegiate degree. (Mine happens to be in English, a recognizably useless degree, not that I really cared, and yet still a degree more useful than my other degree, which is so useless I won’t even mention it—again, not that I really cared.) Other ideas for a “career” came and went, in varying degrees of serious consideration, but at year’s end I was left with the increasing certainty that I had no desire to have a “career” doing anything that smelt, to me, of cog-in-the-system soul-sucking respectability. I was satisfied enough with the old summer job that I’d retained for the purposes of sufficiently life-sustaining cashflow that in January 2021 I basically said screw it: I’d work my job and in my free time I’d write a book, specifically one small enough to be completed in a relatively short amount of time and yet big enough to potentially make a decent sized splash upon publication (which, I decided, I wasn’t going to actively think about until I had finished it.)
I landed on James Gray simply because he’s one of my very favorite filmmakers and existing literature on him, at least in book form, is slim to non-existent—plus his filmography is small enough to make the project a reasonable size for a first book. Anyways, if you recall steps one and two of my writing process above, that’s what I’ve spent the greater part of the last ten months doing—pleasurably and without overwhelming amounts of issues, project- or life-wise. But as I’ve entered step number three, I’ve found myself skipping to step four more often than I’d like to. I mostly think this has to do with the problem of size and genre. For an essay length piece like my one on Domino, these steps mostly flow smoothly. But for a book length piece—one that tries to take the form of an essay while including more biographical and informational type writing—these steps have been getting tangled up. I find myself slipping back into the kind of academic form that I used to write papers with in school, which isn’t an inherently bad form, but one I’ve increasingly found unexciting and lacking the spark I’m looking for. This usually happens when I skip the vomit stage and try to write things straight—poetry disappears, dull functionality replaces it. So I’m left with the question of whether my desired writing style is even compatible with book form; perhaps I feel a subconscious pull towards a certain refined style simply because of the way I’m imagining the final product. I wonder if I were simply writing it to publish on this dumb little blog of mine I would still be running into the same mentality problems. Or, rather: I think I’d like to simply not care. Who’s to decide whether “internet writing” is up to snuff to find a place in paperbound form—it’s all arbitrary anyway.
So my internal struggle is really one of practical philosophy. I would like to lean, if at all possible, towards a process of pleasure & poetry rather than one of prescription & perfection. I want to be willing to sacrifice everything in the name of reader edification, even it means alienating myself from everything that the average person associates with the concept of a book. And I wonder, for example, if the people who would be interested in reading a book about James Gray even care what form it takes; or if they would actually prefer it to take the form more closely resembling my here-and-there internet ramblings....
An important
part of this project’s inception comes from my life situation—left in a
position to take creative risks that won’t harm anyone else in their failure
but myself, I feel emboldened to try this at this point in my life as a first
last-ditch attempt to carve out some sort of space where my passion for film
writing doesn’t just become a nights-and-weekends hobby. There are a million
complexities to the past, present, and future of this desire, many of them
having absolutely nothing to do with the small community of online cinephiles that
I feel not only connected to but, in a way, responsible to. For the time being,
however, I just want to put my head down and get this project out of me and
into the world, and deal with everything else afterwards. Hopefully writing
this blog post has contributed in some miniscule way or another towards getting
me there.
