“And no, I’ve never written a screenplay you old fuck tool, but I vote with my eyeballs and mine are busy with other shows now. Yea, noob, you are old. Look in the mirror and see the epic failure that is your life, how you have been an abject failure at everything you have done. Now you see a wrinkled grey haired failure in the mirror, and you loath it. Good, I laugh at you and your kind. So now when you look in the mirror, you’ll see me looking back at you, laughing at you, belly hurt style.”
Actual quote I pulled from a message board. Does it matter what site, or what is being discussed?
If you have ever written anything, or dreamed about writing something, I am about to show you the scariest thing in the world. I have placed it behind a jump, because this thing…well, it’s not for the wobbly. This image will darken your soul.
Still want to see it? Don’t say I didn’t warn you…
Did you just get a chill? If so, you might be a writer
It’s the blank page. Larry Gelbart used to call the typing paper delivered to the writers’ room on M*A*S*H “those boxes of silence”. In a life full of noise and drama and character and sex and blood, here is…nothingness. If that doesn’t spook you then I suggest you are not taking this stuff seriously. Keep that image in mind.
Part of the business of storytelling, these days, eventually involves having a dialogue with your audience that exists outside the work you created. Having the story you told speak for itself has essentially been outlawed – the audience considers itself entitled to a piece of the storyteller, and they don’t care if what is left of him at the end is bloody chunks.
So there are Q&As. Message board threads. Amateur criticism. A lot of it is great; anyone willing to put this kind of extracurricular time in has an active, invested interest in storytelling, and we need that in our culture. If you treat the TV has a simple feeding tube and take whatever it gives you, you’ll end up looking like something that lives off a feeding tube and then gets slaughtered for taco fillings. We love, love, love passionately-involved audiences.
But there is an inevitable negative undercurrent. Haters, trolls, whatever you want to call them, there are people out there who seem absolutely enraged by something you have done. They have a bottomless supply of vitriol, and they choose to spend their spare time conveying it to you; at length.
Where did it come from? Is it an Internet phenomenon? Certainly there was coordinated and massive hatred trained on singular targets within nerd culture before the Internet became ubiquitous. Just ask this guy. But the Internet seems to have a curious focusing effect. I wonder if it’s like an ineffective group therapy session, where the traumatic wound George Lucas inflicted on us with Episode I is helplessly self-re-gouged every time anything doesn’t go exactly the way we want it to.
“FUCK YOU DIE SHIT FUCK DIE BALLS YOU MOTHERFUCKER. WHY THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR STUPID BIMBO MOTHERFUCKING FACE DIE FUCK AND CUNT BURN DIE I FUCKING HATE YOU.”
Hate mail directed at a critic of a character on the My Little Pony cartoon whose voice was changed to avoid potential insensitive stereotyping. And they say there’s no misogyny on the Internet.
Is this healthy? Criticism can be useful, but what is useful criticism? That’s not a topic I can adequately resolve within what I am trying to say here, but hopefully we can stipulate that there is some significant percentage of audience reaction and response out there which, though urgently-felt, has very little function for a writer other than making them feel like they’re in the stocks getting spat on.
Just because we agreed to take questions doesn’t mean we’re asking for this
Many of these complaints are the same, you just have to change the name of the movie/book/TV episode under discussion. A character did something dumb which advanced the story. A character did something that seems inconsistent with prior behavior. The story is treading too-familiar ground. The story doesn’t make sense.
A lot of this is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe it’s right, maybe it’s not. I can’t litigate the quality of every piece of creativity out there, but what I do know is that you can present the most acclaimed, universally-beloved piece of fiction a culture can produce, and if you put it on a message board there will still be some troll claiming it has “plot holes you can drive a truck through”, that the characters are all cliches, and that it is, in a universe where the movie After Last Season exists, that this is nevertheless THE WORST THING EVER. Their rage will beat against the very structure of their sentences like the bending walls of a wooden cage.
How do you answer that? Is there any point trying?
It’s the same argument. And because it’s the same argument, some of the same counter-arguments are inevitably deployed by the defenders of the work. One of the counter-arguments that produces the most violent indignation is the question “What have YOU ever written/sold/produced?”
There is some usefulness in this question, but I think it is often misinterpreted and incorrectly-used. It is taken as a status challenge in the heat of a clash for dominance, and an unfair and invalid one, probably. You don’t need to be a writer to appreciate writing, and we all agree that even if you are a success in this town, you still might suck. That’s what I want to explore here.
Think back to that blank page. When an actor, in the moment on the set, improvises something brilliant, we are all grateful. But they are working within the context of a character they discovered on the page. The designers are building a world they read on the page. Everyone works off the script, except the writer. The writer (and I include in this case creative producers, directors and others who, particularly in movies, are there at creative conception choosing the building blocks of the story) built the house in which everyone is playing; he or she is the one who deals with the blank page; and having faced a few, I can tell you, they’re daunting.
To write something requires a choice. A choice could be right or wrong. The first choice you make destroys a billion other stories that might have been. That nothingness is infinity, and when the choice faces you to shatter infinity and replace it with something flawed and finite, something that someone out there could PICK APART, you can find your subconscious quickly begging you to find ANYTHING else to do but stare at this horrid white space, or that blinking cursor.
There’s a reason that Barton Fink, that impotent coward of a would-be artisan, was put in such a despairing funk by the instructions: “Wallace Beery – wrestling picture”. A Hollywood hack may be a Hollywood hack, but that would have been enough for a hack to run with. Fink, as we discover, has only his lame common-man agitprop fancies that he probably osmosed at some of the smart parties he attended; and does not know how to genuinely create. The page he is facing isn’t even blank, but it still paralyzes him.
A message board troll shows you the life of his mind
Particularly if you are consuming at the rate required to feel prepared to participate, there is an evolutionary stage you reach as a consumer of culture where you begin to realize that there are a lot of commonalities in this stuff. The Hero’s Journey. The 3-Act Structure. The 12-Bar Blues. When you have reached this stage you feel like you suddenly have goddamn X-Ray eyes; you can see through the surface of EVERYTHING to the structure underneath.
Oh my God, I see it now. Harry Potter is just Luke Skywalker in a world where you can’t master The Force in one training session!
This is a really rough developmental stage. It’s a lot like early adolescence, and I don’t think that is a coincidence. That period in your life when the secret world of grown-ups is at last becoming visible, coinciding with emotional outbursts you don’t understand and overpowering desires you have never before felt, has often been flagged as the stage at which trolls seem to be stuck.
I have watched, by my estimate, well over 2,000 feature films in my life (please don’t comment that you’ve seen 5,000. I don’t care.) And I’m not taken credit for things I glanced at, or saw 20 minutes of and heard about what happens in the rest, or had on in the background one night. I’m not counting TV movies, or stuff that I know my parents played for me as a child but didn’t stick. I mean I really WATCHED these movies, starting credits to end credits, nearly always in a single sitting, actively enough to remember them. Often I remember exactly where I was when I first watched them, and who I was with.
Throw in all the hours of television I have also enjoyed (over 700 episodes just of shows called Star Trek), and that makes for a hell of a lot of stories to flash across my eyeballs. Of COURSE I see patterns and cliches. I see them everywhere. The fact that, from a certain point of view, The Terminator is effectively Halloween with a robot doesn’t diminish The Terminator at all. In fact, it’s just one more thing I admire about how James Cameron was able, not even consciously, I’m sure, to adapt a structure from a seemingly-different genre for use within the incredible world he imagined.
Come to think of it, “The night HE came back!” works as a tagline for this movie, too
At a certain point, simply recognizing something I have seen before stopped making it a crime. I am so grateful for that breakthrough, because suddenly I was really enjoying stories with a richness never before available in my life. And I found myself less angry at stories whose only real crime was not re-inventing the wheel.
There’s an old story I often tell that Robert Zemeckis, in the mid-70’s a young film brat apprenticing with fellow brat Steven Spielberg, had a chance to see an early cut of Jaws. And in the moment that Bruce the shark, only glimpsed and implied for so much of the movie, finally leapt from the water and ate Robert Shaw, Zemeckis laughed and clapped and cheered because he knew enough to see that Spielberg, already a puppy genius, had stuck the landing on that climax.
The next day he went to Spielberg’s office to talk about the movie. The director was listening to an audio recording of the audience noise, in order to see what moments were working or not. When Zemeckis asked him what he was learning, Spielberg replied (and I paraphrase): well, it sounds like it’s working, but there’s this sick lunatic applauding when Shaw gets eaten.
Quint makes the mistake of posting on the IMDB message board for his own movie
Of course, that’s the kind of fan we want, as storytellers. We relish those people who have wrestled with what we do enough to have full appreciation for those rare and amazing moments that just…plain…WORK. And even if you haven’t brooded over the void, and just love to be entertained, and something like that entertains you – we’re fine with that too. It’s what we live for. But what would the trolls say in that moment in Jaws?:
“Shark looks fake”.
“They’re just ripping off 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
“If the shark could always do that, why the f*ck did he wait all this time? This doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why isn’t Quint fighting back more? He sounds like a little bitch all of a sudden. They ruined his character.”
“This movie is the biggest failure of all time, and I’m going to prove my disgust and superiority by downloading it rather than paying for it.”
I fully admit to making all these up
If I tried micromanaging an attorney in the courtroom, or a doctor in the O.R., at a certain point, I am sure that sooner rather than later he would be driven to say something along the lines of “It would take two years of schooling just for you to understand how dumb your question is, so forgive me that my time is too valuable to answer it.” Those wouldn’t be the exact words; there would be swearing.
We all agree with that, right? It feels sensible. But of course, writing feels different. How hard can it be? After all, it’s just a piece of paper…
Once you start wrestling with this thing, and I mean REALLY brooding over it, your whole perspective shifts. You know that so many little details get automatically wrenched from their places by one medium-sized decision that you learn that, for your own health, you have to get less attached to them. If a problem surfaces in a scene, you have the wherewithal to recognize that it probably started somewhere else, and this is just where the carpet poked up. And once you have told more than one story, you accept that, though your vision is worth fighting for, your whole identity is not bound up within one single moment, because you have more stories in you to tell, and there are a lot of surface changes on this one that you can accommodate in the real world of bringing this story to an audience without fundamentally sacrificing a damn thing.
In other words – you start to navigate the world of creative choices like someone who drives a car every day. There is stress, there are unexpected events, but you accept that it isn’t ever perfect but if you got to where you were going alive it can’t be all bad. You don’t spend your whole day crapping your pants and screaming at every sign, piece of debris, or other driver on the road like you’ve never seen them before. (Actually, a lot of people in LA do this. Maybe there’s a connection.)
The point being awkwardly-made in highlighting that the critic in question is not a writer is not about their wealth or success. It’s about the fact that if you have never had the sack to face that blank piece of paper and really DO something with it, then there is no way, within the two seconds your fury is willing to let you listen to me before the next outburst, to make you understand why I probably can’t just snap my fingers and make it into what you’re demanding.
Here’s the scary truth we don’t talk about much: When I’m alone with the blank page and the blinking cursor, I have to guess. That’s all. I don’t have an audience there; what’s more, I don’t have EVERY audience there, because you know that you’re never going to please all of them. You do the best you can to get to the segment you want as deeply as you want. I am confident in my guesses, because I have done this a lot, have witnessed my material play in front of a paying audience, and devoted myself to learning how this stuff works. But my guesses won’t all be right; ever.
That’s what a screenplay is – about seven million guesses. Miniscule guesses built on top of small guesses built on top of medium guesses built on massive, pillars-of-the-world-sized guesses. Every guess is an act of courage within the void of that blank page, and the best screenplay ever written probably guessed wrong about a million times, but we won’t know because we don’t live in the universe where the other one got filmed and proved to be better.
These arguments I am lamenting are effectively unanswerable. Something which has been done before sucks. I have identified something you did which someone did before. Your work sucks. Q.E.D. Or perhaps it is that they have imagined a version of the movie in their head that works perfectly because there is nothing in their head to show them they have ever guessed wrong, and since your work in the real world is imperfect, it will always suck by comparison.
Do we owe it this particular breed of critic to consider their alternative? Even if it absolutely would make it better, how much better? .1% better? What if, in brawling for that .1% improvement, you destroyed something a great actor enjoyed about the script, and they quit, and you just made your movie 5% worse, net? A writer becomes aware of the ripple effects of changes in their work to a degree that is hard for non-writers to intuit. And we also learn that it is very, very rare that we are 100% certain that something NEEDS to be a certain way.
Worse yet – what if their suggestion isn’t better or worse AT ALL, just different? You can answer the suggestion, but to answer the emotional investment of the person making the suggestion (especially when it comes in this fire-cloud of death-rage) is impossible. BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOT WRITTEN.
How do you answer an audience that seems to have absolutely no joy or gratitude over the fact that they were just entertained, often by some of the most talented people in their field worldwide? How do you tell them that, in pioneer days, the best entertainment you might get in six months might be one drunken massacre of Buffalo Gals and a scorpion stinging Jessup’s nethers?
I have done my fair share of movie criticism. I was 21 the first time I got paid to review a movie in a real, professional newspaper, and I’ve stuck knives in hundreds of Hollywood talents. Do I negate my own argument here? When I think back on my emotions with the movies I condemned, though, I don’t remember this kind of hatred. I remember disappointment in talents I thought should know better. Frustration, at incidents of laziness or pandering, or derision in the face of failed pretenses and sloppy work. But it all comes within a greater context of love, a love for this medium that is lifelong and absolute, and a real hope to find something special every time I experience a movie. If movies are a spouse – we might bicker and tease each other sometimes, but I’m still in love every day, and movies don’t have to worry if I’m going to axe them in bed.
How to know when your critic has left reason behind
That started long before I was a writer. So I don’t mean to say that writing is the ONLY means to grow out of this phase and approach a writer on a level of understanding that accommodates the work he must do. I earnestly believe you can get there simply by being an active, discerning, and appreciative viewer or reader. And I don’t want people to stop criticizing the work we do – we need it to keep us sharp, to keep us from resorting to the easy choice, to nurture our desire to surprise you. There is a relationship here that storytellers cannot do without if they ever mean to hone their skills.
Am I spending 3,000+ words basically saying “shut up, this is hard!”? Maybe so. Maybe there’s no establishing dialogue with a volcano. In that case, length might have served me; at the very least, there’s a chance I bored one or two folks down from their boiling point.
But I would invite you, if you think just by recognizing patterns and cliches and flaws in storytelling that you have reached the pinnacle of understanding, or that demanding a change in something is somehow the equivalent of imagining the thing into being to begin with, to gaze into that void for awhile and do something with it. If you never want to change as a person, you might not like the result, because of that whole being alone with yourself and silence thing.
But maybe you’ll write something. And maybe, after you have, you won’t be so angry all the time. Maybe you will start seeing things differently, and finding facets to enjoy even within work which you acknowledge is fundamentally formulaic; because you feel some fraternity with what that storyteller was facing.
And it might mean we end up with one more real writer in the world; and that’s a good thing.