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I shake off my boredom, get dressed, and go out into the street. Madrid is empty, except for the pavement opposite where I live and walk, the Paseo de Pintor Rosales, where there are a lot of people lounging on café terraces or strolling around, families with children. On a bench I see a Latin American couple, engaged or recently married, they are both very short and are looking excitedly at the passersby. I also see a lesbian couple, almost identical in their neutral dress style, their casually masculine hairstyles. They’re also quite short. They are older. I’d love to know more about them. I’m glad that they have found each other. I am always impressed by the silence of couples.
“To write, you must refuse yourself to others; refuse them your presence, your love. You must disappoint your friends and your children. For me, this discipline is a source of satisfaction, even happiness, and at the same time, the cause of my melancholy,” Slimani says in her book. I don’t agree, or not entirely. I’ve taken this paragraph literally and it’s brought me no happiness or satisfaction, but lots of melancholy. It’s unpleasant, at least to me, to realize that you’re begrudging with your time, even if the business of writing and directing films is one that completely absorbs you. Maybe Leïla Slimani is right that her work and mine require countless hours of isolation, but I deeply miss the contact with other people’s lives, and it’s difficult to go back to how things were, to a time when I was a social creature and led a more communal life, because as you get older, not everything works in your favor, it’s not enough to meet people. Picking up the phone and randomly calling the usual friends isn’t always an incentive. And I think that’s very detrimental, especially for someone like me, who has fed on everything going on around me to write my screenplays—my mother, my childhood, my time with the priests in Catholic school, my years as a young adult in Madrid, the countless friends I hung out with during La Movida, the conversations overheard, the weirdness of some of those friendships, the pain that was caused by intimate personal relationships. If there was one thing I knew for certain when I was young, it was that I’d never be bored. Now I am bored. And that is a kind of defeat.
from The Scent of Flowers at Night i think
I like writers who talk about the act of writing and constantly quote from other authors. Slimani’s book is full of reflections about writing. “I don’t think writers write to gain relief,” she says. I agree. “A writer has an unhealthy attachment to their sufferings, their nightmares. Nothing would be more terrible than being cured of this attachment.” I’m not sure. It’s true that you don’t write when you’re happy, or write about happy characters. Tension and conflict are like beats in music, they are indispensable, they give the story a sort of framework, a structure and a rhythm.
I think this is a weakness I’ve overcome, or at least gotten firmly under control. The one piece of advice I’d give to all mediocre—and not so mediocre—writers, and one I impose on myself, is an exercise in self-criticism. Self-criticism gives you something of inestimable value: calmness, knowing how to wait. And I waited (I’ve been waiting now for more than forty years). One of the other positive aspects of self-criticism is that it makes the inevitable disappointment more bearable.
Given that I can’t, and that I’m too lazy to research the Turkish War, Fonk’s trial, and Goethe, I’ll look for subjects and characters closer to home. This might be a good start: “I was born in the early 1950s, a terrible period for the people of Spain, but a glorious time for cinema and fashion.”
i liked this