by
Walter Murch
advice/writing
Patricia Highsmith,
Ursula K. Le Guin,
Mary Karr,
Anne Lamott,
David Foster Wallace,
Martin Amis,
Vijay Prashad,
Annie Dillard,
Syd Field
tips
Wherever he goes, he should try to think, as much as possible, about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the film. It is difficult, but it is necessary to create a barrier, a cellular wall between shooting and editing. Fred Zinnemann would go climbing in the Alps after the end of shooting, just to put himself in a potentially life-threatening situation where he had to be there, not day-dreaming about the film’s problems.
Then, after a few weeks, he would come down from the Alps, back to earth; he would sit down in a dark room, alone, the arc light would ignite, and he would watch his film. He would still be, inherently, brimming with those images from beyond the edge of the frame (a director will never be fully able to forget them), but if he had gone straight from shooting to editing, the confusion would be worse and he would have gotten the two different thought processes of shooting and editing irrevocably mixed up.
Do everything you can to help the director erect this barrier for himself so that when he first sees the film, he can say, “All right, I’m going to pretend that I had nothing to do with this film. It needs some work. What needs to be done?”
useful advice for writing too
[...] Nabokov has elsewhere made the point that all writers who are any good are funny. Not funny all the time – but funny. All the lasting British novelists are funny; the same is true of the Russians (Gogol, Dostoevsky, and, yes, Tolstoy are funny); and this became true of the Americans. Franz Kafka, whatever your professor might have told you, is funny. Writers are funny because life is funny. [...]
The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of a chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the gavel). The end of a novel, you’ll be relieved to learn, is usually straightforward, because by then everything has been decided, and with any luck your closing words will feel preordained.
Don’t let your sentences peter out with an apologetic mumble, a trickle of dross like ‘in the circumstances’ or ‘at least for the time being’ or ‘in its own way’. Most sentences have a burden, something to impart or get across: put that bit last. The end of a sentence is weighty, and that means that it should tend to round itself off with a stress. So don’t end a sentence with an –ly adverb. The –ly adverb, like the apologetic mumble, can be tucked in earlier on. ‘This she could effortlessly achieve’ is smoother and more self-contained than ‘This she could achieve effortlessly’.
Temperament (as I’ve said) is vital. You need an unusual appetite for solitude, and a strong and durable commitment to the creative form (you have to want to be in it for life). These are qualities that the dedicated reader already has. You will also need this strange affinity with the reader – unendingly complex though almost entirely unconscious. Then there is a fourth element…
Borges, in his long conversation with the Paris Review, at one point spoke with bafflement about all the people who simply fail to notice the mystery and glamour of the observable world. In a sentence that stands out for its homeliness, he said, ‘They take it all for granted.’ They accept the face value of things…
Writers take nothing for granted. See the world with ‘your original eyes’, ‘your first heart’, but don’t play the child, don’t play the innocent – don’t examine an orange like a caveman toying with an iPhone. You know more than that, you know better than that. The world you see out there is ulterior: it is other than what is obvious or admitted.
So never take a single speck of it for granted. Don’t trust anything, don’t even dare to get used to anything. Be continuously surprised. Those who accept the face value of things are the true innocents, endearingly and in a way enviably rational: far too rational to attempt a novel or a poem. They are unsuspecting – yes, that’s it. They are the unsuspecting.
All right. Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, was written in a Berlin boarding house, when both the author and the century were about twenty-five. His situation was as follows: having fled the Bolsheviks, he and his Jewish bride now awaited the Nazis (the NSDAP was formed in 1920); his father had been shot dead by a (Russian) fascist in 1922; his mother and his sisters were penniless in Prague. Vladimir was deracinated, declassed, and destitute. And yet Mary bears not the slightest trace of melancholy, let alone alienation or nausée. Indeed, the only angst Nabokov ever suffered from had to do with ‘the impossibility of assimilating, swallowing, all the beauty in the world’. And his first novel ends with his promise to meet that world with ‘a fresh, loving eye’. That’s your situation. You are a stranger in a strange land; but you come to it with a fresh and loving eye.
One of the writers remarks that the best advice he ever got about character development was to ask oneself: What is the lie this character harbors about himself? “All of us have a lie that we hinge our entire lives on,” he says.
[...]
There is a long moment of silence, and then the woman who has been diagnosed with cancer speaks. “You probably know what it is, though,” she says to the other woman. Then she gestures broadly, including the entire table. “All of us probably know, implicitly, what our lie is. Just think about it.”
I worry, once again, that my oblique approach has managed only to muddle things. I suppose I’ve been trying to suggest that subtlety is always a sign of mystery, and that our attitude toward the former is roughly commensurate with our tolerance for the latter. I have come to regard it as something of a dark art, a force of nature that can be summoned but never fully harnessed, and can backfire at the slightest misstep. Anyone can pick up a bullhorn and make her intent clear to all, but to attempt something subtle is to step blindfolded into the unknown. You are always teetering on the brink of insanity. You are always working on a wire strung across an abyss, hoping to make it from one end to the other without losing your balance, or your mind.
Perhaps this is another way of saying that subtlety is a transaction of faith. The artist must have faith that her effects will be perceived in the way she intends; the reader must trust that what he detects, beneath the surface of the text, is not merely a figment of his imagination. The disciple must come to believe that the whispers he hears in the wilderness are not the wind, or the devil, but the voice of his Creator. All religion, all forms of love, depend on this leap.
Art cannot by itself change the world. It can provide insight and perhaps an epiphany — but it does not change the relations of power in the world. For that, one needs organizational power and struggle.
But art at the same time must be free to engage with contradictory consciousness without a predetermined end — the ends of politics, for instance. If a political line drives the process of elaboration, then we would know the answer to our question before we began our studies among the people. In order to best understand social relations, socialist writing and art must have freedom to come as close as possible to the contradictory common sense and produce — again in conversation with the people, with one’s comrades — the good sense of our times.
Antonio Gramsci in his prison notebooks has a theory of elaboration, which I think is very important. Gramsci argued that people in a capitalist system absorb ideas from a variety of sources — family, education, media, workplaces — and that the totality of these notions forms what he calls “common sense.” Now this common sense is useful because it explains a great deal about the world as it is — and how it appears. But there are fundamental elements of the world that remain difficult to fully understand. There are contradictions that make no sense.
Gramsci says that the mass of the people experience reality through a contradictory consciousness. Gramsci argues that the communist or the socialist goes among the people, interacts with them, and listens intently to their common sense. Then the communist activist or journalist critically elaborates upon their common sense, takes this contradictory common sense and elaborates it into “good sense” or philosophy. Good socialist nonfiction writing does not assume that it emerges from the genius of the writer or an inspiration — but it comes from being absorbed by the common sense around us, and by being honest about elaborating it into philosophy of good sense.
To come at this from another level: socialist writing is about democracy, about seeing readers as part of our process and not as consumers who must buy the commodities we produce. Socialist writing should be a conversation.