Writers as characters

• The Onion A.V. Club selects 6 Memorable Books About Writers Writing.

The winners: Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk, The Poet by Michael Connelly, Misery by Stephen King, Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. A fun selection, and much preferable on the whole to Dave White's rather pedestrian "Writers on film" article at MSNBC.

Writers are boring to watch

• Columnist Jeffrey Wells talks about the difficulty of making a good movie about writers at Hollywood Elsewhere.

Good points from Mr. Wells, whose website I wrote for briefly, once upon a time:

Writers --- serious writers of books and plays as opposed to, say, journalists -- are not very interesting people to make films about. They're almost as bad as painters. Morose, self-destructive depressives...terrific. Unless the film follows the writer on an intense real-life adventure of some kind, as Fred Zinneman's "Julia" did with an episode in the life of the young Lillian Hellman. Or better yet, if the movie somehow injects its writer character into a surreal realm of his/her own devising, like Joel and Ethan Coen did with John Turturro's gloom-head screenwriter in "Barton Fink", or like David Cronenberg did with a William S. Burroughs-like character in his adaptation of "Naked Lunch."

From another post:

The history of movies about writers is mostly colored in varying shades of tedium.

He's right -- there's nothing terribly cinematic about a guy sitting at a typewriter for hours at a time, wandering around the office, smoking, drinking, writing some more, petting the cat, playing with the stress ball, wandering around some more, writing some more... watching grass grow would be more exciting. Still, there are exceptions; Wonder Boys and Adaptation come to mind.

What kind of crap are you reading this summer?

It must be the temperature; the higher it goes, the lower the standards sink. Like such a fuddy-duddy I sound, but still... how it is that summertime came to equal dumb, weightless entertainment has always mystified me. Yeah, I like to see girls in bikinis and shit blowing up just as much as the next guy. That's me, down there in the middle of the theatre, hooting at car chases and leering at Keira Knightley, mainlining Skittles and soda like heroin. (Oh, and in case you haven't heard: Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane.)

Still, when it comes to the reading, my habits tend to be inversely proportional to the rest of the world's. (I save the silly crap for the wintertime, when I'm so brain-fried by cabin fever that even a Clive Cussler potboiler could seem stunningly profound.) Last summer was the one I picked to dive into Swann's Way and War and Peace; the summer before, it was Heller's Something Happened and Barth's Coming Soon. I don't know what it will be this summer, but impossible behemoths like Gravity's Rainbow and Life and Fate are keening their siren song. (But please, friends and relations, if you catch me with schnozz a-buried in something gloriously disreputable like Carl Hiassen or Joe R. Lansdale, just pretend I'm mastur-- er, masochistic -- and look away.)

So over at Slate, currently in the midst of a welcome celebration of pulp fiction, authors chime in: Scott Turow is diving into Greg Iles, Michael Connelly and Ridley Pearson; Thomas Mallon is rolling around in Kenneth Anger; Rick Moody is soaking up a Motley Crue tell-all. There are snooty exceptions, of course. Michael Chabon claims that he doesn't "change what I read when I go to the beach or on a vacation. I just read more." Joyce Carol Oates and George Saunders politely refuse to answer the question, with Saunders' explanation being a particular standout (in that unmistakable Saunders fashion):

For my money, the best beach read is How To Get Sand Out of Your Private Areas, by Hitch C. Groyan. Ha ha! No seriously. The best beach book is I Floated Nearby, Full of Envy by Moby Dick. It's the heartbreaking, true-life story of a whale who longs to come up on the beach and befriend the wealthy, joyful people he sees there but can't, because he has no legs and is totally naked. Also, he is a little sensitive about his last name. In the sad conclusion, this cranky guy named Ahab kills "Moby" to make him into lantern oil, only to find that lanterns are no longer used. Then—I haven't read it in awhile—I think Ahab gets so depressed about the lantern thing that he cuts off his own leg, and then this crocodile keeps chasing him around, and the crocodile learns to fly and decides never to grow up, and asks the audience if they believe in fairies, and then gets arrested for using language insulting to gay people. It's sad, but it's also depressing, and really makes you think while totally bringing you down and making you want to have about six more drinks and go for a swim.

Not to be outdone, USA Today asks the same question of writers including Stephen King, Dennis Lehane, Wally Lamb and E. Lynn Harris. Always the straight shooter, King, when asked about his summer selections, cuts to the chase:

Why these authors? "Because they're good!"

This so-called writer's life

Early in the film Wonder Boys, adapted by Steve Kloves from the novel by Michael Chabon, a character named Q mounts a podium in front of an auditorium full of college students and faculty and announces, with fat-cat gravitas, “I... am a writer.” Dutiful applause follows, while the main characters roll their eyes at one another.

Make the mistake of telling people you’re... a writer... and the instant assumption is that you fall cleanly into whatever artist-stereotype category they’re familiar with, and most likely, it’s the Q type, the pompous know-it-all. Or the Proust type, the nutter holed up in a cork-lined room, slaving away on some epic, unintelligible monstrosity. Or the Mozart type, the genius-savant who rises phoenixlike into the artistic stratosphere, has a spectacular flameout and is dead by 30. Or, best of all, the Hemingway/Bukowski type, whereby life becomes a very simple progression: Drink. Fight. Fuck. Write. Repeat.

The second instant assumption is that a writer just sits down and unscrews the top of his head, and out onto the desktop falls a diamond called War and Peace, which of course is nonsense. It’s not like housework or gardening or carpentry where you sweat all day and end up with a clean living room, a rose bush and a deck chair. Sometimes you pound out fifteen pages in an hour and sometimes a sentence takes up a week. Writing is a strange, ever-fluctuating vocation. It’s like a relationship: it takes a lot of time and a lot of physical and emotional energy and a whole shitload of coffee. And yeah, sometimes you’ve gotta make that tough decision on whether or not to stick with it or move on.

The third instant assumption is that you specialize in just one thing, that you’re a mystery writer, or a western writer, or a thriller writer, that you only write comedies, plays, cookbooks, stereo instructions, cell phone ads, whatever, which drives us straight up the wall. The instinct of others to categorize, simplify and classify what we do runs exactly counter to our ambitions. A very small percentage of writers in the world are able to earn a living by just sitting at home and filling up pages. The rest of us Joe Six-Packs punch a clock so we can put food on the table, and write whenever we have a free moment, just for the sheer pleasure of release. It doesn’t matter if it ever gets published, or if anyone else even reads it; it just matters that you’re writing. That, or you have a blog, and you fill up entry after entry with endless masturbatory philosophizing. Like this one.

Writers can be miserable, hateful, bitter, spiteful, horrible people. Obsessed with their so-called gifts, buoyed by a fatuous sense of entitlement, convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority. But they’re also capable of incredible generosity, love and support. Willing to listen, ready to advise, happy to give everything they can to help another realize their dreams. They’re us. They’re everything that we are, composed of different shades, moods, ideas, temperaments: kaleidoscopes on legs, slaves only to the bizarre whatever-it-is that compels them to roll up their sleeves and put down one word after another. We don’t understand it, we can’t explain it, and we won’t even try. Why is there air? Because.