I'm struggling to think of a single child actor who made it out of the Disney/Nickelodeon gauntlets without being mentally disturbed in some way. I'm talking a kid that made some coin as a tween/teen, then left the scene and became normally adjusted human being.
There's a couple that I can think of - I actually know of one who lives in my town and is friends with a lot of my friends, though I've only met him in passing - but the thing is you just never hear about them because they get out of the system. Even then, I'm sure they have their own stories and bad experiences they don't share outside of a select group of family and friends. I'd also say they're in the minority, for sure.
Since I pretty much only knew him as the iCarly guy, with an awareness he had a bunch of other successful related shows, it's been interesting to get this glimpse into his beginnings. Also intriguing how hard it is to verify some of these details about stuff like Harvard, even in our amply documented age. Goes to show how tough historians must have it, haha. Also appreciate your even-handedness here rather than condemning based on hearsay.
I don't really have much more to add, since this is unfamiliar territory to me for the most part and I'm just enjoying following along with the "story". Instead I'll indulge some tangents:
"Probably because it takes effort no one is willing to give, and talent no one in the industry has." Damn. Another one that hits hard, at least for me. It's not that I was unaware, but it's sobering to stop and think how much our culture has declined just in my lifetime. There really seems to be this feeling of not even trying anymore. Even if it's weird considering how fierce the competition is to get into this industry in the first place.
The "typecasting vs character actor" thing is also interesting. Should ever actor ideally be able to play any role, or is it okay and even commendable to specialize? How much of an actor's personality goes into the part, anyway? I've never acted myself, but there's something endlessly fascinating about this job for me. Has to be one of the strangest professions around. And some of the considerations remind me of writing fiction, like the "generalist vs staying your niche" thing. I guess writing a novel is kind of like acting for an audience of yourself. Or at least I think you have to be in the same headspace as an actor, or a related one.
Which, to bring it back to Schneider, made me wonder what it'd be like to act in and write for a show at the same time. Don't think that's a very common situation? Especially not when it's just one of the regular cast and not a thing where the whole show is a vehicle for the main actor/writer.
"Creepy is not a gender-exclusive adjective and we, as a society, really need to remember that."
Hmm. In one sense you're obviously right. I suppose the really ugly elephant in the room here is that a man could theoretically dispense with the niceties and use force to get what he wants, or at least a woman always has to be cognizant of that potential threat, in a way men usually don't. (Which is probably one reason some straight men feel so intensely threatened by gay men and the prospect of finding themselves considered as sexual objects when they have no interest of reciprocating, but that's another story.)
Or: if a woman is a creep, it usually doesn't have any real consequences, but the other way around the consequences can go all the way up to lethal in the worst-case scenario, with a lot of unpleasant stations in-between. That said, you're right that there's a lot of unfortunate double standards hanging around here, both in the sense of painting all men as potential dangers and women as both helpless and uninterested in sex by default, while men always want it.
On a lighter note: I've started and scrapped a few drafts of my Adventures of Pete-related thing, and I want to reiterate that I appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into these essays. Telling an engaging story through non-fiction rather than cataloguing opinions is hard, even without adding humor to the mix. Not that I thought otherwise, but again, I have more experience with fiction, so it's humbling to really see it up close.
One of my pet peeves is how little people seem to respect writing as a craft. Maybe I've just become jaded after spending so much time in various fiction critique circles, but I get the sense a lot of people think they can slap any old thing together just because they know how read and write. I've seen so many people doing the equivalent of, say, playing the guitar for a couple weeks and then performing in front of an audience. Yes, the bar of entry is very low, but the ceiling is just as high as in other art forms. I dare anyone to compare Dan Brown to Richard Powers and tell me otherwise.
Then again, as you've shown us more than once in these essays, it's not like the professionals seem to take it much more seriously, haha. Maybe that's one of our core problems: as a society we're simply not serious about anything anymore. Or to dust off another James Howard Kunstler* quote: "anything goes and nothing matters". Doesn't turn an immediate profit? Forget it.
*Drawing on his quotes makes me sound like a bigger fan of the guy than I actually am. I think he writes very well but is also basically a crank, or maybe a grifter in his own way. I'd consider him more an entertainer than a serious pundit, like a fire and brimstone preacher of the deep-green set. He does score the occasional hit, though.
Well, I have a special fondness for the art of the movie poster. In my opinion, it's like an album cover - it's the first thing the audience is going to see that is meant to represent the content of the film, so it better make a great first impression. The fact that, in the 70's, 80's, and the 90's, to a lesser extent, you were getting these lush, hand-drawn, almost Renaissance-esque posters that basically encapsulated all the actors and many major plot important props and elements, you could get a good feel for what you were getting into, on top of an impressive work of art that, in time, could be iconic in its own right. If you google "Blue and Orange Movie Poster", you'll find that almost every major release follows a similar "blue and orange" dominated color scheme and is mostly just a collage of photographs of the main actors and little else. Even those that attempt to do something with a little more substance - for example, the posters of the new Star Wars sequels - they just look cluttered, messy, and slapdash compared to the Drew Struzan posters they were trying to emulate. The fact that they paid Struzan to make a poster for The Force Awakens in the same style as those he did for the remastered original trilogy VHS's, he did it, and they rejected it, speaks volumes of what the industry's priorities are. Another example is that Struzan did the posters for the first two Harry Potter films. Just like the fact that John Williams did the score for them, you can trace a marked decline in the effort of both the posters for the future films and the film scores with those of the movies, even if the later Potter films are still fine (though I attribute that to the heavy-lifting of the cast more than anything else). Sorry to go on a screed, it's just a topic I feel strongly about.
As for type-casting, I don't think it's a bad thing, if the actor in question is okay with being pigeonholed in one particular character mold. But it can destroy the careers of actors who aren't as accepting of taking one type of role. The best instance in my opinion is John Candy, who always wanted to do more serious, dramatic roles, and was very good in the few movies where he was allowed to showcase his talent for them, but those movies were almost always done reluctantly by the studios and given very little marketing or publicity, which led to most of them under-performing. There's also probably something of a prejudice from audiences who knew him as a comedic actor and only wanted to see him do comedy films. The end result was that he had to continue to take comedy roles that he didn't want to do just to keep his career afloat, and he found himself in a pretty severe career decline because of it that he was only just beginning to get out of before his untimely death. Vince Vaughn, Adam Sandler, Steve Carrell, and Jim Carrey all had similar issues trying to break out of their type-casting as comedic actors. Once you're a comedy guy, it's very hard to shake that reputation. Even Daniel Craig has been very vocal that he absolutely does not want to continue playing James Bond-type action heroes. Sid Haig, who I mentioned in the article, actually retired from acting for a while because he was tired of always being cast as thugs and gangsters. But, on the other hand, I doubt Christopher Lee ever felt sleighted that he was the go-to guy to play imposing villains, nor do I see many actresses dubbed "Scream Queens" lament the fact that they only get horror roles. You really don't ever see Jason Statham, Vin Deisel, or Sly Stallone complain that they're always cast as hyper-masculine action stars, either. Maybe there's a degree of comedy actors not always wanting to play a fool to it that makes it so prevalent in comedy more so than other genre, but, really, I think it comes down to whether an actor wants to stay in their assigned lanes or not. And for all that do, there's a lot that don't. You do see the same thing play out in the literature world, to a lesser extent, though from what I understand from talking to published authors, it's more of a difficulty about finding the right people to edit and publish something outside of your conventional wheelhouse than it is finding an audience. But that's just as an outsider looking in. The world of publishing has a myriad of issues that are much more egregious than being unable to switch genres.
As for your point about creepy women versus creepy men, I see what you're saying, and you aren't wrong. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds on the prickly nature of gender politics, but I do think a creepy woman is just as capable of causing damage to a man's life if spurned, albeit in other, less physical ways. I remember there was a friend of mine in high school who rejected a girl who was unhealthily obsessed with him, and she went on a campaign to ruin his reputation and did a pretty good job. I will admit, it's less common, and it really isn't a gender thing so much as a shitty person thing. Regardless of the gender, it's unacceptable behavior.
Back to the lighter note, I very much appreciate the praise. It really does mean more than you know, and it's nice to know that the effort I put into these - which is not small - is both acknowledged and appreciated. You're absolutely right that there is very little respect paid to the art of literature and writing. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone online say, "Writing isn't hard, anyone can do it." And, yes, while pretty much anyone and everyone has the tools to write something, and the barrier to entry is much, much lower than most other creative hobbies... well, you said everything that really needs to be said in your comparison between Brown and Powers. Anyone can do it, but can they do it well? Do they understand the basics of how to do it? I say that there are no rules in writing, and there aren't, but there are general guidelines to what generally tends to work well and what generally doesn't, and anyone who ignores those do so at their own peril and cheat themselves out of refining their craft when they ignore them because an English teacher once told them "There are no rules to writing". The fundamentals of writing, as well as the English language, are woefully undertaught in school and misunderstood by the general population in a way that's becoming increasingly apparent in the world of literature. As self-publishing, vanity printing, and the phenomenon of fan-fiction or web-based fiction being published and sold in actual bookstores, it's hard to ignore that most of them write at a very basic, journeyman level. That's not to say it's bad, but the all-important "voice" of an author is completely missing. At worst, I've seen very popular authors who's vocabularies are remarkably small, grasp of grammar is tenuous, and, worst of all, they seem not to understand the concept of "spacing", which, to me, should be one of the most easily identifiable issues to fix because it just looks bad on paper. There's so many finer points to writing and making something that doesn't just make sense coherently, but something that flows, something that reads well, something that sounds good when you say it... it's just totally ignored. "And don't get me fucking started on dialogue tags," he exclaimed angrily as he furiously beat his fist against the heretofore unmentioned table rapidly. The state of dialogue among authors is in shambles. I read some things and have to wonder if the writers have ever actually spoken to another person in their lives. This isn't to bash on anyone, especially not anyone particular, or to say that I'm some enlightened Bodhisattva of the written word, but it does grind my gears that material that wouldn't be worth wiping one's rear end with gets printed and held up as high art because the average prole wouldn't know proper prose if it smacked them across the face. There's a greater discussion to be had about the absolute failure of the masses to dismiss anything that has an iota of brain power behind it as "pretentious" (see: FilmTok, which is a thing, which criticizes actual cinephiles for liking "artsy" and "pretentious" movies like fucking "The Godfather" and "Blade Runner", which are great but not artsy or pretentious by any means, just because they aren't low-effort, conveyor-belt Marvel sloppa). But that's for another day. Truly, we are not serious about anything anymore. As a society, at least. Which is why we, as people, should be so more than ever.
Very much agree with everything you're saying re. writing here. Dialogue tag abuse is the bane of my existence, haha. I think this is the heart of the thing, though: "but the all-important "voice" of an author is completely missing." Yes. So much. I've seen so much bland, interchangeable prose of the "he did this, he went there, he thought this" variety that's basically a written film camera. Throwing in a metaphor here and there doesn't help. More than anything these days, what I want to see is something that feels written by a distinctive voice, something that has some "soul", to use what might be a dumb and pretentious term, but still.
I think part of the problem is that so many young people are so steeped in visual media, and what they really want to do is make their own movie or (gods help us, haha) anime, but since those require actual budgets and support systems, they have to settle for dry biscuit prose instead.
I think you're onto something there. I read a lot of amateur, independent fiction and I get the feeling that the people writing a lot of it would absolutely be making a movie (and, perhaps because of what I read in particular, an anime), if they had the means to, and that writing is really the cheapest and most feasible means by which they can indulge their ideas. It's not inherently a bad thing, but it's also degrading and rather demeaning to the art of the written word to take it as a "last resort" creative outlet.
The one piece of advice that I got - probably the best piece of writing advice I've ever heard - was when I let a professor of mine, who I liked quite a bit, read one of my trunk novels for feedback, which he was generously willing to do. When we were discussing feedback, he said, "It seems like you're not writing a narrative so much as describing a movie, at times."
To which I said, "Yes, I have a bit of a problem with that. I see the story in my head as a movie, and I do feel as if I'm just writing down how I see it."
And he replied, "Well, ask yourself. Are you writing a novel, or are you writing a movie synopsis for Wikipedia?"
Pretty much changed my entire outlook on the craft and the artistry behind it. I think I still struggle somewhat with it when it comes to fiction, but it was the major reframing of the writing process I needed. It's like, both movies and literature are distinct art forms that both have their merits, as well as their drawbacks, and if you approach writing like you're describing the movie you see in your head, you're robbing the prose of the strengths that come exclusively to a story told with the written word. I'm not saying that a writer has to take a creative writing class to elevate themselves above the mean, but having that input from actual published authors who have decades of experience is invaluable. Assuming said author is worth a damn, which is... debatable. Especially on college campuses, these days. But I was very fortunate to have a particularly erudite one, and I am immensely thankful for his feedback to this day.
Hopefully all goes well with your own endeavors. I look forward to reading it when you finish :)
I really enjoy reading your take on all the culture things. You are so thorough in your research and it is so well written and interesting every time. I love how you are introducing Dan to us and I can’t wait to see where his story goes next, with all the hints and teasers you gave! Thank you so much.
I'm struggling to think of a single child actor who made it out of the Disney/Nickelodeon gauntlets without being mentally disturbed in some way. I'm talking a kid that made some coin as a tween/teen, then left the scene and became normally adjusted human being.
There's a couple that I can think of - I actually know of one who lives in my town and is friends with a lot of my friends, though I've only met him in passing - but the thing is you just never hear about them because they get out of the system. Even then, I'm sure they have their own stories and bad experiences they don't share outside of a select group of family and friends. I'd also say they're in the minority, for sure.
Since I pretty much only knew him as the iCarly guy, with an awareness he had a bunch of other successful related shows, it's been interesting to get this glimpse into his beginnings. Also intriguing how hard it is to verify some of these details about stuff like Harvard, even in our amply documented age. Goes to show how tough historians must have it, haha. Also appreciate your even-handedness here rather than condemning based on hearsay.
I don't really have much more to add, since this is unfamiliar territory to me for the most part and I'm just enjoying following along with the "story". Instead I'll indulge some tangents:
"Probably because it takes effort no one is willing to give, and talent no one in the industry has." Damn. Another one that hits hard, at least for me. It's not that I was unaware, but it's sobering to stop and think how much our culture has declined just in my lifetime. There really seems to be this feeling of not even trying anymore. Even if it's weird considering how fierce the competition is to get into this industry in the first place.
The "typecasting vs character actor" thing is also interesting. Should ever actor ideally be able to play any role, or is it okay and even commendable to specialize? How much of an actor's personality goes into the part, anyway? I've never acted myself, but there's something endlessly fascinating about this job for me. Has to be one of the strangest professions around. And some of the considerations remind me of writing fiction, like the "generalist vs staying your niche" thing. I guess writing a novel is kind of like acting for an audience of yourself. Or at least I think you have to be in the same headspace as an actor, or a related one.
Which, to bring it back to Schneider, made me wonder what it'd be like to act in and write for a show at the same time. Don't think that's a very common situation? Especially not when it's just one of the regular cast and not a thing where the whole show is a vehicle for the main actor/writer.
"Creepy is not a gender-exclusive adjective and we, as a society, really need to remember that."
Hmm. In one sense you're obviously right. I suppose the really ugly elephant in the room here is that a man could theoretically dispense with the niceties and use force to get what he wants, or at least a woman always has to be cognizant of that potential threat, in a way men usually don't. (Which is probably one reason some straight men feel so intensely threatened by gay men and the prospect of finding themselves considered as sexual objects when they have no interest of reciprocating, but that's another story.)
Or: if a woman is a creep, it usually doesn't have any real consequences, but the other way around the consequences can go all the way up to lethal in the worst-case scenario, with a lot of unpleasant stations in-between. That said, you're right that there's a lot of unfortunate double standards hanging around here, both in the sense of painting all men as potential dangers and women as both helpless and uninterested in sex by default, while men always want it.
On a lighter note: I've started and scrapped a few drafts of my Adventures of Pete-related thing, and I want to reiterate that I appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into these essays. Telling an engaging story through non-fiction rather than cataloguing opinions is hard, even without adding humor to the mix. Not that I thought otherwise, but again, I have more experience with fiction, so it's humbling to really see it up close.
One of my pet peeves is how little people seem to respect writing as a craft. Maybe I've just become jaded after spending so much time in various fiction critique circles, but I get the sense a lot of people think they can slap any old thing together just because they know how read and write. I've seen so many people doing the equivalent of, say, playing the guitar for a couple weeks and then performing in front of an audience. Yes, the bar of entry is very low, but the ceiling is just as high as in other art forms. I dare anyone to compare Dan Brown to Richard Powers and tell me otherwise.
Then again, as you've shown us more than once in these essays, it's not like the professionals seem to take it much more seriously, haha. Maybe that's one of our core problems: as a society we're simply not serious about anything anymore. Or to dust off another James Howard Kunstler* quote: "anything goes and nothing matters". Doesn't turn an immediate profit? Forget it.
*Drawing on his quotes makes me sound like a bigger fan of the guy than I actually am. I think he writes very well but is also basically a crank, or maybe a grifter in his own way. I'd consider him more an entertainer than a serious pundit, like a fire and brimstone preacher of the deep-green set. He does score the occasional hit, though.
Well, I have a special fondness for the art of the movie poster. In my opinion, it's like an album cover - it's the first thing the audience is going to see that is meant to represent the content of the film, so it better make a great first impression. The fact that, in the 70's, 80's, and the 90's, to a lesser extent, you were getting these lush, hand-drawn, almost Renaissance-esque posters that basically encapsulated all the actors and many major plot important props and elements, you could get a good feel for what you were getting into, on top of an impressive work of art that, in time, could be iconic in its own right. If you google "Blue and Orange Movie Poster", you'll find that almost every major release follows a similar "blue and orange" dominated color scheme and is mostly just a collage of photographs of the main actors and little else. Even those that attempt to do something with a little more substance - for example, the posters of the new Star Wars sequels - they just look cluttered, messy, and slapdash compared to the Drew Struzan posters they were trying to emulate. The fact that they paid Struzan to make a poster for The Force Awakens in the same style as those he did for the remastered original trilogy VHS's, he did it, and they rejected it, speaks volumes of what the industry's priorities are. Another example is that Struzan did the posters for the first two Harry Potter films. Just like the fact that John Williams did the score for them, you can trace a marked decline in the effort of both the posters for the future films and the film scores with those of the movies, even if the later Potter films are still fine (though I attribute that to the heavy-lifting of the cast more than anything else). Sorry to go on a screed, it's just a topic I feel strongly about.
As for type-casting, I don't think it's a bad thing, if the actor in question is okay with being pigeonholed in one particular character mold. But it can destroy the careers of actors who aren't as accepting of taking one type of role. The best instance in my opinion is John Candy, who always wanted to do more serious, dramatic roles, and was very good in the few movies where he was allowed to showcase his talent for them, but those movies were almost always done reluctantly by the studios and given very little marketing or publicity, which led to most of them under-performing. There's also probably something of a prejudice from audiences who knew him as a comedic actor and only wanted to see him do comedy films. The end result was that he had to continue to take comedy roles that he didn't want to do just to keep his career afloat, and he found himself in a pretty severe career decline because of it that he was only just beginning to get out of before his untimely death. Vince Vaughn, Adam Sandler, Steve Carrell, and Jim Carrey all had similar issues trying to break out of their type-casting as comedic actors. Once you're a comedy guy, it's very hard to shake that reputation. Even Daniel Craig has been very vocal that he absolutely does not want to continue playing James Bond-type action heroes. Sid Haig, who I mentioned in the article, actually retired from acting for a while because he was tired of always being cast as thugs and gangsters. But, on the other hand, I doubt Christopher Lee ever felt sleighted that he was the go-to guy to play imposing villains, nor do I see many actresses dubbed "Scream Queens" lament the fact that they only get horror roles. You really don't ever see Jason Statham, Vin Deisel, or Sly Stallone complain that they're always cast as hyper-masculine action stars, either. Maybe there's a degree of comedy actors not always wanting to play a fool to it that makes it so prevalent in comedy more so than other genre, but, really, I think it comes down to whether an actor wants to stay in their assigned lanes or not. And for all that do, there's a lot that don't. You do see the same thing play out in the literature world, to a lesser extent, though from what I understand from talking to published authors, it's more of a difficulty about finding the right people to edit and publish something outside of your conventional wheelhouse than it is finding an audience. But that's just as an outsider looking in. The world of publishing has a myriad of issues that are much more egregious than being unable to switch genres.
As for your point about creepy women versus creepy men, I see what you're saying, and you aren't wrong. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds on the prickly nature of gender politics, but I do think a creepy woman is just as capable of causing damage to a man's life if spurned, albeit in other, less physical ways. I remember there was a friend of mine in high school who rejected a girl who was unhealthily obsessed with him, and she went on a campaign to ruin his reputation and did a pretty good job. I will admit, it's less common, and it really isn't a gender thing so much as a shitty person thing. Regardless of the gender, it's unacceptable behavior.
Back to the lighter note, I very much appreciate the praise. It really does mean more than you know, and it's nice to know that the effort I put into these - which is not small - is both acknowledged and appreciated. You're absolutely right that there is very little respect paid to the art of literature and writing. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone online say, "Writing isn't hard, anyone can do it." And, yes, while pretty much anyone and everyone has the tools to write something, and the barrier to entry is much, much lower than most other creative hobbies... well, you said everything that really needs to be said in your comparison between Brown and Powers. Anyone can do it, but can they do it well? Do they understand the basics of how to do it? I say that there are no rules in writing, and there aren't, but there are general guidelines to what generally tends to work well and what generally doesn't, and anyone who ignores those do so at their own peril and cheat themselves out of refining their craft when they ignore them because an English teacher once told them "There are no rules to writing". The fundamentals of writing, as well as the English language, are woefully undertaught in school and misunderstood by the general population in a way that's becoming increasingly apparent in the world of literature. As self-publishing, vanity printing, and the phenomenon of fan-fiction or web-based fiction being published and sold in actual bookstores, it's hard to ignore that most of them write at a very basic, journeyman level. That's not to say it's bad, but the all-important "voice" of an author is completely missing. At worst, I've seen very popular authors who's vocabularies are remarkably small, grasp of grammar is tenuous, and, worst of all, they seem not to understand the concept of "spacing", which, to me, should be one of the most easily identifiable issues to fix because it just looks bad on paper. There's so many finer points to writing and making something that doesn't just make sense coherently, but something that flows, something that reads well, something that sounds good when you say it... it's just totally ignored. "And don't get me fucking started on dialogue tags," he exclaimed angrily as he furiously beat his fist against the heretofore unmentioned table rapidly. The state of dialogue among authors is in shambles. I read some things and have to wonder if the writers have ever actually spoken to another person in their lives. This isn't to bash on anyone, especially not anyone particular, or to say that I'm some enlightened Bodhisattva of the written word, but it does grind my gears that material that wouldn't be worth wiping one's rear end with gets printed and held up as high art because the average prole wouldn't know proper prose if it smacked them across the face. There's a greater discussion to be had about the absolute failure of the masses to dismiss anything that has an iota of brain power behind it as "pretentious" (see: FilmTok, which is a thing, which criticizes actual cinephiles for liking "artsy" and "pretentious" movies like fucking "The Godfather" and "Blade Runner", which are great but not artsy or pretentious by any means, just because they aren't low-effort, conveyor-belt Marvel sloppa). But that's for another day. Truly, we are not serious about anything anymore. As a society, at least. Which is why we, as people, should be so more than ever.
Very much agree with everything you're saying re. writing here. Dialogue tag abuse is the bane of my existence, haha. I think this is the heart of the thing, though: "but the all-important "voice" of an author is completely missing." Yes. So much. I've seen so much bland, interchangeable prose of the "he did this, he went there, he thought this" variety that's basically a written film camera. Throwing in a metaphor here and there doesn't help. More than anything these days, what I want to see is something that feels written by a distinctive voice, something that has some "soul", to use what might be a dumb and pretentious term, but still.
I think part of the problem is that so many young people are so steeped in visual media, and what they really want to do is make their own movie or (gods help us, haha) anime, but since those require actual budgets and support systems, they have to settle for dry biscuit prose instead.
I think you're onto something there. I read a lot of amateur, independent fiction and I get the feeling that the people writing a lot of it would absolutely be making a movie (and, perhaps because of what I read in particular, an anime), if they had the means to, and that writing is really the cheapest and most feasible means by which they can indulge their ideas. It's not inherently a bad thing, but it's also degrading and rather demeaning to the art of the written word to take it as a "last resort" creative outlet.
The one piece of advice that I got - probably the best piece of writing advice I've ever heard - was when I let a professor of mine, who I liked quite a bit, read one of my trunk novels for feedback, which he was generously willing to do. When we were discussing feedback, he said, "It seems like you're not writing a narrative so much as describing a movie, at times."
To which I said, "Yes, I have a bit of a problem with that. I see the story in my head as a movie, and I do feel as if I'm just writing down how I see it."
And he replied, "Well, ask yourself. Are you writing a novel, or are you writing a movie synopsis for Wikipedia?"
Pretty much changed my entire outlook on the craft and the artistry behind it. I think I still struggle somewhat with it when it comes to fiction, but it was the major reframing of the writing process I needed. It's like, both movies and literature are distinct art forms that both have their merits, as well as their drawbacks, and if you approach writing like you're describing the movie you see in your head, you're robbing the prose of the strengths that come exclusively to a story told with the written word. I'm not saying that a writer has to take a creative writing class to elevate themselves above the mean, but having that input from actual published authors who have decades of experience is invaluable. Assuming said author is worth a damn, which is... debatable. Especially on college campuses, these days. But I was very fortunate to have a particularly erudite one, and I am immensely thankful for his feedback to this day.
Hopefully all goes well with your own endeavors. I look forward to reading it when you finish :)
I really enjoy reading your take on all the culture things. You are so thorough in your research and it is so well written and interesting every time. I love how you are introducing Dan to us and I can’t wait to see where his story goes next, with all the hints and teasers you gave! Thank you so much.