The Schadenfreude Guide to Authorial Competence, or: Somewhere Between Me and a Dream
While I enjoy writing, the main issue in reading my writing is that I just think it’s boring. Assuming it’s not an early draft (which I almost always hate), I rarely have any particular dislike of the characters, the story, or any of that shit; I mostly just find it drab and styleless, because it’s my style, and my style is just a slipshod homogeny of writing I enjoy and/or respect, so I’m constantly reading my work and thinking, “This isn’t terrible, but John Kennedy Toole would have made it funny.”
Last week, I submitted my writing to this portfolio review class. In case I haven’t mentioned it (and I’m way too lazy to go back and check right now), each week the entire class receives a different peer’s work. During the following week, we read their “canon” and discuss it in the following week’s class. Some students are assigned written coverage of the pieces.
So we all submitted our “canons,” and one student with whom “Doc” has a relationship volunteered to have his work already copied in time for this class, so “Doc” passed around each work at the end of class. Our task: assess it.
The student submitted four detailed treatments, a step outline of one of those treatments, two short screenplays, and one feature-length screenplay. (I felt slightly less masculine with my contribution of one feature and two short scripts.) I was assigned coverage of one of the treatments, but I decided to start with the feature, because it’s easier to get out of the way first.
Or so I thought.
Okay, here’s the thing: I’ll admit that I am hyper-critical. Not merely of myself, but of everyone else. That’s how come I hate so many fucking jackasses. I actually think it’s a good thing that I don’t hold myself to a higher or lower standard than anyone else; I also happen to think that I can be kind of an asshole when I don’t like something. Generally, that’s fine, until I have to look the author in the face and say, “This is the worst goddamn piece of shit I’ve ever read.”
I’m telling you, though, this writer made it easier and easier for me to say those words with each page. My rough assessment goes like this, as generally as possible:
- The story doesn’t start until page 76. Everything — and I mean everything — up to that point is back-story that he could clearly, effectively, and interestingly establish in two or three scenes. How can I tell there’s a lot of back-story? Let me put it this way: within the first ten pages of the script, the characters are born. That’s all that happens. And this isn’t a movie about genius babies.
As a consequence of this heavy back-story, when the story gets going nearly nearly two-thirds of the way through the script, he rushes through it to the end. And the only thing that stopped me from coming out and saying this is a terrible script is that everything that happens from page 76 to roughly page 105 (out of 127) is unbelievably good, but it’s so rushed that I want more of it. And that, folks, is how you know where your story starts and ends. - For somebody who takes his damn time with the back-story, he sure has some undeveloped characters. The central characters are thin; the secondary characters are cardboard.
- The dialogue is stiff, forced, and generally on-the-nose. A few characters, in addition to being stereotypes, are over-the-top stereotypes. They’re borderline cartoony.
- All I’ll say about this script’s content is that the main character is deformed, spent his entire life in a basement, and pretty much all he can do is read the Bible. For someone with these limitations, he’s remarkably street-smart when he finally gets out. I think the idea of this character being let outside could be fascinating — hell, he could have an entire story right there — but he seems to know exactly where to go, exactly how to get there, and exactly who he should avoid.
I’m not saying the Bible isn’t a good prep-guide for the world; everyone in that book is a complete dick. However, aside from the human nature aspects, everything that happens in the Bible is really far removed from the modern world.
I, personally, would find it hilarious if there were a John the Savage quality to him. Whereas John the Savage thought and spoke in imabic pentameter and Elizabethan language, because he learned everything about the world from Shakespeare, it would be hilarious if this character thought of the world in terms of a very literal interpretation of the Bible.
Honestly, I would produce and direct this screenplay if there was a scene of the main character asking a teamster to place his hand under his thigh and pray.
Those are my main points. There’s other stuff, but it’s either too minor or too specific to get into. The main thing that vindicated me is that during the discussion, everyone either brought up or agreed with the way I felt. Unfortunately, points two, three, and four were negated by the professor, who shot our asses full of this hot info: the entire script took place in, roughly, the 1920s.
Suddenly, every plot hole, contrivance, over-the-top character, or logical fallacy made sense. There were still problems, sure, but that tiny bit of information made a whole lot of the script much more forgivable. It didn’t change the fact that the story starts way too late, and it actually brings me to point number 5: - There is absolutely no indication whatsoever that this script takes place in any time other than the present.
Sometimes, time period and location don’t make a difference, especially if one is going for a “timeless” story. But in a story about a guy locked in a basement simply because he’s deformed and people think he’s a demon is much, much, much more believable in the early 20th century than it is in the early 21st century.
All he had to do in the writing was give us a little bit of a 1920s feel. A very little bit. Like describing fashions or hairstyles. Or indicating period music. Something like, say, when the characters are born (sometime between 1900 and 1910), perhaps one of the characters is born in a farmhouse, rather than a hospital.
The only indications of the time period come, as I’ve said, from logical fallacies (such as a writer expecting us to believe a group of modern nuns would believe a kid is a demon just because he’s deformed), plot holes (there’s a whole thing about one of the characters being pursued by, and then lost by, the police; by today’s standards, she didn’t technically commit an arrestable crime, and it’d be really easy for them to track her), and shit like that. We aren’t immersed in a 1920s world, so it’s hard to forgive the major problems because we all thought it takes place in 2004.
This is, I have to report, the worst sentence I’ve ever read in the English language. And I’m the guy who has not only read Hubert Selby Jr., but I’ve written the following sentence: “In recent weeks, it has been brought to my attention that I mostly sabotage my somewhat pitiful attempts at relationships by, for example, becoming really hostile, saying things I don’t mean, and then never, ever apologizing for the things I say and do while under the influence of my immense, soul-crushing ego and irritating superiority complex.”* I know what I’m talking about.
This guy’s terrible, incomprehensible sentence made me believe I was a good writer. No, not even a good writer, just not as bad a writer as I normally think I am. I, in effect, got over myself.
Will I go easier on myself? No. Basically, I just concluded that, while my writing is bad, it could be much, much worse.
With that ringing personal endorsement, I bet you all can’t wait until I offer up the samples I used to compile my “canon!”
*What’s telling about this is that I clicked a random month and scrolled down randomly and managed to find a horribly constructed sentence without any difficulty whatsoever.
Posted by Stan on October 19, 2004 6:53 PM | Permalink | School Rants | Digg It
