Mark Trainer

There's a well known problem with making movies about a writers.  All sorts of interesting things may have happened in a writer's life, but the essential part of what makes him or her interesting--the writing--is an excruciating bore to watch.  You just can't make it visually engaging, no matter where you put the camera, no matter what meaningful utterances the writer lets slip.  You end up with something along the lines of the above video.  Worse still is the Inspiration Cheat: Artillery shells give soldier Cole Porter (as played by Cary Grant) the idea for the driving rhythm of "NIght and Day;" W.S. Gilbert staring profoundly at a samurai sword as he conceives of The Mikado in the otherwise wonderful Topsy Turvy.  I don't think the viewer has to be a writer to cringe at these moments with the certain knowledge that it just doesn't work that way.

But I'm increasingly realizing this problem isn't limited to writers in movies.  These days, it's traces are all over the pages of writers on Facebook, their Twitter streams, and, yes, especially their blogs.  Writers have more ways to keep their names in people's minds.  To "build the brand," if you will.(Please don't.)  It's easy to mistake what the immediacy of these tools offers for something that will further illuminate work we admire.  Instead, what you get is a hint of the author's taste in online articles, maybe her politics or his taste in music.  if you're lucky, you might discover that that writer you hold in such high esteem likes that silly cat video that's been going around your office as much as you do.  At worst, you suffer through excessive self-promotion and/or self-mythologizing.  The greatest compliment I can pay to nearly all the writers whose online presence I follow is that I enjoy their books a lot more than the digital breadcrumb trail left by their tweets, entries, and status updates.


Oh yeah, but don't let that stop you from reading this blog--it's friggin' fantastic.

I've not read James Ellroy, but this interview by my friend Jon Fasman has me primed. What an intriguing manner Ellroy has: the deliberate tone, the halting emphasis, the bow tie, for god's sake.  I know it's all about the writing, but I wish there were more authors who had Ellroy's sense of odd panache.  You used to see Truman Capote and Norman Mailer acting weird on talk shows.  I miss those days.

Let's just agree that Wordle is a lot of fun.  This is the word cloud from my story collection.  When I pasted in the full manuscript, character names were among the biggest words.  That's probably not unusual, but I think my narrators and characters do use proper names a lot.  I then excluded character names. What else can I learn from this?  "Like," "looked," and "back" are in there a lot.  Do I use enough similes to have "like" loom so large? "Little," "just," "room"--can't draw any connections there.  Clearly "time" is much on my mind.  Maybe the biggest takeaway is that, to judge by my word cloud, I write with the vocabulary of a second-grader.

I suppose Trollope has become the patron saint of writerly productivity.  His daily schedule annoyed his contemporary critics, who thought the muse did not visit those who waited for her on a schedule.  (This opinion remains popular among undergraduates--at least the ones who took my workshops.)

But what's on my mind this morning is something I read a few years ago.  As we all know, Trollope wrote his allotted three hours EVERY day.  Was it from 5 in the morning until 8 or 6 to 9?  But apparently when he finished a novel manuscript at, say, 8:45, he would turn the page and write "Chapter One," and be off on his new novel for his remaining fifteen minutes of writing.

Now that my story collection is finished (it is finished, right?), I'm trying to get something else underway--something novel-like.  And all these Trollope questions come rushing back to me.  Did he outline anything?  Did he ever just stare at the wall and wonder how this or that strand of the plot could be made to work?  Maybe he did that at the post office  when he was supposed to be working.