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.