Where There's a Wilbon

I'd love to credit this title to Michael Wilbon, sports columnist of the Washington Post, and co-host of the ESPN show, Pardon the Interruption. Wilbon (everyone calls him that, or more precisely, Mr. Tony calls him that) has been asked what it takes to be a good writer, and he says to "write, write, and write some more", or words to that effect.

My prodigious blogging is a result of his advice. I believe the more I write, the better I'll get. I've come to the conclusion that it's not happening, at least, not to my satisfaction. My biggest problem is that I write blogs very fast. In thirty minutes, I can crank out ten or more paragraphs, and you'll be reading until the cows come home. This means I don't edit myself very well. I just write and write and write.

Editing. That's my second problem. No one edits me but myself. Frequently, I find I'm blogging about something. I'm four or five paragraphs into the entry when I realize, well, frick, I have nothing profound to say in this entry. I know, I know. I never have anything profound to say in any of my entries.

What I mean is that I write myself into a corner. I have a point, it's weak, I find I have nothing more to say, and yet, it's an awful way to end, so I just rush head-long into any kind of conclusion, and it turns out....awful. I figure, it doesn't matter that much. There's another entry, another thing to write.

Yet, it would be very helpful to have an editor, because when I edit myself, I think, that's wonderful, or if I get stuck, I think, there's no way out. A second or third opinion would give me options. I've never much thought of writing as some kind of game, where you pick one of several potential strategies, and yet I should. My bag of tricks is hardly a bag at all.

The place where my writing suffers the most is writing film reviews. I've read reviews for years, and some of these writers are excellent. Much of that is because they have, you know, an opinion. Well, no, much of that is because they are actually good writers.

Good writers, it seems, are much like the Matrix. You can't explain how they do what they do. You have to see it. (To which, despite his excellent advice, Morpheus begins to explain the Matrix). Why is Mike D'Angelo's prose so much more lucid than mine. Why does Scott Renshaw have so much more to say about a film than I do?

Sure, they've seen ten times the films I have, but there are a few folks that watch films voraciously. These days, I watch one to two films a week, and while that doesn't compare to the five to ten films a film critic will watch in a week, it's still substantive.

My biggest flaw in writing reviews is summarizing. The bane of any review is to summarize what the film's about. It takes no skill to summarize. Well, no, it takes some skill to summarize, to decide which of the many plot points you should reveal, and which should remain hidden. But it takes even more to say something more insightful that "it sucked" or "it rocked", and I frequently find myself wanting to say just that.

For example, I found it difficult to get into The Brothers Grimm. For all its fanstastical set pieces, I was simply not that involved in the story. Part of it were Gilliam's weird excursions, working in plot lines of Grimm fairy tales. Jack and the Beanstalk. Little Red Riding Hood. Cinderella. Gilliam tries too hard to work those in, and for the most part, it doesn't fit. Some of film's problems lie in its tone, of the trickster Grimm brothers in the first half, and the is-it-real-or-not magic in the second. There's a jarring effect as you're questioning whether the magic is real or not. Had it been a better story, I might not have cared. As much as it tries to tell an old story in a fairy-tale way, it is told through modern sensibilities. The tough female trapper is a nod to modern attitudes towards women, as is the scholarly Grimm. It's a mess of a film that has an ending reminiscent of Return of the King, at least, when it comes to towerly collapses.

OK, so that is much closer to what I want. It's still raw and unfocused, but it doesn't summarize nearly as much. At this point, the only way I'm getting better at writing reviews is to write it again and again, until the urge to summarize is excised.

I recall the title of a book called Writing to Learn. The full title (with an Amazon search) is Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All. Writing can be very good for focusing thoughts. But the real key, in the end, is editing. I really need to learn how to edit. Writing isn't enough. Not by itself.

Well, there, I've spent, I don't know how long, trying to explain that I need to edit myself. Yet, I haven't.

I call it The Aristocrats.