Conventional wisdom about writing is conventionally wrong.
Long is the enemy of all that is funny and good.
Writing long will suck the life out of your words and ideas. Embrace short and pithy. Hug the glory of writing short tightly to your bosum, even if you’re not sure where your bosum may be, or if the FCC will fine you for using that word on the Series of Tubes.
Take photo memes, which are really one-liners with an illustration. They’re boiled down and refined, without a word wasted. That’s why they work. Extra verbiage would drown the funny.
Just like “playing professional football” isn’t one solitary skill, but a set of separate skills, you don’t study and practice “writing.”
There are dozens of separate skills involved.
It’s a lot like the 53-whatever guys who play on a football team. Want to learn how to kick a field goal? Don’t ask the quarterback – bribe the kickers after teasing them about how clean their unis always are.
Need to become a better tackler? Talk to the linebackers. Want to run faster? Work out with the wide receivers and cornerbacks.
Because if you don’t cross-train, you’ll wind up looking silly. Like this.
Same thing with MMA fighters. They’re so well-rounded now, mixing striking with wrestling and ju-jitsu. Nobody who fights for money would think of spending all their time on one skill while ignoring the others, because they would get crushed into powder … and no longer pay the bills as a professional fighter. Delivering pizzas, maybe. Fighting, no. Unlike the bad old days of boxing, there isn’t a market for tomato cans that up-and-coming fighters match up with to pump up their record.
As a writer, I’ve learned the most from cross-training. Journalism and speechwriting are completely different, just like writing screenplays happens on a different planet from writing novels.
You can’t learn the other things while you play around in your favorite sandbox — but the skills you learn from hanging out in other writerly sandboxes has gargantuan payoffs.
Oh, this is too good. Some talented man sat through 5.93 bazillion hours of Aaron Sorkin footage to find all this glorious stuff.
I’m a big fan of Aaron the Sorkin, especially The West Wing (when it didn’t stink up the joint) and Sports Night and even A FEW GOOD MEN (mostly because of Jack Nicholson and in spite of Tom “Short! Annoying!” Cruise).
HOWEVER: Both Sorkin and another favorite of mine, Quentin Tarantino, are easy to parody. And this supercut of Sorkin is so funny because — like a fine Swiss bell, made by Swiss monks IN SWITZERLAND or whatever, despite the fact that I’m not sure Switzerland has a lot of monks, or any monks who make bells — well, it’s funny because it rings so true.
Every time that Hollywood reboots the SUPERMAN franchise, they hire some hot-shot screenwriter, who pens something the hot-shot director hates, leading to some OTHER screenwriter taking a stab at the page 1 polish (rewrite) until studio execs get involved and bring in five of their favorite screenwriters to add their spices to the awkward stew.
This is a certain way to spend $300 million on an epic failure.
HOWEVER: some random man, posting on the Book of Face, just told a better story than anything I’ve seen from any Superman movie in the history of mankind.
If I post a music video every Monday, or every other Monday, or on random Mondays when I feel like it, I will officially be playing more music than this channel on your cable box called MTV.
That channel, which was once proud and powerful, is now apparently dedicated to documentaries about the fake-tanning habits of young, unmarried losers in New Jersey with gelled hair and steroid problems and fake body parts.
Watch this insane video by Florence + The Machine, then use your literary powers of deconstruction to figure out what it’s trying to say.
I believe the alien go-go dancers are a tribute to all the green alien women Captain Kirk conquered back in the 1960s, and that the end of the video pays homage to the only good scene in X-MEN: THE FINAL COUNTDOWN OR WHATEVER when Famke Janssen, who rocked as an evil Bond girl in Goldeneye, went nuts and turned all these bad guys into dust because Hugh Jackman refused to go steady with her.
So I’m driving on the Autobahn from Frankfurt, Germany to Goze, Belgium on zero sleep for about 36 hours, which is not the wisest thing in the world when you’re going 160 kilometers per hour, seeing how closing your eyes and napping for half a second will be fatal.
But I do not nap, and the Citroen of Itty Bittiness does not slam into the guardrail and burst into flames.
Frankfurt is a big city full of skyscrapers, the Manhattan of Germany, and this is because after World War II, cities razed by bombs had citizens vote: (a) bulldoze the rubble and start over or (b) rebuild on the ancient, narrow cobblestone streets and painstakingly restore all that was destroyed.
The people of Frankfurt picked “start over.” And you can tell, with just a glance, how any random city in Germany voted after the war.
Goze, Belgium was not bombed to rubble during the war. It’s a tiny little town full of brick homes and brick business and stone churches.
If you’re not familiar with Belgium, let me give you a primer:
Just like three years ago, we stayed with my wife’s host family from when she lived here as an exchange student. I lived in Holland and Germany as a kid, so this whole area feels like home.
Battle of the beer: Germany versus Belgium
There’s a huge difference between Germany and Belgium when it comes to beer.
Back in 1516, a German king got tired of people going blind, getting sick or dying from moonshine and bad beer.
This king wrote the Reinheitsgebot (food purity laws), which said the only ingredients allowed for beer were water, barley and hops. He also set the price of beer and standardized things. Today, you can also use yeast, which is quite important, though they didn’t know about yeast back in 1516. Also: wheat malt and cane sugar. But you can’t use unmated barley anymore. NOBODY KNOWS WHY.
The Germans do a lot with those few ingredients. I drank many beers in many towns. Despite the lack of variety, they were all smooth and good.
HOWEVER: Belgium crushes Germany into powder when it comes to beer, because they have 250 different beers that are all excellent. Want a chocolate beer? Done. An IPA with hot chile peppers? They probably have it.
Belgium also has trappist ales — beer made by monks — with many recipes unchanged for almost 1000 years, which is longer than Joan Rivers has been alive. Chimay is probably the most famous. If you haven’t tried Chimay, hit Trader Joe’s and buy some. The stuff is as smooth as silk. If your lips ever touch a can of Budweiser again, you’ll spit it out and say, “Put it back in the horse.”
Things to do in Belgium
The country is small, flat and pretty, with all kinds of beautiful old villages and green fields. Do you like riding bicycles? Ride all over the place with a camera and a picnic basket. Go crazy.
It’s one of the friendliest places, too. People greet you with three kisses (right cheek, left cheek, right cheek) when they first meet you and one kiss whenever you see them again or say goodbye. This is much, much better than standing around or an awkward handshake. Everybody does it, and this breaks the ice.
Also helpful: everybody is handing out beer and wine like it’s going out of style, though they don’t binge. I never saw anybody staggering around, drunk out of their mind. They are professionals with the alcohol, and drink slowly and steadily rather than breaking out beer bongs and losing their heads like a college freshman who’s just discovered Bud Light comes in keg size.
So: ride around the countryside, meet people – and have dinner, which is not 20 minutes at the dining room table while people play with their iPhones. Dinner is a big social event that takes hours. Breakfast is a social event. Also, lunch.
Basically, people in Belgium prefer the company of OTHER PEOPLE rather than televisions, iPhones and romance novels involving men in kilts.
This is refreshing and fun, despite the fact that I don’t speak a lick of French — because the secret is to listen rather than talk. In Iceland, Sweden, Belgium, France, Germany and elsewhere, people tended to talk to me in Icelandic, Swedish, French or German, as long as I (a) walked around like I knew what I was doing and (b) didn’t say anything.
This came naturally from being a kid in Germany and Holland, and from not speaking at all except to my sister for many years. She was my diplomat: “Guy is hungry for breakfast” and “Guy wonders if we can paint the dog white” and “Guy has just declared war on Syria.”
Over in Europe, I walked around not saying anything, pointing at stuff I wanted to buy and handing over monies. This works great. Try it sometime. If they ask, tell them Guy sent you, and that in solidarity, you also are cutting off diplomatic relations with Syria.
This is not a scene from PROMETHEUS.
Fast forward mid-way through this sucker, to the point where the scientist applies flame to the white powder, which is when you should be screaming at the screen, “Don’t do it, you fool!”
Because once this thing springs to life, we are all doomed.
Anybody who’s a fan of Clint Eastwood‘s spaghetti westerns knows that THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY is one of his best films ever. Clint hardly says a word the entire thing. It’s like the first 30 minutes of WALL-E, if you changed him from a robot that cleaned up humanity’s trash in an apocalyptic wasteland to a gunslinger who cleaned up human trash in an apocalyptic wasteland.
So: flying over to Germany and back, I saw many, many airplane movies. As a public service, I’m reviewing the ones that I remember to (a) save you from watching stinkers, (b) give you a head’s up on hidden gems and (c) say sarcastic things about Sarah Jessica Parker.
First up is the Good, then the Bad and finally the Ugly.
More good stuff from George the Clooney and Ryan the Gosling, who does a good job portraying the crazy life of a political campaign.
As a reporter who covered all kinds of campaigns, and as somebody working in politics now, this movie gets a lot of things right. The long hours. The mix of cynical veterans and 20-something interns full of energy. Lofty ideas crashing into the shores of reality. Reporters working angles. War by leaks.
I appreciated this movie, and how it saw all the shades of gray in the characters.
Ryan goes from a wunderkind who can do no wrong to having no job — and then, having learned things the hard way, rolls around in the mud to pull a coup on the boss who fired him to get the job of running Clooney’s campaign. You see this character suffer and change.
Clooney could have played his presidential candidate as a straight-up hero, a cartoonish good guy. Once again, Clooney has the guts to play somebody interesting and flawed.
Verdict: Rent it on Netflix at least TWICE, because I say so.
PAUL NEWMAN AND ELIZABETH TAYLOR IN SOME FILM WHERE PEOPLE TALK A LOT
From watching this with the sound off: Paul Newman is a good-looking jerk. He broke his leg, so he lays around the house all day, drinking up the booze and glowering at people. For some reason I never understood, Elizabeth Taylor is completely nice to him the entire time, even after he tries to break her ribs with his crutches.
This movie raised many, many questions in my mind:
First: Why doesn’t Elizabeth Taylor — or whoever owns this house — kick angry Paul Newman to the curb?
Second: Who’s paying for all this booze that Paul drinks?
Third: Does he have a job?
Fourth: Yes, he’s good looking, but does he have blackmail photos of Elizabeth or something? Because being good looking doesn’t usually let you sit around a house for weeks and weeks, drinking all their alcohols while you throw things at your host and act like a total dipstick.
This is a talky movie. There are old people and kids and a birthday cake.
I’m guessing it was a play (CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF?) before it was a movie, because nobody every drives anywhere and there’s just a few sets. The camera keeps bringing us back to Paul Newman’s bedroom, where he demolishes Elizabeth Taylor’s liquor while giving her the cold shoulder.
She is far too kind in this flick. I would’ve kicked him out of the bedroom, crutches or not, after his first hissy fit.
Also, why is Paul the Newman such an angry drunk? My guess is he was some kind of high school sports jock, sad about the passage of his glory days, because the first scene I saw was Paul at some high school stadium at night, killing a bottle of whiskey or whatever while he throws stuff around before running hurdles. On the last hurdle, he trips up and that’s when he breaks his leg.
I found Paul Newman to be completely unsympathetic. Plugging in the airline headphones wouldn’t change my opinion because he never seemed to say anything anyway.
Note: After firing up the googles, yes, this was CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, and the internets say Tennessee Williams, a playwright famous enough to have his OWN STATE, hated this movie adaptation of his play so much that he told people the film would set back cinema for 50 years or whatever.
Verdict: This might be a good movie with the sound on. Who knows? Visually, it was boring. You’d have to pay me in purple euros to watch it again.
I DON’T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT
I also watched this with the sound off, peeking every 10 minutes, and that was plenty to understand the plot: Sarah Jessica Parker is a working mom with a husband, kids, a gigantic loft and many, many pairs of shoes. Her boss is Remington Steele / 007, which makes her life even more miserable, right?
It’s a rough life.
There are more than 7 billion people on the planet. Half are women. I bet if you showed this film to moms in Africa who walk miles every morning to fetch drinking water, or moms in China working on assembly lines 14 hours a day, they’d break down and cry at all the hardships that Sarah Jessica Parker has to endure in this movie. Should she spend more time at the office with the suave Pierce Brosnan, more time at home being a wife and a mother or maybe hire another nanny and just not feel guilty about it?
The climax of this movie, I believe, comes when Sarah Jessica Parker faces the ultimate test: should she pack five pairs of shoes on her business trip or six?
The Hollywood executives who greenlit this turkey should be belted into a 15-hour airplane ride, halfway across the world, while they’re forced to watch this thing five times straight.
Verdict: Kill it with fire. Nuke it from orbit. No mercy.
Impressive and interesting.
I salute you, Lord of the Rings.
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Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that won some award (PNWA 2013). Represented by Jill Marr of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
So this West Virginia photographer is hitchhiking around the country, writing a book about kindness in America, when he’s randomly shot by some man in a truck.
That’s news. Ironic and interesting, with a mystery thrown in: who shot him, and why?
The police arrested a man in a maroon pickup who matched the description. Reporters wrote all kinds of stories about this writer / photographer, Ray Dolin, and his book idea.
Those stories turned out to be wrong. Turns out, he shot himself.
Protip: shooting yourself is never a good way to (a) promote a book idea, (b) win back your ex-girlfriend or (c) make a sweet YouTube video.
The Red Pen of Doom 