Jordan Peele won an Oscar last night for best original screenplay for Get Out, a movie so powerful it took me a week and reading on Wikipedia about how it ended before I could watch the last fifteen minutes. In his acceptance speech, he said he stopped writing it twenty times because he thought it was impossible, that it wouldn’t work. Nevertheless, he persisted. Thank you, Jordan, for giving me a glimpse of the pathway. I’m on my third week of not writing The Achilles Factor. Blocked on Chapter Twenty, pretty sure it’s impossible and that it won’t work.
My psychiatrist once told me the way through writer’s block was to either get where your characters are or get your characters where you are. So, daunted by the prospect of transporting my rogue’s gallery to a hobbit cottage in New Mexico, I propose to get myself down the brass pole into Mission Ops in a basement at JPL where they’re arguing about something I can’t quite hear, other voices, other rooms (thank you Truman Capote).
Aaron Sorkin says, look for people arguing about something. Helen Mirren says to imaginatively put yourself into a situation. Shut your mind down, bring yourself into that world, think and feel your way through it. Go deep into your imagination and focus on the necessity to tell your story. Nothing else matters.
So. I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the argument they’re having in the basement there (thank you James Joyce).
Jordan Peele. Truman Capote. Aaron Sorkin. Helen Mirren. James Joyce. I’m in good company as I wrestle this motherfucker to the ground.
Eclectic Magpie 