Being rational isn't always reasonable — here's why.
Everybody pretends.
The “it’s fine” smile you give to the 85-year-old coot in the supermarket line holding up your day. The “let’s grab a drink some time” offer you give to parting colleagues that never happens. The “I’ll add it to my list” thing you say when friends recommend a movie or TV series you’ll never see.
All bullshit. But necessary bullshit to navigate social conventions amicably. Pretending is pathological, and part of being human.
Though sometimes we can go too far — relying too much on reason, and forgetting who we are, and what we actually want. That’s how mid-life crises happen.
Being rational is the problem
There’s one scene in Woody Allen’s Whatever Works that sums this up beautifully. Larry David’s character, Boris, is having a panic attack, doubting his decision to marry his wife. He lists all the reasons he married her — the shared love for classical music, how he loves talking to her, the affinity in bed, etc. “Those sound like pretty good reasons to me!” she says. Boris responds, “That’s the problem! It was rational, it made sense!”.
Making decisions based on reason can get you in trouble if not done properly. You could even define maturing as the process of learning to do what you don’t want. What you might call compromise. Compromise is fine, but not when it turns to blind submission.
Pretending can become a problem for writers — when they start working on projects that aren’t them or, even worse, choose to start working on a project for the wrong reasons.
To curb this, the most important question you can ask yourself when evaluating your next project is:
Where did the idea come from?
You should always ask yourself this question. You have to be aware of why you do what you do, so you can keep track of your tastes and what makes you unique. That includes your strengths, your weaknesses, your fears, your idiosyncrasies, anything that can tell you what to avoid and run with in your writing.
You can often put where your ideas come from into the following categories:
Recommendation
Maybe you’ve written a bunch of buddy comedies, and your partner says they’d love to see you try a rom-com. Or you’re a seasoned sci-fi writer, and a friend reckons you’ve got a great horror in you. Or, you specialize in dark comedies and an industry exec says you should try a “high-concept” flick to attract investors (this actually happened to me).
Diversification isn’t a bad thing — but not to be approached lightly. Carefully consider these recommendations, as your self-esteem is on the line if you devote weeks to a project that you end up hating. Read more about how to take feedback like this here.
Duty
This is the same as recommendation — except you’re making the recommendation to yourself. Like any good writer, you love a range of works. From Star Wars to Seventh Seal, Tolstoy to Tolkien, Shakespeare to Ginsberg. So, after your third thriller in a row, you may feel the duty to try an action, fantasy or anything else one of your heroes did. Got to show variety, right?
No. You don’t.
My co-writer and I were on a roll writing feature scripts — all cynical dark comedies dripping with the absurdity, ridiculous mishaps and ultraviolence we loved (read about them here). For our fifth script, we thought we should try something different — a light-hearted road movie in the ilk of Little Miss Sunshine. We struggled through the first draft. Then, while reviewing it, we decided it couldn’t be salvaged and made the tough decision to bin it.
This destroyed our self-confidence, and we didn’t write for months. Moral? Write what you want, not what you feel you should want. If you don’t, you’ll be pretending, and setting yourself up for trauma.
Inspiration
This is also similar to a recommendation — but not coming from a person, but another external stimulus. It could be anything you see — a sad-looking woman smoking out of a window, a stunning country view, a homeless man giving his last scrap of food to his dog. These brief flickers of beauty are what light the fire of fantastic ideas.
What makes them beautiful is up to you. They may trigger a memory, a trauma, a place, a feeling, a smell, a taste. It doesn’t matter, as long as it comes from you. Build your ideas around these moments, and you’ll make something you love.
If you make something you love, others will love it too. If some don’t, it’s not for them. All that matters is that you love it. It’s yours.
What if I have to pretend?
Let’s be realistic.
Much of the above can only apply all the time if you make a living from writing what you want. Most of us have to compromise — working for somebody else, following briefs and hitting deadlines. All vital considerations, and we should count ourselves lucky to make money from any type of storytelling if we can.
But even if you do have to write things that aren’t you, you can still make them you. Put your stamp on things. Everybody has a trademark, a calling card, an artist’s signature, that they can put anywhere, no matter what they’re doing.
For the Coen Brothers, it’s their witty dialogue, outlandish characters and comedy by line repetition. Surprisingly, they helped write the script for Spielberg’s 2015 Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies. Normally indie comedy darlings, this genre very much isn’t them. But they found a way to fit their trademark in. You can see it from the funny characters Tom Hanks’ character meets in the Russian Embassy, to Mark Rylance’s character’s brilliant ‘Would it help?’ one-liner.
The Coens can be less subtle because they’re the Coens. But the point remains — you can make anything your own. Even if you’re the only one who notices.
If you don’t at least try, all you become is a monkey at a typewriter — someone who submits to reason and, in doing so, losing yourself. You’re more than that.
Stop pretending.
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