Win-Win Situations

January 30th, 2007General4 comments

The thing about writing is that if you do your job well, you create situations in which everyone wins.

Actors see potential in the material and want to attach themselves; great roles make them look good.

Great material allows a director’s vision to coalesce; it gives them the blueprint or the seed to bring something amazing to life on the stage or on screen.

And finally, great writing connects with an audience. It tells them that someone understands, shares their wounds, or shows them a vision of the world that they didn’t see before: How it was, how it is, or how it could be.

I think this is possible with writing because it is a business of ideas, and you are creating solid things out of thin air. Morgan Freeman (I think on The Actors Studio) said something about how the only true creator in film is the writer — directors and actors are working with something that was already there. But the writer creates something out of nothing.

No precious resources are used in the making of stories. A few trees have to be murdered for the paper, but at least it’s a renewable resource. No one loses their lives or livelihood in any insane competition. And in a universe where (as far as we know) E=mc^2, storytelling is one of the few processes where matter/energy/ideas are generated from nothing. Plus the laws of physics and sometimes even disbelief do not apply.

How can anyone not be turned on by that?