The Secret to Writing…

For a moment, please indulge a little bit of my ranting: Every day I fire up my newsreader and try to catch up on what my favorite authors are posting, and I’m amazed and bewildered by how much writing some of these authors can turn out. The load of my own business and personal obligations is hardly monumental, but if some of these authors are juggling even half of my what I do during waking hours while also turning out these reams of blog posts and, in many cases, producing beautiful design work too… well, then I salute them. They’ve mastered a level of time management that I have little hope of matching.

I can barely scratch out four or five posts a week, and it often takes a dogged determination to find a twenty minutes scattered between tasks to get them drafted, edited and posted. Mostly, though, it’s not the quantity that I lament… it’s the time. By and large, very few of the posts I knock out benefit from the time and care with which I’d like to invest any piece of writing I put in front of public eyes. Just this evening, I was hammering out that capsule review of “Elephant” when the dinner I ordered arrived, and immediately I felt compelled to wrap it things up quickly so I could put a little food in my stomach. That…s not a proper way to write anything.

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Elephant in the Room

ElephantI’ve been an erratic fan of Gus Van Sant’s work for years, mostly because the work itself has been somewhat erratic — witness “Psycho” and “Good Will Hunting,” two movies I’d just as soon never watch again. But I was really, really floored by “Elephant,” which I skipped in theaters due to the somewhat uneven critical response it garnered. After two jaw-dropping hours, it baffles me that this film, which is meticulously directed and gorgeously shot, failed to become a sensation in its original run. Then again I think of the deliberate, almost Kubrick-like coldness with which it forgoes any kind of judgment over the characters caught in its Columbine High School-like construction, and it makes a certain kind of sense to me that the public would shun it. We like tragedies written bold in history and reductively in drama, and this movie fits neither of those criteria. It’s subtle and familiar and also deeply frightening.

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