Movie Stories: Entertainment Versus Self-Expression

well, that much is obvious, isn't it?

asking people what kind of movies they want to see is a fairly useless endeavour because

1. the people really don't know what they want to see until they actually see it
2. it's openly admitting your own lack of imagination and preemptively accepting failure as a writer

you can't expect the people to tell you what they want to see because they are looking to you, the writer, to dazzle and surprise them with something that is so far beyond anything they could even imagine! if they could imagine it, why wouldn't they just write it themselves?

it's like a magician coming to you to ask what kind of magic tricks he should do. how do you answer him? you're not a magician, so what do you know about magic? it's not your JOB to know anything about it!

the most you can do is tell him "uh--i saw a magician make a bird disappear on TV once. can you do the same trick?" and maybe he can do it, but it's not really that inspiring because you've already seen it done before. and the magician could have just saved himself the trouble of asking the audience by just watching his peers to see what tricks are popular and directly copying them, right? in any case, such a magician would be a very mediocre and imitative one.

but the magician who really blows your mind is the one who does the trick that you don't expect, that you never ever ever in a million years would have dreamed of--the magician who has a vision beyond that of regular people.

the thing about writing is that it is a very lonely vocation. when you are writing, it's just you and the paper (or computer screen) and the only audience you have is yourself. so yes, it IS important to write something to please yourself first and foremost.

oftentimes, the work that audiences enjoy is the stuff that you can tell the writer really enjoyed writing. the audience can *feel* when something has been cynically contrived to exploit them, so i always advise that as a writer, the first audience you need to think about is yourself.

but of course, that doesn't mean that just because you enjoyed writing it that the audience is necessarily going to enjoy watching it. there might be some references or jokes that are too insular to your own experience for anybody other than you to understand or appreciate them.

which is why you need to be able to step back from your work and objectively look at it and ask yourself "is there anything in this work that appeals to the basic human experience? am i writing about something that can pretty much connect with just about any human, regardless of race, nationality, geographical location, etc.?"

(that is why the majority of popular songs are about love, by the way--because it's an emotional impulse that EVERYBODY can relate to on some level)

so yeah--if the question is: "entertainment or self-expression?" then i would say the answer is a little bit of both.

stories based on personal experiences can be a good vehicle because you write them with more passion, and that can make a difference. also, one of the basic tenets of writing is "write what you know," and what do you know better than something you've actually gone through?

at the same time, personal stories can be very risky. because of your emotional investment in them, you can get too tangled up in them and lose perspective. you might think that just because the experience that you're writing about is important to you and very interesting to you, that it should and will be interesting to everybody else.

which clearly is not the case.

the audience does not give a shit about you, your personal life or your feelings. all they want is a good story.

so you need to be able to distance yourself emotionally from your personal story and be able to assess whether it is a good story.

as a writer, you need to sort of be of two minds. you need to be able to invest yourself emotionally into writing it, and then at the same time, you need to be able to step over the fence and pretend that you are a member of the audience who has never seen this story before, has no knowledge of the personal experience behind it: would you think this is a good story?

how can one do this?

i thought about this for a while, especially after some conversations we had about certain things. i said previously that i don't depend on other people to tell me whether or not a story is good. i give people my stuff to read just to gauge their reaction to it, but i don't need them to tell me if it's good or not. i already know.

not because i'm so arrogant that i feel that i know everything and i can do no wrong, but because i know when i'm writing something good, and i know when i'm not.

what i could not explain is how i know this.

i think i figured it out, though i'm not sure how to explain it.

i'll think about it a little bit more, but for now, i will say that it has a lot to do with pure craftsmanship--understanding the properties of a good story, recognizing the way a story works and how to craft one.

i'll be back later to explain a bit further, but for now i would recommend reading Aristotles' Poetics. it's available for free a bunch of places online.