Haruki Murakami is a bestselling Japanese author whose novels have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s one of those literary writers who lives in the borderlands of literary magical realism and sci-fi/fantasy. My first introduction to his work was the monstrous tome 1Q84, which is almost 1200 pages.
Novelist as Vocation is a book about writing, but if you’re hoping for a technical manual or detailed tips on voice or pacing, this is not the book for you. The closest analogue I’ve read is Stephen King’s On Writing.
King’s book is half memoir, half writing advice. Murakami’s book also has a memoir component, but any writing advice is almost incidental. Murakami seems loathe to put himself on a pedestal with the implication that his advice might be valuable, but he does describe his writing process in some detail.
The book is split into a dozen chapters, each one standing alone and covering a different topic. Half of these chapters started life as essays Murakami wrote years ago and set aside, eventually being published as a serial feature in a Japanese literary magazine. The rest were written later to fill out the book.
For those who are fans of Murakami, the chapters “Are Novelists Broad-Minded” and “Going Abroad – A New Frontier” provide the most history of his career and insight into the man and his view of the world. For those seeking concrete advice, the chapters “So, What Should I Write About?” and “Making Time Your Ally: On Writing a Novel” give an overview of the author’s entire process leading up to, writing, and rewriting a novel.
If nothing else, Novelist as Vocation reinforces the common view of Murakami as a successful author who never quite fit into the literary establishment in Japan or internationally. He comes across as idiosyncratic and sometimes odd, having never been formally trained, and making a start at writing much later in life than many of his literary peers. Getting a glimpse of the man through these chapters, it seems almost obvious that this would be the person behind these unusual novels.
Murakami is self-deprecating and self-important in turns, on the one hand brushing off some critics’ poor reviews of his works and style, but then bringing it up so often that I can’t help but think it hurts him more than he would like to admit. He knocks his own writing as nothing special, but also repeatedly calls back to the prize he won for his first novel and his broad success since then. If nothing else, the fact that he wrote this book about his own life and writing has a certain egoism built into it.
Murakami also serves as a good reminder for any writer who is worried about not having an MFA, worried about starting later in life, or simply feeling like an outsider in the literary world: there are many definitions of and paths to success in writing, and we should not be discouraged or afraid to forge our own way.
After my recent re-read of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, I decided to create a revision checklist. For this list, I started with items from the book, then added some of my own based on my weaknesses and what I typically look for. I’ve split these into several categories to help focus. If you want to make your own checklist, you can split items up into whatever categories make sense to you.
There is a lot to keep track of when revising a story. Too much, in fact, to keep track of all at once. This is why it pays to make multiple revision passes, working from big to small, and working on only a few things at a time. The checklist is a convenient tool for keeping track of it all.
One checklist like this can’t cover everything. It’s just a starting point. There will be changes that are specific to each story. The “general purpose” checklist can also change with your writing style. As you rid yourself of bad habits, you may find that you don’t need to check for those things anymore. If you want to focus on something new (maybe something that comes up repeatedly in reader feedback), you can add it to the checklist.
Story
☐ Introduce important characters early ☐ Describe character physically when first introduced. ☐ Can any characters be merged? ☐ Avoid using multiple channels to show the same characterization or plot point (dialogue, action, narration, etc.)
Chapter/Scene
☐ New scene or chapter when location/timeframe/POV changes ☐ Pacing - should this feel faster or slower? ○ Adjust scene or chapter length ☐ Focus on important aspects for scene ○ Characters/characterization ○ Physical action ○ Dialogue ○ Background info ○ Tone
Dialogue
Mechanics
☐ Avoid swifties (alternatives to "said," adverbs on "said") ☐ Single attribution per character per POV/scene ☐ Avoid tagging with redundant explanations ☐ Beats (action in dialogue) ○ Do two things at once — illuminate character, reveal something ○ Punctuate an emotional shift
Character
☐ Each line fits character/shows character ☐ Dialect - word choice, cadence, grammar. No phonetics.
Misc
☐ Read aloud! ○ Read each character’s dialogue consecutively, out loud, to hear inconsistencies in voice. ☐ Avoid big soliloquies - back and forth flow ☐ Complexity - misunderstandings, indirect questions, leaving things unspoken
Details
☐ Avoid weak words - seemed, mostly, some, a little, a bit, slightly, somewhat, sort of, kind of, like, as though ☐ Avoid cliches and idioms ☐ Avoid italics and ”emphasis” quotes ☐ Avoid phrasing that draws attention to itself ☐ Avoid description in a dependent clause (accidentally simultaneous actions) ☐ Avoid repetition ☐ Use exclamation points very judiciously ☐ Use brand names judiciously ☐ Use expletives judiciously ☐ Use adjectives judiciously ☐ Replace adverbs with better verbs
Narration
☐ Bad/excessive summary or exposition. ○ Work in exposition along the way ○ Provide information at the point it becomes relevant ☐ Narration follows POV character's focus
Characters
☐ Avoid summarizing character feelings ○ Show through action/dialogue ○ Have a character react to or describe another ☐ Time spent/level of detail on character should reflect importance
Point of View
☐ Establish POV as quick as possible in a scene. ☐ Evaluate POVs ○ What info is necessary? Is an omniscient perspective necessary ○ What perspective is most interesting? ○ More distance makes perspective changes less jarring ☐ Limit interior monologue
Pacing
☐ Should this feel faster or slower? ○ More or less description ○ Sentence and paragraph lengths
Renni Browne and Dave King aren’t household names. They aren’t famous authors like Chuck Palahniuk, or Chuck Wendig, or any of your classic famous authorial Chucks. They’re editors. Their advice isn’t wild or shocking, and it doesn’t claim to make writing easy or save you the hard work. It’s just twelve fairly straightforward ideas that can be used to edit fiction and make it better. The result is one of my favorite books on writing.
This book has been on my shelf for years. I have the second edition from 2004, and the original was published a good decade before that. It’s not exactly timeless, but it’s about as close as you can get while including references to a broad swath of literature. I take it out every few years when I’m planning to do a lot of editing, which is why I recently re-read it.
Each chapter focuses on one thing: Show and Tell, Dialogue Mechanics, Interior Monologue, etc. The authors explain a few problems they look for when editing, then provide short examples from published books, workshops, and manuscripts. Each chapter finishes with a bulleted checklist that can be used for your own work. Finally, they provide a couple of exercises that you can try, if you want to use the book as a sort of self-guided class.
After the last chapter, there are two brief appendixes. The first contains the editors’ answers to the exercises. The second is a list of recommended books for writers, split out into craft, inspiration, and reference. Lastly, there is a solid index, so you can easily find that half-remembered advice without needless skimming.
This structure is something worth noting. So many books on writing are meandering or mix anecdotes, ideas, and advice in ways that make them difficult to use as tools. This book has a few anecdotes and asides, but it’s organized so that you don’t have to wade through any of that when you’re busy trying to find some specific thing that resonated. It’s worth reading the book from cover to cover, but it’s also designed in a way that allows it to be useful as a reference.
If there is a weakness in this book, it’s a focus on a modern, mainstream, “popular” writing style. The authors don’t talk much about the exceptions to the rules, or how to make strange and unusual fiction. This is not a guide that will help much if you’re writing House of Leaves, or Poison for Breakfast, or This is How You Lose the Time War.
I don’t think that’s a major failing. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers advocates for clean, concise, clear fiction. That’s a pretty good starting point for any writer. I suspect the authors would suggest that this is table stakes for fiction. If you want to do something more, something wild and crazy that breaks the rules, you will do it more effectively if you have a good grounding in the basics first. This book provides that.
I have a day job in software development where I’ve worked with large corporations. Thanks to that job, I’ve had plenty of exposure to corporate efficiency buzzwords and processes, from lean six sigma black belts to leveraging synergies.
While the eye-rolls induced by these terms are often justified, they usually start with a useful kernel of truth before metastasizing into something a VP drones on about in the all-hands meeting as everyone tries not to cringe.
This brainstorming method is based on the five whys, a corporate-speak process for digging a few levels deep to find the real root of a problem. I like it for brainstorming fiction ideas is because it is fast and easy and generates some unexpected connections.
Five Finger Brainstorming
Start with the first premise that pops into your head. It can be almost anything. It doesn’t have to be particularly interesting or story-worthy. However, don’t be afraid to start with something big like a hostage negotiation or first contact with aliens.
Example:
A man kills his neighbor…
Next, ask yourself why that first event happened, or what it implies. Repeat this until you’re at least five levels deep. You can count them off on the fingers of one hand.
Don’t think hard. Just write down the first thing that pops into your head each time. This technique works best if you let your subconscious take the wheel.
A man kills his neighbor…
because the neighbor knows his secret…
his secret is that he is hiding an alien in his basement…
because he is in love with it…
because he is an alien too.
Next, look at this sentence or paragraph as though a breathless child had just run up and told you this story. What questions would you have? I usually have a couple. These questions are natural jumping-off points for expanding the idea further.
Are they the same species of alien?
Why does one need to be hidden? Does one pass for human while the other doesn’t?
What happens after the murder?
Bonus: Story Trees
You can expand on this with a different style of brainstorming—one that is slower and more methodical. Try it with an idea that feels like it has potential, where you weren’t satisfied with your initial blurbs.
Look at each answer as a branching point in a tree. The original idea is the root. Instead of expanding that idea once, expand it in five different ways. Then go down the chain for each of those branches.
(Why yes, my MSPaint skills are incredible. Thanks for noticing.)
Be aware that filling out all the branches results in exponential blurbs. If you don’t want to go that far, just fill in a few branches that pique your interest. Remember, inspiration often strikes when you’re straining to come up with one or two more ideas. On the other hand, you’re under no obligation to stop at five if you want to keep going.
Two Techniques that Work Great Together
The five-finger technique helps dig deeper into the reasons and consequences of an initial idea or event. The story tree forces exploration of alternatives, which can sometimes get you past easy, tropey explanations and into more interesting territory.
In brainstorming, quantity leads to quality. With these techniques you can generate a lot of ideas quickly, so don’t be precious about them. They’re meant to be quick and disposable. So start counting, and come up with something new!
There’s a chance you’ve come across Carter Vail if you ever find yourself scrolling through Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, or the other short video platforms on the handful of social media sites that make up the modern internet.
He recently released a concise and honest how-to video for building a creative career. It’s tailored toward musicians, but most of the points he makes can be easily translated to other artistic endeavors.
Cash in favors to make *your kind of art* ferociously
Make people care
Stay in the game
Thoughts
It’s interesting to note right away that this list assumes art is a collaborative endeavor. It’s possible to be a solo singer-songwriter, but I think most people will agree that music is among the most collaborative of the arts, perhaps only behind TV and movies in the number of people who have to come together to make something.
Writers and painters are more likely to balk at this. Many of us are used to working alone. But even in the world of fiction, there are beta readers and writing groups and agents and editors and marketing people. You might find yourself writing for other media, for comics or RPGs or video games. As you progress and do more, chances are good that you’re going to have to interact with some or all of these people. No man is an island.
“Make people care” is innocuously simple at first glance, and immediately stands out as the hardest of these steps for most of us who have tried to do it. Today more than ever, there is an infinite abundance of art out there. It’s a struggle to be seen and connect.
I see the fifth step, “stay in the game,” as an extension of this. Rare is the artist who never thinks about giving up. Making people care takes time. You never know when (or if) your work will reach the right set of eyeballs. It may be tomorrow. It may be a decade from now. Do you give up or keep going, harder than ever?
As Carter says, “Stay in the game, make art, and put it out into the world.”
Last week, in the second post of my series on writing short stories, I had already missed my weekly goals. Hardly the end of the world, but I was still a little disappointed in myself.
I have a notebook from NaNoWriMo that says “Write Every Day” on the cover. It’s exactly the thing that NaNoWriMo advocates. It might be the most commonly given writing advice. After all, if you want to be prolific, you’re going to need to write a lot. Right?
Well, yes and no.
The reason we have this mantra is because it’s hard. Most of us don’t write every day, even if we aspire to. However, simple aphorisms usually obscure a more complicated truth. Writing every day doesn’t guarantee success, and success doesn’t require writing every day.
The Self-Designed Job
Most of us who write fiction on spec are writing entirely on our own. There is no job description, no education or work history requirements. Nobody evaluated our resumes. We woke up one day and decided to write. Even those of us who have more formal writing jobs are often freelancers or contractors.
It can be powerful to choose your own goals and working hours. It can also be difficult. It’s not as simple as going into the office 9–5. It’s not as easy as having work handed down from a boss. Being self-directed means there are no defined boundaries to the job. You can work too little, or far too much.
I realized a few years ago that I was always setting goals for myself, and almost never satisfied with my own achievement. My performance reviews for my self-defined job were consistently bad. But this is really just my own personality issue. It doesn’t actually reflect my performance. Understanding that, I can more easily recognize that feeling and let it go.
Writing is More Than Writing
It’s not surprising how many writers hate talking about their own work, or trying to sell it. We write because we love writing, not because we want to do writing-adjacent business stuff. Unfortunately, that’s not the real world. If you want people to read what you’re writing, there’s probably some amount of business and self-promotion that needs to be done.
Beyond that, writing is more than putting words on the page. There’s work to be done before the first draft, coming up with ideas and refining them. There’s work to be done after, revising and editing. There are classes, books, and blogs about craft.
There is even the undefinable work of being out in the world, observing people and things, having the experiences that will inform the work. Fiction can only be as interesting as the inner world of the author. That stew of ideas requires ingredients and time.
I’ve even found blogging or journaling to be incredibly useful for my writing. Sometimes experience isn’t enough; it takes reflection to unlock that understanding. I can’t count the number of times that writing about my process resulted in exciting new ideas.
Moving Toward the Mountain
If you’re like me, and you have that voice in the back of your head that complains when you’re not writing “enough,” there are a few things you can do to address it. Make a list of all the things that contribute to the writing. Include things like ideation, editing, and critique. Include that fun business stuff, whether it be sending work to traditional publishers, working on self-publishing, or something as mundane as accounting for taxes. Include reflection, like blogging or journaling.
Ask yourself honestly if you’re allocating enough time to rest, recharge, and feed that stew of ideas that will, in turn, feed your stories. Don’t be afraid of taking a break, or even a vacation. If you want writing to be a “real” job, it should come with sick days and vacation time.
When pursuing goals, there are a lot of different ways to move toward the mountain. Sometimes the path isn’t straight. We have to put words to paper if we’re going to be writers. But not necessarily every day.
I’m always on the lookout for good books on the craft of writing. Over the years, I’ve discovered that there are actually quite a few of them. I have at least a dozen on my bookshelf at any given time, a selection that morphs slowly, like the ship of Theseus. In fact, there are probably hundreds of good books on writing. These books have a tidbit here or there that will lodge in your head, only to pop up at an opportune moment, leading to some small improvement. Or they’ll provide some high-level idea that inspires an adjustment in your way of working.
Consider This is something else. Having just read it for the first time, I think it’s safe to say that it is one of those rare great books on writing. There is an easy way to tell if you are reading such a book. It reads like an autobiography. Writers see the world through writing, and it is only natural that we should get to know each other best through our writing philosophies. A great book on writing feels like you’ve cracked off a little piece of a writer’s soul and slipped it under your ribs. A warm little splinter next to your heart.
The subtitle of this book is, “Moments in my writing life after which everything was different.” I suspect a fair number of writers will count this book as one of those. This is not a book about how to write well. It’s a book about how to write when you are Chuck Palahniuk. And really, what other book could we possibly expect from him?
Postcards From the Tour
If you’re not familiar with Palahniuk (pronounced “paula-nick”), he is the author of Fight Club. He has written more than twenty other successful books and comics, a good amount of short fiction, and a few non-fiction pieces, but if you know him from anything it’s probably Fight Club. His writing career spans over thirty years.
Much like Stephen King’s On Writing, the book is half advice and half anecdotes from the author’s life. Unlike King, whose book is more or less neatly split into the writing parts and the biography parts, Palahniuk’s is a mish-mash.
Each chapter focuses on a particular broad topic: Textures, Establishing Your Authority, Tension, Process. Between these sections are Postcards from the Tour, vignettes from Palahniuk’s life that may or may not directly relate to what comes before and after. He wraps the thing up with a list of recommended reading, and an interesting, brief chapter called “Troubleshooting,” which is essentially a list of problems that you may run into with your work and his suggested solutions.
There are motifs that span the book, like the favorite quotes from authors Palahniuk has known, inscribed alongside tattoo art. “For a thing to endure, it must be made of either granite or words.” “Great problems, not clever solutions, make great fiction.” “Never resolve a threat until you raise a larger one.” And, of course, “Readers love that shit.”
Palahniuk makes it clear that much of the advice he’s providing is not his own. It was given to him by others. He may have taken it to heart, tweaked it, and made it personal, but it is really a collection of advice from all of the people who helped shape him. When Palahniuk makes a point he wants you to remember, he says, “If you were my student, I’d tell you…,” but this is not workshop book. It is not a syllabus to be followed. It’s a conversation between fellow writers.
If You Were My Student
Consider This is packed with small pieces of good advice; so much that it is impractical to dig into all of them here. In fact, I kept running into things that made me pause to consider how they would help me in one way or another with the stories that I’m currently working on, and made me wonder if I needed to revise some pieces I thought were done.
He tells us there are three textures for conveying information: description, instruction, and exclamation. A man walks into a bar. You walk into a bar. Ouch!
He tells us attribution tags can provide a beat within a sentence. Use quotation marks for detail and realness, paraphrase for distance and diminishment.
He tells us the Little Voice is objective and factual. It is unadorned description, the documentary camera. The Big Voice is explicit narration, journal or letter. It is opinionated. Intercutting Big Voice and Little Voice can convey the feeling of time passing.
Palahniuk also makes more than a few suggestions that made me think, “That’s all well and good for Chuck, but what about the rest of us?”
He suggests that each chapter should be a self-contained short story, to the point that it could be published independently.
He suggests a liberal mixing of first, second and third person points of view.
He says we should create a repeated “chorus” to break up the story parts, like the rules of fight club. Use lists, ritual and repetition.
I have an unsettling suspicion. The parts that feel wrong to me—the parts that seem too unique to Palahniuk—might be just as useful as the parts I found immediately helpful. I just haven’t quite grasped them yet. Maybe in five years or a decade they’ll hit me like a lightning bolt and I’ll feel the need to revise all my works in progress yet again.
Readers Love That Shit
If it’s not obvious, I think this is a book on writing that most writers should own. It’s raw and personal, often strange, and very particular to Palahniuk. That’s precisely what makes it work. It’s a collection of writing advice from many writers, all channeled through Palahniuk over a decades-long career. I took copious notes on my first read through, and I have confidence that I will find an entirely new selection of things to consider when I read through it again.
November is over, and so is NaNoWriMo. If you participated, I hope it was fun and you hit your target word count.
If you’re new to NaNoWriMo, it’s worth noting that it’s more than just the big November event. The “Now What?” Months are January and February, where participants are encouraged to finish, revise, or work toward publishing their NaNoWriMo novel. Camp NaNoWriMo happens in April and July, and encourages pursuing more flexible goals, whether that be starting a new project, finishing an existing one, working on editing, or whatever you like.
There is also the unofficial community tradition of NaNoEdMo, when some ‘WriMo-ers try to get in 50 hours of editing (or however much you feel like) in March. Unfortunately, while there have been several fan-maintained sites in the past, they all appear to be defunct. However, the NaNoWriMo website can still be used to create a new project for the month. Just set a goal of 50 “words” and treat them as hours of editing, or set it to 3000 “minutes” if it feels better to have a bigger, more granular number.
I’m currently thinking I will try to finish my NaNoWriMo 2023 project in one of the Camp NaNoWriMo months, but for now I want to get back to some other things, like revisions on Razor Mountain. I’m also thinking about new big project for 2024.
Thanks for hanging out with me this November. I’ll see you all in December, when I get back to my regularly scheduled programming.
As I mentioned last week, I’m hopping back onto the NaNoWriMo bandwagon this year. I’ve participated quite a few times, but for those who are participating for the first time, I thought I would give you some advice and resources for NaNoWriMo newcomers.
Nothing Really Matters Except for the Writing
Let’s get this out of the way up-front. All you need to do is write. Write 50,000 words of a single novel in the month of November, and you’ve won NaNoWriMo. And if you don’t want to do “traditional” NaNoWriMo, set yourself whatever goal you want.
NaNoWriMo is all about writing, so write in whatever way works for you. That said, most of my advice here assumes that you’re doing the standard event.
Set up Your Profile
NaNoWriMo started as a fun challenge among friends, and slowly expanded into the huge event it is now. Likewise, the NaNoWriMo website has evolved over the years to have quite a bit of functionality.
Once you’ve created a login, you have access to your personal profile and a few tools. None of this setup is really necessary to participate, but I find that it helps me to get excited about the event if I set up my profile.
First, under “My Nanowrimo,” you can create an “About me” section and select favorite books and authors. If you have friends doing NaNoWriMo, you can set them as your buddies. Under the “Groups” section, you can join your local writing group. There are groups for most decent-sized cities. If you’re in a rural area, there is probably a group that covers that part of your state. (If you’re not in the US…I’m not actually sure how good the international coverage is. You’ll have to search and find out.)
Create a Project
Under the “Projects” section of “My Nanowrimo,” you can enter some info about the book you plan to write. If you just signed up, the default settings will be for NaNoWriMo, but you can adjust the settings to whatever you want.
Picking a working title and an image to represent your project can be a fun non-writing way to get excited about your project. You can also look at the “Badges” section and award yourself personal achievement badges. There are badges to identify yourself as a planner, “pantser,” or something in-between, and a bunch of other badges for various little actions and achievements.
The badges under “Writing Badges” will be automatically awarded based on the word counts you upload to the site. If you enjoy earning badges, you should glance over these before November starts. To earn them all, you’ll need to write at least 1667 words per day in November, and you’ll need to update your stats on the website each day to earn credit toward badges.
Connect
There are forums under the “Community” section of the website, where you can chat with other participants and find like-minded writers. If you’re interested in meeting up and writing with people in real life, check out the section for your geographical region. People will often schedule events and get-togethers, although what’s available is going to depend a lot on the amount of participants in your area.
Offers
Since NaNoWriMo has become a big event, many companies that sell tools for writers will provide discounts or coupon codes for participants. You can check “Writer’s Resources -> Offers” to see what’s available.
These are typically not amazing deals, but if you’ve been thinking about buying a writing tool like Scrivener (a product I personally like a lot), you can get it a little cheaper by using these codes.
Preparation
While futzing around with your profile on the NaNoWriMo website can be a fun way to procrastinate, you’ll eventually want to get into the actual project. If you’re participating in the traditional NaNoWriMo, you can’t start actually writing until Halloween midnight, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do some preparation before November.
If you’re the sort of writer who likes to outline, this is the most obvious way to prepare. Knowing what you want to write will allow you to hit the ground running. Whether you’re a planner or not, you’ll probably want to think about your characters’ personalities, your settings, and at least a starting point for the plot. NaNoWriMo is mostly about writing a lot of words in a short amount of time, and you’ll have an easier time writing a lot of words if you don’t have to regularly stop and figure out where the story needs to go next.
The most important thing is to find the aspects of the story that excite you. Why do you want to write this story? The more excited you are to write, the less grueling the process will feel. Most writers will regularly encounter frustrating sections in their work, but that excitement is the fuel that can keep you pushing forward when you’d prefer to close the laptop or notebook.
Apart from story considerations, you may want to think about writing logistics. If you don’t already write on a regular basis, it can pay to think about where you’re going to set up shop for the month. Do you plan on writing at a desk at home? The local coffee shop? Will you write on a computer, tablet, or notebook? When will you have time to write each day? Do you need to make adjustments in your schedule during November to ensure you have the time set aside?
If you haven’t been writing on a regular basis, you may not have a good idea of how long it will take you to write 1667 words. If you have the time and inclination, one or two practice sessions might give you a better idea of what you’re capable of. For some people, writing 6-7 double-spaced pages is no big deal. For many of us, it’s hours of work.
You may want to give a heads-up to your family or the people you live with. The event is a lot easier if they are aware of the time commitment you’ve made. These people can also be your biggest cheerleaders, even if they aren’t participating. And if they are participating, then you can support each other.
Psyche Yourself Up
At the most basic level, the strategy for success in NaNoWriMo is simple: start strong, and try to not miss any days.
To start strong, many participants like to join a midnight write-in or local event on November 1st. Late-night diners are common venues, but you can always attend a virtual write-in at the place of your choosing. The more you can boost your word count in the first couple days of the event, the more wiggle-room you’ll have for days where you struggle.
If you have days where you know you won’t be able to write (Thanksgiving is a common one for writers in the USA), you may want to try to write extra beforehand, so you won’t fall behind.
Don’t Forget to Have Fun
NaNoWriMo is a challenge, but it’s meant to be a fun one. If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to fall into the trap of worrying about the goal and forgetting to enjoy the actual experience. Writing can be tough, but we do it because we get something out of it: self-expression, self-understanding, or the simple joy of bringing something new and unique into the world.
Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? What are you doing to prepare? Let me know in the comments.
Asteroid City is the latest movie by Wes Anderson, released this summer, but written and filmed during various stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve touched on Wes Anderson once or twice before. He’s a divisive figure who makes movies with a very particular aesthetic. Some people revere him, some can’t stand him.
Asteroid City is, in many ways, just another Anderson film, with many of his usual virtues and foibles. However, I can’t help but feel there was one way it diverged significantly from other Anderson movies, and it was not a positive change. The problem with Asteroid City is its ending.
What Works
Like so many Anderson movies, Asteroid City starts with a frame. The main story is supposed to be a famous play, while the frame is a documentary about the author and the creation of that play. The brunt of the movie follows the plot of the play, with small asides back to the documentary.
In a pastel pastiche of the 1950s, a young scientist convention brings a number of children and their families to the small desert town of Asteroid City. The festivities are interrupted by the brief arrival of a UFO, and the government puts the town under quarantine. However, the children work together to get news of the situation to the outside world, and this results in public pressure to drop the quarantine. The various people who have come together in this strange situation then leave the town and return to their separate lives.
There are a whole host of fairly obvious correlations to the pandemic quarantine in this plot, and the bonds and romances that develop among the characters in a stressful situation. These are all relatable themes; perhaps the most universally relatable themes available to a storyteller in 2023.
I was a little leery of Wes Anderson delving into science-fiction when I first saw trailers for this movie, but the actual sci-fi elements are quite slight, and mostly played for humor. This works well enough in the Andersonian medium, and there’s even a funny little call-back in the “documentary” portion of the movie, where it’s revealed that the alien in the stage play is a masked Jeff Goldblum, the only scene he appears in.
Where it All Falls Apart
As the plot of the convention and the short-lived quarantine wrap up, the movie shifts back to the documentary. In an acting class taught by Willem Dafoe and populated by most of the cast of the movie, there is a discussion about sleep and dreams. Then the group begins to chant, over and over…
“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”
It is this chant that ends the “documentary.” When I talked with my wife afterward, this was also the exact point where she said that she gave up on the movie completely.
It’s Weird, So What?
I think it’s safe to say that the average moviegoer finds most Wes Anderson movies to be weird. These movies usually don’t see wide distribution, and they don’t make blockbuster money; they exist on the edge between Hollywood and low-budget art film. They’re not trying to be a realistic depiction of life, and they’re also not full of bombastic special effects like the typical Hollywood blockbuster.
In my opinion, Anderson movies occupy an interesting niche. They’re clearly on the hoity-toity, film festival end of the movie spectrum, but they’re usually plotted in a straightforward way. They’re open to interpretation, but they’re not inscrutable.
Grand Budapest Hotel is partly a love story, and partly about a man who inherits an expensive painting and earns the ire of a the deceased woman’s murderous family. Moonrise Kingdom is about a pair of kids who run away together in the face of an impending hurricane. Isle of Dogs is about a kid looking for his lost dog. The Anderson movies that appeal to wider audiences are the ones with a surface-level plot that is easily understandable. They contain quite a bit that you can appreciate in a single viewing, even if you’re not worried about the vagaries of cinematography or frame stories or aspect ratios.
These movies are still “weird.” They’re still arty and invite all sorts of deep reading. You just don’t need those things to have fun watching the movie. This is where Asteroid City fails its audience.
Most of Asteroid City follows the ethos of an interesting surface layer on top of deeper weirdness. The parts that take place within the play are straightforward, bright, and funny. The parts that take place in the frame story are less straightforward, but they have their share of jokes, and they take up much less screen time. It’s only at the end where this spirals out of control.
The chanting actors are not at all straightforward. Their mantra, “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” has almost nothing to do with the movie on a surface level. It demands that the viewer try to make some non-obvious interpretation in order to square this ending with what they just watched. Anyone in the audience who merely wants to watch and enjoy a movie is immediately excluded.
Even worse, this phrase is chanted over and over and over. The viewer is bludgeoned with it. The movie literally shouts out the importance of this singular phrase. It shows a complete lack of trust in the audience, a fear that we might miss this vital thing if it wasn’t so explicitly spelled out.
You Choose Your Audience
If the movie had ended with the temporary residents of Asteroid City saying their goodbyes and driving away, it would have worked for a “surface-level” audience. It would have welcomed the average moviegoer along with the cinephiles. Instead, it ended with an event that demands interpretation and demeans the audience with a complete lack of subtlety.
And I know, at least anecdotally, that parts of the audience felt excluded. They decided this was not a movie for them.
I don’t know what Anderson was hoping to accomplish with this ending. He may very well have been happy to make something just for the ardent fans. But he made a choice that profoundly affected who can enjoy his movie. These are the kinds of choices we all make in our work, either purposely or by accident.
It’s also worth noting that you can cater to a variety of overlapping audiences. It’s not always a zero-sum game. You can provide an entertaining surface-level plot, with readable character motivations, and still embed deeper ideas, complex metaphors, or mysterious events that are never adequately explained. Nothing can appeal to everyone, but you can make choices that widen or narrow your audience.
There’s nothing wrong with choosing to write something that you know will have a limited audience. If that’s the story you want to tell, then tell it. But think about what you’re doing, and do it as purposely as you can. Make sure you’re not excluding the audience by accident.
Words Deferred 