Earlier today, Video WatchBlog topped 200,000 hits. It's a good excuse for me to thank you all, once again, for your regular attendance and giving me audience and reason to write some things out of my system that might not otherwise get written.
I spent today writing my next SIGHT AND SOUND "No Zone" column, which is about Pola Rapoport's WRITER OF O, a documentary about STORY OF O's pseudonymous author Pauline Réage, who after several decades revealed herself to be Dominique Aury, an editor at Editions Gallimard. Without previewing my column too much, this is one of the most extraordinary and moving films about writing and love of literature that I've seen. It streets next week, and I recommend it to all of you, hand on heart. It's not just a documentary; it also includes dramatic stagings of scenes from STORY OF O (superior, I feel, to the 1975 Just Jaeckin film) and the essay "A Girl in Love," and dramatic recreations of events that actually happened -- and it all flows together beautifully, without seeming in the least indecisive about what kind of film it wants to be.
WRITER OF O's depiction of Madame Réage's writing habits left me feeling as though I have disgraced my craft by not writing more often in longhand. Before the computer age, I used to write in longhand a great deal -- in a personal journal, and also fiction that I wrote on index cards that I subsequently stacked in order and held together with rubber bands. I got my first PC in 1985, and it was paid for with money I received for agreeing to write four volumes and edit all twelve of VIDEO TIMES' "Your Movie Guide" paperback series, which Signet Books later published. Since that time, except for signing books and the monthly checks I send to my debtors, I've basically stopped writing in longhand and do all my writing the way I am writing these words now.
There was one exception: a lone piece of fiction that I wrote in my attic on a legal pad in a sudden burst of inspiration. After watching WRITER OF O, I was inspired to search for it. I found it copied into my computer and dated exactly ten years and one week ago. As I read through its eight pages, the material felt exciting to me and I am thinking of returning to it, extending it into either a novella or novel, and writing the whole thing by hand -- organically. The way artists paint. The way musicians play their instruments.
Oddly enough, my second novel THE BOOK OF RENFIELD was written in a similar way, with the opening chapter written (if memory serves) eight years before the rest of the book. I've been thinking lately that the best way to write is to write fast, to give one's writing the benefit of absorbing one's subconscious, which naturally dissipates the more an author consciously thinks about what he/she is writing, over time. The screenplay I wrote with Charlie Largent, THE MAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES, was written this way and, while some layerings of the material were constructed deliberately, the script also contains a wealth of subtext that entered into the project because it wasn't belabored and thus made too "conscious," and also because we knew our subject well enough that we didn't have to think too much before we wrote each new page. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote that LOLITA was his favorite novel, but that INVITATION TO A BEHEADING (one of my favorites) was the one for which he had the most respect because it came to him in an instant and was completed nearly as fast. Thanks to my collaboration with Charlie, I know how that feels.
To create something new and add it your shelf -- to your self as a broadening achievement -- is one of the best feelings in the world, and I really, really, really want to get back there.
