The Failed Writer

Sometimes you feel like the failed writer when you see how well all the other writers are doing. Take grants for example. How the hell do all these writers get these grants? Authors are always thanking this foundation or that for getting large sums of money to work on their fiction. Or the more obvious one...the writers who get a million dollars for a book or a quarter million or a tenth of a million. How do they do that? Or how about the writers who are guest columnists in the NY Times? How did they score that gig? Or the ones that pop up on television. Or hit the NY Times Bestseller list. How did they pull it off?

So you think well I am not doing something. And that something could be a lot of things. Maybe you aren't blogging enough. Maybe you aren't sending out your manuscripts to the right people.  Maybe you don't have a great agent. Maybe you are just writing the wrong types of books. Maybe you have been barking up the wrong tree for years in your pursuit of literary fiction and really someone should have gotten hold of you way back when and said...THIS...THIS is what sells, not...THAT! And you could have made the change then.

But years have passed and you have been pounding away on your piece of stone and your hammer is bent and dull and your stone is chipped and scratched and sort of a dully putty color. But it is your stone. And so you pick up your hammer once again with all these questions smacking around your skull. And you hit that stone one more time. Then again. Then again. For all those questions without answers.


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Three D Gatsby

Maybe you don't know but a 3D Gatsby is in production joining that list of filmmakers who have tried with the classic novel and failed starting with the 1925 production to the Copolla Redford Farrow fiasco that left us with the tinny twenties music playing over shots of  1920 automobiles. The prose in that production was actually the undoing of the film with the heavy Carroway voice over that sounded like molasses's on top of sugar against the spectroscopic gaiety of the twenties and Redfords suits and cars and his heartthrob good looks. Alas it died.

 Now comes a new version. Three D. The rational is that they can finally stage Gatsby like a play the way it was meant to be. Unfortunately Gatsby depends on Fitzgeralds prose and not on the technical staging of the plot. To separate one from the other is near impossible and to put the prose into a voice over or an actors mouth sounds heavy and awkward. Who can forget Redford delivering his line "Cant repeat the past, why of course you can old sport!" Ick,

And so technology will not rescue the film. The book is simply too dependent on the eloquence of Fitzgeralds marvelous ear. There is no way around that and the story without the prose is inconsequential. Fitzgerald had a great fear of the movies initially replacing novels and some would say that has come to pass. But great works of art can never really be duplicated even in 3D. So I guess we will have to continue to read the novel to really get Gatsby.

So sorry to all those with 3D glasses.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/


www.billhazelgrove.com