Robert De Niro's intro for the best screenplay nominees at last night's Oscars Awards made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. Dark but funny...and all too smattered with bits and pieces of the truth: “The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination and consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day."
I've been pondering why these three sentences struck me so deeply. I think that it's because the mind of a writer is so intent on reflecting the essence of what it is to be human, to hurt deeply, to love profoundly and beyond reason, and to find connections that make it all worthwhile that we know that what we put in writing is there to be read (and if we are lucky, re-read and perhaps translated to other mediums) and we bear the burden of finding or perhaps creating some kernel of truth in it all. And we tell ourselves over and over again that the end product had better be f'in good!
But then again, maybe that drive is all just ego. From my experience, the best we (any of us - writers, musicians, accountants, trash collectors, CEOs, moms, dads...) can do is ask to be a vessel for whatever it is that we are meant to bring to the world, get our egos out of the way, be grateful for the opportunities we have to touch other lives and let LOVE and TRUTH that we don't even understand move through us. Easier said than done. But hey, we can try.
Okay, so in the meantime, I'm gonna gonna go brew a pot of coffee before pulling an all-niter for this script job and try to keep the panic at bay...
Just kidding. Sort of. Maybe I can get the being-a-vessel thing to kick in. It's worked for me before! And that's a story I shall share with you in another post.
I've been pondering why these three sentences struck me so deeply. I think that it's because the mind of a writer is so intent on reflecting the essence of what it is to be human, to hurt deeply, to love profoundly and beyond reason, and to find connections that make it all worthwhile that we know that what we put in writing is there to be read (and if we are lucky, re-read and perhaps translated to other mediums) and we bear the burden of finding or perhaps creating some kernel of truth in it all. And we tell ourselves over and over again that the end product had better be f'in good!
But then again, maybe that drive is all just ego. From my experience, the best we (any of us - writers, musicians, accountants, trash collectors, CEOs, moms, dads...) can do is ask to be a vessel for whatever it is that we are meant to bring to the world, get our egos out of the way, be grateful for the opportunities we have to touch other lives and let LOVE and TRUTH that we don't even understand move through us. Easier said than done. But hey, we can try.
Okay, so in the meantime, I'm gonna gonna go brew a pot of coffee before pulling an all-niter for this script job and try to keep the panic at bay...
Just kidding. Sort of. Maybe I can get the being-a-vessel thing to kick in. It's worked for me before! And that's a story I shall share with you in another post.
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