Saturday, July 18, 2015

What's More Important? Style or a Good Idea

It appears that content or a good idea can be more important than style. For example, would Lolita, despite it being extremely well written, be as well known if it weren't about the sexual seduction of a 12-year-old nubile nymphet? A number of critics and writers believe that Lolita would be on the level of The Enchanter or Laughter in the Dark but not the novel that made Nabokov rich and (in)famous.

The Blare Witch Project (1999) began with a budget of $600,000 and a 35 page outline for a script that was sans dialogue since the dialogue was improvised. The filming lasted only eight days and was done by a "cinematographer" with only two days of training. However, the innovative independent film's content trumped it's amateur techniques and feel and made a whopping $248.6 million at the Box office. 

Then you have examples like San Andreas (2015). The film received a mediocre 3 out of 5 stars from IMDb, 2.5 out of 5 stars from Rotten Tomatoes and 2 out of 5 stars from Metacritic, but the 3D disaster film made $459.8 at the Box office after being filmed on a budget of $110 million.

And I'm not the only writer who can't fully understand why Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is a cult classic. But it may have something to do with the level of emotion that Salinger put into the book while writing it in the trenches during World War II.

Thus it appears that a good idea, which is of course subjective, can be more important than style. 


Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Write for the Glory of the Art, Not "The Bread"?




As a writer you may stress over whether your writing will sell but it's completely out of your control. That is one of the reasons why it's vital to write about topics and themes that interest you as a person\writer and that you want to share for altruistic reasons.

A lot of people may agree that Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris deservedly won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, but a lot of people may not be able to fathom how the script for Pixels (2015) was sold. 

Jon Elster shared in Explaining Social Behavior "that in some cases I can get X by doing A, but only if I do A in order to get Y. [e.g.,] If I work hard to explain the neurophysiological basis of emotion and succeed, I may earn a high reputation. If I throw my into work for a political cause, I may discover at the end of the process that I have also acquired a "character."" However, it's important to understand that a "high reputation" and "character" are "states that are essentially by-products". 

Thus, you may want to be more like Lester in The Tenants than Willie. Lester was a published novelist who wrote for the glory of the art and immortality while Willie was an unpublished writer who wrote for "The Bread".