Writing Resolutions, Aftersun, The Banshees of Inisherin
I know it’s become something of a cliché — assuming that with a bit of goodwill and focus you can get somehow transform your life in the week between Christmas and New Year. Nevertheless, I’m a firm believer that while lying on the sofa in a miasma of turkey and Christmas cheer it is a good time for reflection and so on New Year’s eve I posted a short thread on twitter of New Year’s writing resolutions.
I wrote them in the second person so as to avoid the constant repetition of the word ‘I’ and the self-importance that implies, but I can’t stress enough that these are resolutions firmly aimed at me. Nevertheless, I thought I’d include them below, just in case they may be of some help.
Prep slow and write fast. Procrastination can be your friend. Get every moving part set in your head, then set the machine in motion. Don’t dive in too early, but once you have, ride the momentum to the end.
Strategize less. I’m least happy when thinking about what is going to sell and how best to package something up — so spend the time actually trying to put something down that someone’s actually going to like. If someone else likes it, you will sell it. If they don’t you won’t.
Write things you like. Which is what you’re always supposed to do, I suppose — but it’s so easy to get caught up with other people’s feelings, deadlines and notes, and the existential feeling of dread that someone might not like what you’ve written. Write what you like.
Distinguish what matters from what doesn’t. Hold on to the spine of your work, the stuff that really matters, and don’t sweat anything else. Don’t get grumpy when people ask you to change stuff that doesn’t matter, just knuckle down and do it.
Give in more. See above.
Defend the material better. When you’re collaborating with people on something you’ve written it’s okay to say — no, this bit here is good — and then make a the case for why it’s good. It feels self-important to do this. Worry less about seeming self-important.
Don’t sweat things that are out of your hands. Make the thing that you can control (the script) YOUR final product, and don’t worry about the things you can’t control (finance, selling it, production) — if things don’t get financed or sold or produced, you still did your job.
Work with cool people.
Stop procrastinating with twitter threads.
I saw a couple of films over the Christmas break, the one that completely blew me away was Charlotte Well’s debut: Aftersun, which was really something remarkable. Hewing very close to reality it, at first glance, is a very simple story of a daughter and her father on a package tour holiday in Turkey — it was so simple, in fact, that for the first few minutes I was worried that there would not be enough in it to hold my attention. I was quickly shown how wrong I was, as Well’s unfurled a majestic demonstration of story-telling efficiency and restraint, the very quotidian and unremarkable surface hiding beneath it the cry of a soul in torment. It hangs together not the least because of two fantastically naturalistic performances at its centre by Paul Mescal (who is so much more in this than his Normal People heart-throb persona would lead you to believe) and a really remarkable debut performance from Frankie Corio as Sophie.
I was significantly less enamored with Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin — which I know has been very well reviewed but was, it seemed to me, rather slight and left a bad taste in the mouth. A sort of parable-esque tale of a man (Colin Farrell) on a small island off the coast of Ireland at the tail-end of the civil war (Brendan Gleeson), who suddenly finds that his long-time friend would rather not speak to him any more — indeed, his friend would rather cut off his own fingers that have to listen to any more of his banalities (I sort of know how he feels). There was quite a bit of repetitive, existential screwball dialogue that reached for Beckett but was left grasping. It seemed to me that these men (and the supposed ‘tragedy’ here, felt very masculine, almost laddish at times) and their non-problems were supposed to symbolize something, but the few analogues that the film offered (art vs life, the history of Ireland), were left poorer for the comparison, not illuminated. Kerry Conlon was cracking though as Farrell’s sister.
Happy New Year to you all — hit reply if you’d like to drop me a note in 2023.
All my best,
James.