Yet Untitled 032 - Necessary Floundering
A short note on transferring confidence
Dearest Yet Untitler,
Thank you for all the wonderful responses to YU 031. It was delightful to hear about your gaps, and the range of your experiences around memory and its absence was fascinating. Memory - it’s a perpetual, ne’er drying well of inspiration to me. I can write about it without tiring till the cows come home.
Speaking of writing - here we are on instalment 032. Counting the YU Lite instalments (my mini version to fall back on during busy or vacation-some days), we are on 36 straight weeks of publishing! And it has been sheer pleasure! What I mean to say is that it’s not simply stamina at work here. At some point, the effort become effortless. Perhaps one decade of uncompromised effort - almost continuous writing on account of my career - has manifested thus. Perhaps unseen muscles made strong from constant use are flexing without creating excess lactic acid. Perhaps it’s a flow I am blessed to enjoy for a spell.
As if to balance this out, the universe sent a challenge my way, and I’d like to write about it in this week’s instalment. This week, I want to write about floundering. About not knowing. About not being adept. About being beaten by something.
The Challenge
I drew a blank when I sat down to write a short film script this week.
For context:
I’ve made 8 short films in the last 20 years.
The last short I made was about 7 years ago.
The experience of writing the short felt so different from writing YU that I sat up and noticed. It’s not that I didn’t have ideas; what was difficult to fathom was that I felt unsure. That’s something that my hot-streak-36-instalment self has not been used to.
He. Did. Not. Like. It.
It took me back to a time, long ago, when I had sat in front of a laptop wrestling hopelessly against a second draft of some script. The ideas were there - good ideas. But the proficiency to jump over that particular set of hurdles was absent. I remember the feedback I received on that draft - expectedly dismal. But that failure put me in a certain state of mind - it led to a dogged determination that fuelled the next ten years of writing.
I think I’m feeling something similar right now. It not pleasant. There’s restlessness in it. There’s frustration. But, there’s also hope. If I’m lucky, maybe this very feeling may fuel my next ten years of filmmaking!
Deconstructing Confidence
In order to understand my discomfort in writing a short film, I deconstructed my comfort in writing YU.
Writing YU has been a rigourous kind of comfort. What I mean is - I haven’t been writing it on a hammock sipping on a Piña Colada. I’ve been stealing minutes between, stretching bedtime, grabbing Uber time - you get the picture. But what’s been clear is that I’ve known what to do in those 10 minutes. I’ve known where to look and I’ve learned to convert effectively enough to be able to hit send each week.
With the short, 10 minutes is the average amount of time I’ve spent staring blankly at the screen before typing even one word! It’s been a while since I’ve felt this; which probably means that it’s high time that I’m feeling it.
In writing Yet Untitled, “converting” effectively - converting creative impulse to creative output - in my experience, is the comfort of always having many options to choose from. Does this make sense? It feels like I know that there are a 100 ways to express an idea. Is this, at some point in my like as a writer, I have attempted each one of those 100 ways? All those man-hours must mean…something?
Here’s another insight:
To me, writing YU is ‘writing’, while writing a short film is ‘filmmaking’. In my head, writing scripts for shows and films I’m not assigned to direct is still ‘writing’. I think that’s where I’m getting stuck. Writing a short that I’m going to direct is suddenly ‘filmmaking’ (😬 ominous music plays). And suddenly, I’m out at sea fighting all kinds of demons from the deep, more than a bit frightened.
Also, with ‘writing’ - I’ve “been there”. I’ve wrestled with unfinished drafts in the face of looming deadlines. I’ve fought, outwitted, swashbuckled and crawled my way to the end of stories. I’ve written crap a hundred times to hit upon non-crap the 101st time. If demons arise from the deep, I decapitate them with my mightier-than-a-sword thingie.
With ‘filmmaking’, I feel like I’m going to school all over again. And I recall that pit-in-stomach feeling of the first day of school. Unpleasant. Avoidable.
At this point, when it comes to ‘filmmaking’, my eager and restless mind can see my intent clearly, but not the means of manifesting it. That’s all blurry, currently. Not that I haven’t done it before. All the scheming to pull off shoots without location permission, all the bumps on the head earned from fighting to finish before losing light, all the imagination employed to sidestep an non-actor’s inability (the day to day currency of indie filmmaking) - it’s all there, but it doesn’t reside in the fingertips. Like the demon Kumbhakarna, whom Ravana had to wake up from slumber by deploying his loudest musicians, all this experience is dozing inside a comfortable, cool cave at the back of my head.
With “Yet Untitled”, ideas form quickly and manifest quickly. I have bent time, space and schedules to make this so.
How do I do this with filmmaking?
How do I wake up my Kumbhakarna?
The curse of profundity
If could step out of my own head and watch myself write a list of things I want to make a short film about (the list - my love!), I would likely explode with laughter or implode with embarrassment. Thankfully, a lack of objectivity saves me. And when surmounted on this page, the amusement turns to words.
Here, you do the laughing for me:
Vasant’s list of very filmable 🙄 short film subjects:
“Transcending time”
“The tension between contraries”
“Comprehending eternity”.
After many ten-minute capsules of disbelief at myself - wondering how I got to this place where I could feel this small before a giant process - I awakened to the absurdity I was setting myself up for. The process wasn’t a giant. I was turing it into one. In fact, I was turning it into an Ogre.
“Yet Untitled” always maintained a commitment to simplicity, not inaccessible complexity. I always want YU to be readable. The moment it ceases to be readable, I have failed.
Initially, YU started with an image (especially my early instalments, which deliberately launched off an image chosen as if with half-closed eyes). Leaping off an image, I was usually reeling in 2-3 immediate ideas that it evoked. Starting with an image was solid and simple. An image has edges. A shape. A shape, you can hold. Something you can hold keeps your head above water. You can always refine your stroke once you’re swimming.
Profoundities, while they may have depth, are often elusive. The trick is finding a way in - and often that opening is a simple, nondescript door.
So I tried an experiment. I swapped the profound with the mundane.
The Switch
So rather than thinking about ‘eternity’ and ‘contraries’, I came up with a much more accessible magnum opus:
Kitkin is my daughter Ananya’s favourite toy. And “Looking for Kitkin” is a simple story about Ananya losing her beloved toy and what she goes through as looks and looks, the fear of losing Kitkin becoming worse and worse.
The moment I committed to this idea, my brain agreed to open all its stops and started to work at filmmaking. It was totally uncanny, the transformation - not very different from watching Bruce Banner turn into the Incredible Hulk. Suddenly there was muscle where earlier there was flab.
How did this manifest?
I immediately had a series of shot breakdowns in my head. They appeared with an ease comparable to the ease of idea conversion in YU.
I suddenly had a plan - when to shoot what, in what kind of light, and the challenges I’d run into. I also had possible solutions to those challenges in my head, not knowing whether they would work, but a definite, energetic curiosity to see whether they would.
I started looking forward to procuring some basic, inexpensive equipment that could use for this. It felt hopeful and exciting!
I’m also very intrigued by the next thought that followed:
“I can make a one minute film every week, starring my kids.”
It was a thought like this that lead to the existence of “Yet Untiled”. It was a decision. It was also permission to not produce a masterpiece every time.
But it was a commitment to produce.
It was a commitment.
So here I am. Committed me, wondering what kind of short film I’ll be sending your way next week or the week after. It’s like what they say in Germany -
“Make eye contact while saying ‘cheers’, else it’s bad sex for seven years.”
My response to this has always been: “At least it’s sex for seven years.”
Years ago, I remember reading that Samurai focussed on mastering tea ceremonies with the belief that it will lead to mastery in swordsmanship. The internet is full of different versions of this same story. In the clip below, a couple of would-be brigands definitely get the whole picture about ability transference from watching Musashi Miyamoto catching flies with his chopsticks. You don’t mess with someone who’s got that level of concentration!
I think we should draw hope from the fact that if we feel inept at one thing, we can think about why we feel adept at the thing we do well, work backwards and find a way to become proficient at the other thing.
That’s the idea. And then there is the work. There is always the work.
I look forward to sharing “Looking for Kitkin” with you a few instalments down!
Before you go…
Have you every encountered confidence transference yourself? Tell me. I want to know!
Yay for KitKin, I like the idea of that film! Also, I adore that picture of you as a kid, lol. I can really see your girls in that one too!
Looking forward to Looking for Kitkin, sounds fab.