Yet Untitled Lite 011 - The Work Behind Beauty

A Process and a Question

Greetings Yet Untitlers

Greetings from the business end of a work Armageddon. I have landed from my holiday into the shock and awe of killer deadlines. Outside my workday, my brain had been resembling the pea soup from The Exorcist, and I’ve been trying to salvage its working parts for the rest of my life the best I can.

The question on my lips - how do I write Yet Untitled at such times? One thought was to take a hiatus. After all these months of disciplined publishing, would that not be ok?

But to find a new form that allows me to publish at such a time? Now, wouldn’t that be interesting…

I opt for this. Indulge me as I figure out what ‘this’ is. Any ideas?

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A Process

I’m in a re-write boot camp for a show I’m working on. My co-writers and I are performing narrative acrobatics doing a last burst of writing before the show goes into production. The timeline is tight and the demands are heavy. We need to fit a story we’ve told so far in 10 episodes into seven or eight. There’s a lot of cutting, chopping, even amputating. A lot of it isn’t pretty.

Narrative acrobatics.

A Question

Something that rarely happens happened when I watched The Banshees of Inishein.

I woke up in the morning with the feeling that I had been thinking about the film all night. And I had. The film slipped like a babel fish from my ear into my brain and has stayed there since, feeding off my brainwaves, growing bigger. It’s an intruder that I’m happy to let alone because it of what it carried with so much life into my head - questions I’ve never pondered. It’s a film that makes you want to give your precious time to. Gladly.

My question is - could my narrative acrobatics ever achieve a masterpiece such as Banshees? Or is a masterpiece birthed whole, dropping out of the womb already glorious?

Bono once described Leonard Cohen as a carpenter who goes to work on a song like a carpenter goes to work on a door. There is a lot of chiseling and there are a lot of wood chips scattered over the floor. He was saying that theres real WORK behind the beauty. The processe may not be pretty, but his songs are, in the end, masterpieces.

I take heart in this.

Here’s a song about what old LC thinks about his own process:

I leave you all with only so much this time, dear Yet Untitlers. The ol’ boat should stabilise soon, and find a new rhythm, and perhaps a new song as well.

Lots of love

V