I wouldn’t want James Gunn within 10,000 feet of Willis or any grade schools.
But he recently said something useful when talking about how the score for his upcoming Superman movie was mostly finished already, even though the composer hasn’t officially signed a deal or (presumably) gotten paid anything for it yet.
What he said was this:
“when you’re riding the waves of inspiration, what are you going to do? I wrote most of Peacemaker and all of Creature Commandos before I had a closed deal!)”
And for whatever reason, that got me to thinking about writers.
Specifically, the different “species” of writers.
Like, for example:
* A lot of writers are purely mercenaries — if they don’t get paid, they don’t write. A lot of old timey day screenwriters admitted to that. A lot of freelance copywriters, journalists, and work for hire types fit that bill too. So were a lot of pulp writers and anyone else who has to write or they don’t eat even though they don’t particularly enjoy writing and would rather be doing something, anything, else than writing. Gary Halbert once claimed to be this type of writer.
* Still others do it for the love of the craft — and it’s like an art form for them, where every sentence is like a brush stroke, every page like a canvas. They don’t tend to be the most commercially successful writers any more than artists tend to be commercially successful, although some obviously are enormously successful. I admire these types of writers in a lot of ways, but have absolutely nothing in common with them beyond the fact we both write stuff.
* Then there are those who are only writers in their own heads — they want to “have written” but never quite get around to actually writing anything on any kind of regular basis beyond social media takes or blog posts. And even then it’s only when they get inspired to write something.
* Finally, there are those of us who do it because it’s basically therapy — and/or from having so many ideas it’s like Niagara Falls and they gotta go somewhere, and we can’t not write whether or not we want to write, “feel” like writing, are inspired to write, or even if we don’t have the time to write. We’re not gonna win any writing awards, but nobody ever accuses us of not being shameless anyway.
There are writers who are probably a mixture of some or all the above.
And maybe there even whole other categories of writers I am completely unaware of.
That admittedly is probably the case, as I don’t really talk to a lot of writers.
i.e., I think Bukowski had a point when he said:
“The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.”
Not sure what the point of all this was.
Except, maybe, to write something..
On that note:
I was talking to Stefania recently about the idea of putting the screenplay I just finished (based on my first novel “Zombie Cop”) up on the internet for people to read or ridicule, enjoy or hate, mock or encourage, whatever the case may be. I am rewriting the entire novel in a couple weeks based on the screenplay either way, as when writing the screenplay I realized how:
(1) the novel is so bad and amateur and gross it makes the rest of the 8 books after it mostly inaccessible except to the most depraved minds…
(2) the screenplay is probably 100x better than the novel in its current form, and certainly I am 100x more proud of it vs how embarrassed I am of said novel – which I don’t even let my mom read for fear of her wondering how she failed her boy…
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Ben Settle
