Posts Tagged ‘film’

Does writing feel effortless to you?

This week I’m attending the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado. The panel that I’m primarily attending is called “Cinema Interruptus,” which is moderated by the one and only Roger Ebert and film critic Jim Emerson. It’s my seventh or eighth time attending, and I look forward to this event every year. Here’s how it works. Roger and/or Jim pick a film. On Monday we view the entire film, uninterrupted. Starting on Tuesday and continuing for the rest of the week, Roger, Jim and the audience go through the film scene by scene to analyze it.

This year, the chosen film is Chop Shop. As a very special treat, the film’s writer and director Ramin Bahrani is joining us, which is just incredible. In years past, members of the audience have fought each other over the meaning of a prop for half an hour. This time around we can ask Ramin what a prop might mean and get a direct answer that cannot be disputed.

It is a great gift to hear directly from the horse’s mouth about how the film was made. I’m consistently in awe of filmmakers because it seems so incredibly hard to make a film. It makes me tired to even think about it. It seems as if it would be completely overwhelming to me, and physically draining.

After my friend and I left the panel today we had a very interesting conversation about just how hard it would be to make a film, and he surprisingly lumped writing a novel into the same category. In his opinion, both require an immense amount of effort and extreme forethought. The execution, in his opinion, also requires a similar level of dedication and writing even has a physical component as well. He argued that sitting at a computer and typing is not natural for everybody.

All of this was really intriguing. I find that writing my novel feels nearly effortless. It’s like a natural extension of myself, and that more than anything I’m just getting the story in my head out on paper. It’s more like a relief than ever like a chore. To me, filmmakers probably have the same desire, to let their story out, but on film. I wonder how other writers feel about this. Do you write to get the story out? Does it feel natural?

For my friend, it feels impossibly hard to write a novel or make a film, yet he is a computer programmer by trade. He will have a vision of how an application should function, and then have the forethought and skills to translate that vision into code. It comes naturally to him, while to me it seems impossibly hard.

So I suppose that’s what doing what you love is really all about. In a way, we become graceful masters of our passion. It can be so personally rewarding that the effort involved is no effort at all.