FADE OUT: Why We Write
As a writer, your highest calling is to remind us of a universal truth that we've forgotten. That truth might be “love conquers all,” or it might be “explosions are cool.” It's entirely up to you.
Why do you write?
What makes you spend hours of your free time in front of that computer or curled up with that notebook? Why did you reject a normal job with normal working hours – one that doesn't take up at least half of your mental faculties at all times? Why teach yourself a skill that can be learned only through hard work, long study, and sheer, brutal persistence?
Why even bother at all?
Hey, don't look at me. I don't know why you write.
But I can tell you why I write.
I write because I can't stop coming up with crazy ideas, then imagining them as movies and television shows. I write because when I don't I get fidgety, anxious, and ultimately angry with myself. I write because the people I love and trust encourage me to do so – they see something good in my work, even if I can't always see it. And sometimes I write because people pay me to, and I enjoy the creative validation that brings.
But ultimately, I write because I can't for the life of me imagine doing anything else. I think I need stories to survive. And it's not just me. I think all people do, everywhere on Earth.
Stories – narratives – are the number one method by which humankind relays information. This is probably what helped us survive as a species during our awkward teenage years. You know:
Hey Gug! Yeah, what's up? Look, I should warn you, when you go out to hunt mammoth next time? Don't stab it in the butt with your spear. Seriously. Let me tell you what happened to me last time I tried to stab a mammoth in the butt with a spear …
Cue valuable story about how to avoid grisly death via mammoth.
Human beings breathe stories. Every second sentence out of our blabbering mouths is a story. We have the innate ability to turn any stupid old thing into a narrative, even – and this is key – things that have no obvious narrative qualities.
Sports matches become stories. A nation's rise and fall becomes a story. What the hell is up with the weather today becomes a story. We say goodbye to houses when we leave them behind, and we thank cars that get us safely to our destinations. We create stories for our pets, imagining what they're thinking and describing it using our own emotional terminology. This is because we are crazy, and will identify with – and invest narratively in – virtually any goddamn thing.
As Jeff Winger says in the pilot of Community, “You know what makes humans different from other animals? I can pick up this pencil, tell you its name is Steve, and go like this [breaks the pencil] … and part of you dies just a little bit on the inside.”
Humans are thoroughly abnormal and bizarre animals, and the twin sources of our bizarre abnormality are language and empathy. These two elements – the ability to communicate abstractly and the ability to place ourselves into the mind of another – combine to form narrative.
“This happened to me.” “This happened long ago.” “What if this happened?” “Here is how I feel – perhaps you feel this way, too?” Anthropologists talk about “cultural myths” or “foundational stories,” and they're not wrong. Stories are the foundation of all civilization. Without them, humanity as we know it would not exist.
People will tell you that it's weird to want to create stories. Those people are wrong, and possibly projecting a teensy bit of jealousy. Your instinct towards storytelling is exactly as “weird” as reason, speech, joy, loneliness, sex, tribalism, love, or any other innately human quality. That's why they say that everybody has a story to tell – it's weird not to feel like you have something to say to the world.
I'm not going to tell you that your aptitude for or inclination toward writing is a “gift.” I don't believe that there's anyone or anything handing it out. Instead, I prefer to think of it as a human right. You were born with the natural human instinct towards storytelling, and you have the right to exercise it. Pity anyone who says otherwise.
So, then – why screenwriting?
Why not? How long do you spend daily staring at a digital screen? That's what I figured. You spend a huge amount of your time enjoying digital media – film, television, and videogames – and the fact is that your children will enjoy even more of it, in more beautiful and better-connected forms.
We carry games in our pockets because we can't bear to be apart from them for even a second. Television crosses borders and cultural boundaries – one of the first objectives of every family, in every country on Earth, is to provide their loved ones with a television set. And cinema? Cinema is the most profitable form of entertainment in human history, worth billions of dollars a year, loved by every culture on the planet. Films change lives and shape personalities. It's no accident that the ultimate first date question is, “What's your favorite movie?”
Screenwriting is the most popular artform, and therefore the most human artform of all. Don't believe the scare stories about literature, journalism, or fine art being “killed off” by idiot culture – don't believe for a second that the idea of “high-brow” and “low-brow” art are anything but labels of convenience. The old arts all have their own merits – are all beautiful in their own right – but they can't compete with the immediacy and the emotional impact of the screen.
You're a screenwriter because you wanted to be part of that great wave of cultural change: to create art on the bleeding edge of culture. You're a screenwriter because you have a story to tell, and this is the best and only way to tell it. You're a screenwriter because film and television changed you, and you hope that one day you can return the favor.
But you understood all this already, I think. You just needed to be reminded.
You're a screenwriter because you could never have been anything else.