Sprint VS. Marathon

I’ve been reading the book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant. And I was thinking of the playwright Christopher Shinn and the fiction writer Lore Segal. Shinn was nominated at the age of 33 in 2008 for a Pulitzer. Segal at 80 was also nominated in 2008. I also remembered a quote by the sometimes annoying Tony Kushner. I wish I could find the quote, but he said something to the effect that if you’re a playwright and haven’t had any success by the time you’re 35 you’re basically a wash-up. Grant writes about how we remember the young geniuses, in the arts and sciences. I love this quote: “…although we’re quick to remember the young geniuses who peak early, there are plenty of old masters who soar much later… In film, for every Orson Wells, whose masterpiece Citizen Cane was his very first feature film at age twenty-five, there is an Alfred Hitchcock, who made his three most popular films three decades into his career, at ages fifty-nine (Vertigo), sixty (North by Northwest), and sixty-one (Psycho). In poetry, for every e.e. cummings, who penned his first influential poem at twenty-two and more than half of his best work before turning forty, there is a Robert Frost, who wrote 92 percent of his most reprinted poems after forty.” He goes on to write that creators have different ways of inventing: experimenting and conceptualizing. The latter starts out with a big idea and attacks it. The former figures it out as he or she goes. One is a sprinter and one a marathon runner. He goes on to write about e.e. cummings. “After imagining his own rules of language, grammar and punctuation in his early twenties, by age fifty, as one critic remarked, ‘Cummings is still the experimentalist of one experiment.’” So what about playwrights such as Shinn and David Lindsay-Abaire and fiction writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer? Ripcord, Lindsay-Abaire’s last play, didn’t exactly get glowing reviews. Shinn is now doing plays where the ancient Horton Foote was put out to pasture (yes, we know. Foote’s language is gorgeous. And he was working on his The Orphan’s Home Cycle into his 90’s) and Nicky Silver, stumbles, gets up, sprints, gets up, falls and seems to stumble again. References Grant, A. (2016). Originals: How non-conformists move the world. New York, NY: Viking.

Fail Better

I am in love with this quote, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." The quote is, of course, by Samuel Beckett, who I always confuse with Brecht. Lol. This is also very American in that try, try again way. But there's a difference. Beckett is telling us not to be afraid of failure. It's not only about success. I think it was Seth Godin who said we need to learn to dance with failure and Rupaul who said that the voice of defeat will always be there (did I just put Seth and Rupaul together). We simply need to learn to love and live with failure. Don't deny it. And certainly don't fear it. No matter who you are, the possibility of failure will always be with us. This means there's no guarantee in life. I've read a few screenwriting books, one of which is by a very famous man who gives workshops. He states that a good story will always sell, no matter what. So, the aspiring artist says to herself, "Let me write the perfect screenplay." She does so. It's flawless. She shops it around. Nothing. What happened? It's absolutely not true that a good story will always sell, or even a great product. The most difficult thing is not to write the screenplay (and trust me this is difficult indeed) it's getting the damn thing made. Today, art isn't about a celebration of beauty, about elegance, about creation. It's about getting the thing produced. There was an American Express ad a few years back which showed Ron Howard and his producer drinking coffee. Most of Ron Howard's films have been pretty awful. Look at his first with The Fonz, called Night Shift. But the advertisement doesn't focus on the quality of his films, his lack of awards, his obvious contacts which enabled him to become such a big director or his horrible aesthetic. It focuses on the fact that the movies were made in the first place. This is the accomplishment. It's not artistic. Its financial. So why Beckett? He was obviously successful by both artistic and financial standards. The economist.com in an article states, "He was the opposite of a self-promoter: intensely private and fearful of fame, he was more of a self-demoter." So how does a self-demoter become successful? Because the human condition, at least according to Beckett, is about being defeated and whipped. About striving for goals only to be cast down in a hopeless world. So it seems Beckett was writing about a human condition. And this universality is what made him so renowned. http://www.economist.com/node/5624852 http://www.larktheatre.org/john-clinton-eisner/