Writing

Thievery will add value to it just as any other form of commerce. Do you want to tell a story? Do you want to change the world with words? Put me last. I think I am a good writer with great ideas for movies and stories. I would give them away to see them published in some fashion. I am not dying for the money. The thrill is the creative act, telling the story, telling your story. Forget that blockheads write for free. I write to get something, some thought, some story, some fact or feeling out of me. I don't care if some one cooks my mental baby with the afterbirth for lunch. because my part in the process is done. I cannot say what people will do with the product of my labor. You can hope, and you can care, but you can never control. If it were possible to know and not because you are dead, if you wrote a great story and dropped dead and some one made a movie that totally got the story wrong, but it sold millions, but yours was the dirt their idea grew out of, would it be worth it. Don't we all want to do something frosted and sparkling with art?

Consider Falkner. There was a guy trying to support two families and forced by this situation to know long months of deprivation and loneliness in hollywood where he may have sold a story or two, but got little of movie credits. His boss, the studio boss bragged of having the best writer in America working for peanuts. One movie where he got credit he made little contribution because is long monologues were unsuited to movies where dialog is action, he did give a famous line to one of the characters, that of an old rummy sailer who would ask people if they had ever been bit by a dead bee. You can know who the real people are by who treats you real. Its a device, and movies are full of characters with devices.

Now; as I lay dying has become a movie, and it is the most horrible, drawn out adventure seen through the eyes of a child. I can guarantee that this movie will trash Falkner's tale of heartbreak and pain as though these children were but Odysseus' crew following him on his vain quest to get a new wife and a set of false teeth. I have heard stories of the abruptness and cruelty of Falkner as an old drunk at the University in Oxford. I can hardly imagine a more sympathetic treatment of human folly and its aftermath. What a story. I doubt they could find a character in movies as simple and pure as the daughter in this tale, or one, even in this day so destined to disaster.

Any way; we could have a contest, but I am sure I would take the prize.

Sweeney