Aaron Sorkin and Inspiration

My wife and I have a show called The Newsroom. Like most couples with busy lives we have to make time to actually do something together. This action not in any way unique to us is the streaming of a show for an hour or so on Sunday nights.

              The Newsroom has been our favourite for a bit. It’s the creation of the brilliant screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. It’s about a bunch of reporters and producers who work in a, well, newsroom. It’s intelligent, crisp, current, and features Sorkin’s trademark machine gun dialogue and so good that it’s an international tragedy it only lasted three seasons.

              Phenomenal acting, great cinematography, wonderful score (that opening!), but what sets the show apart as my favourite is Sorkin’s writing. Forget everything else that goes into the making of a big-budget HBO show, the writing is where this thing stops and ends. From concept to plot to delivery it’s razor sharp. Even if you don’t know the show you’ve probably seen Jeff Daniels’s rant from the first season about why America is not the best country in the world.

              It’s so good that when we finish an episode I’m absolutely buzzing. The overdrive I feel after that show is better than a half dozen cups of dark roast coffee. I have to go write something right away. This is what great art does, it inspires, but sometimes you encounter something so good that it out and out demands. Usually I binge in these moments, the words pouring out of me faster than I can account for them.

              Because Sorkin’s greatest craft (though not his only one) is creating dialogue, before I even sit down the rapid-fire back and forth of his characters is still echoing in my head. I don’t set down to write like Sorkin, but I have his influence on what I write. It’s key to understand the difference, though, because so many young writers that I work with end up copying the style of the thing that inspires them. Not the same thing.
            Given that it functions in a political newsroom it’s hard to deliver anything in black and white. But somehow the show’s main theme is that these people are trying to do good, they’re trying to be moral. That good is so simple that anyone who encounters it in the show is immediately suspicious. It’s a running joke. I find moral art appealing so this further adds to the shows inspiration for me.
            Inspiration, not imitation. It's important to have something that inspires you. In Julia Cameron's book/course The Artist's Way she encourages "artist's dates" where you encounter art that gets your own creativity flowing, inspires you to go and do what it is you do. But sometimes we encounter something so potent, so engaging, that it's as if booster cables have been stretched across the gap of blockage and charged us to the point of buzzing.

Here's a little clip of a writing class Sorkin's promoting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujdVdQkw24M

On Stephen King

As a joke (not joke) when talking about great writers, specifically perhaps great American writers but a Canadian audience often forgets to specify, I often tell my students that Stephen King’s problem is he needs to die.

              Morbid humour, sure, but I’ve got a feeling Mr. King would probably get it.

              There are two writers I consider the greatest living American masters of words: Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King. McCarthy writes prose that sing of the page, complicated, mad, rife with perfect and yet utterly unique similes. His characters are impossibly, inhumanly over-human, but I find myself lamenting his talent because it’s being used consistently to express a world view that is nihilistic, fatalistic, and anti-human. If his writing is his heart—and I’ve seen enough consistency across his work to believe it is—then he thinks the very worst of our race.

              He presents humanity in a very awful light, casting the gleam on the tube we’re flushing ourselves down. It’s cynical, it’s beautiful, it’s rare. He is unarguably a genius.

              “Stephen King writes horror.” Agreed, but I’d say Stephen King writes horror well. He also writes humans well, love well, fantasy well, shock well. He creates human characters that are somehow based on the people you know. He does this consistently.

               And yet, he is not given his due. He’s too popular, too prolific, too readable.

              In the seventh book of his stunning Dark Tower series (his opus, well, his latest opus, after The Stand, after It, and before whatever his next opus will be unless he does the sensible thing and dies) he writes himself in and a character has heard of him says she’s only read a few of his books because she doesn’t like him. The Gunslinger asks her why she didn’t stop at just one of his books.

              Truth: find me a person who has read only one Stephen King book.

              The man is one of the greatest writers in American history, a genius of the craft, a wonder of style. He’s what we all aspire to be. But because he sells millions and because he usually errs on the side of page-turning creepiness, he sometimes falls below Mr. McCarthy. Because his heroes often win, because he believes in all of his darkness that good usually wins, he’s somehow the lesser.

              Stephen King is a gift. An author prolific, diverse, whose fine-wined personality pours out onto the page, into his speaking engagements, onto his website. Only death will grant him the respect he has long deserved. I think he’d dig the irony.