God, I Need This
I just unfortunately stumbled across a DVD review of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sixth season. It’s terrible. I give you my word on my writing, I swear on anything good I’ve ever written, I’m not saying that because I disagree with the opinions in it. As a piece of writing, it is simply and sadly inadequate–there’s a reason why I’m not providing you with a link to it. I care for you all too much, my vast reading audience, to subject you to someone who does such things as these to sentences. Just trust me. If anything you have ever read by me had led you to believe I know anything about writing, trust me. And this was on a pretty well known DVD review/information site, too, not some message board for overgrown fanboys.
But anyway, it’s got me thinking about writing and one of my all-time favorite quotations on the subject. It’s from Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing, and Henry, a playwright, is explaining to his lover something about writing. He is also trying to make a point about a script by an enthusiastic but untalented amateur. He uses as illustration a handy cricket bat…
“This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly… (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might … travel … (He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.) Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!’ with your hands stuck into your armpits. (Indicating the cricket bat.) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better.”
That’s right.
