I was young, with a penchant for obsession. I studied musical performance and conducting, and ran with a cadre of like-minded scholars. I was a science-fiction/fantasy geek, and so were they. It was fated, then, that when the first Star Wars movie came out, we would band together for trips to The City. Week after week we would ride down Geary, invade The Coronet theater, outmaneuver all comers, and claim the eight seats at first-row-center. There, practically vibrating with anticipation, we would wait, hands poised, ready for the downbeat. Together, we would conduct the entire score (long ago committed to memory), cueing the chords of the Death Star leitmotif, pulling in horns and strings as we swept up to light-speed. It was grand. It was intoxicating.
Until Harrison Ford tried to get his mouth around the line, “Marching into the Detention Center is not my idea of fun.”
A lighthearted line, to be sure, but one that brought sniggers George Lucas did not expect. I mean, Harrison practically had to spit out his teeth to deliver that line. How did it ever make it through the table-read? What was that writer thinking?
Now, having cut my own writing chops, I know exactly what that writer was thinking. He wasn’t.
One day my mother came home with a slogan from her workplace. “Lower Your Expectations,” it read. Not really the gung-ho mentality of today but hey, it was the ’70s. Anyway, my father saw it, found it somewhat ludicrous, and came back with the flip side: “Up Your Aspirations!” He even had it printed up on a t-shirt.
I’ve been trolling the blogs, the last few days, reading fiction from new/unpublished writers. I see the same thing, over and over, the same mistakes, repeated.
I’ve been reading about Gustave Flaubert and his writing method. “What a bitch of a thing prose is!” he wrote to his friend and lover, Louise Colet. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo.” And redo he did.
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 