Writers make bad heros...

One of the scariest things about wanting to be a writer - even scarier than the death of the print industry, the improbable and minuscule financial remuneration, and the grueling ordeal of receiving hundreds of rejection letters - is the fact that all one's favorite writers, the people one aspires to become some day, are all depressed alcoholic loners, dead white men, or both. When I imagine being a writer, I remember walking through an exhibition of Richard Avedon's portraits and noticing that the writers he photographed were more grizzled, more haggard, and more wrinkled than all the movie stars, politicians, and farm workers combined.

Of course, there's an alternative route for my imagination to take. Wouldn't it be nice to be like Colin Firth in Love Actually, a nice, handsome person, living by a lake, falling in love with a cute Portuguese girl, and writing a novel on the side? Or you could be J.M. Barrie, as portrayed in Finding Neverland, cavorting in the park and playing dress-up with adorable kids all while jotting down notes about your next best-seller in a classy little black notebook. Or J.K. Rowling in her Scottish castle - need I say more?

But even the movies don't provide very many examples of idyllic writerly life - I'm hard pressed to come up with another example. And real-life successful writers are a quieter sort than actors or other stars. They don't make newspaper headlines or appear on the cover of Vogue or get stalked by tabloids. So where's a young writer to turn?

I've found two sources of fodder for my aspirations. One of my new favorite activities is attending readings at local bookstores. Technically, this is not only an activity - it's also part of my job to scout out writers as possible invitees to read for a podcast my bosses run. But it's probably the most fun thing I've ever had to do for any job.

First of all, it's an excuse to go to a bookstore and browse. More importantly, there are real, living-and-breathing writers who have written actual books (which are sitting right there on the podium, as proof) and who are willing to answer all one's breathless questions about how they managed to do it. But the best part is, they seem normal, even...dare I say happy? These are not the withered, miserable old men behind the classics of western literature. Out of five authors I've seen at readings this summer, three are youngish, sprightly women who have traveled to India, started families, and published multiple books. They always seem to have lots friends in the audience (no loners, these), and their ability to articulate the ideas behind their writing is impressive. The bottom line is: I would be happy to become any of these women.

My second source of inspiration is a bit less tangible, but no less exciting, for me at least. Enter BBC Radio 4, where, every week or so, the lovely Mariella Frostrop talks to several authors about their writing. And how wonderful it is to hear two intelligent people conversing about the thing one loves most (with British accents, no less). Sometimes she even invites two writers on the show to discuss a common theme in both their work - how often do you get to hear two writers talking to each-other about writing?

The conclusion, I guess, is that if one wants to obsess about books, one must turn to bookish pursuits, like attending readings and listening to the radio. It might not be as cool as seeing a movie or going to a concert, but the next time you're looking for an exciting evening out, I recommend a bookstore.

Wake-up calls

Well, it's been a long time, but surprisingly little of note has happened since my last post. I spent hours editing an interview for a video podcast, only to be told that footage was getting scrapped in favor of a new interview. So I spent hours editing the new interview. But between marathon sessions in the editing room, I've also been commissioned by my boss to work on an independent project - a sort of crowning glory to my summer internship.

It should be noted that my internship is beyond half-way over. I've only got 2 1/2 weeks left. On the other hand, a big project is a nice change from the sundry duties with which every intern is all too familiar. I went home and came up with an idea for a series of features. My boss approved it. We decided the first step was an informational interview with one of the subjects. I made the appointment. All set.

It remains to be seen whether there'll actually be time to go further than that. But whether or not I get a chance to see this project through, the experience of submitting a proposal, developing an idea, and putting it into action will undoubtedly be an education one.

It's also made me realize just how easy it is to trudge along in a routine of small tasks without looking for anything bigger or more interesting to do. I step onto the subway train after work and forget about the computer screen I've been staring at, the cubicle I've been sitting in, and the lists of arts events or sequence of video clips I've been cramming into my brain. But I also forget to reflect on what I enjoyed during the day, what I might like to do tomorrow, and how I can make it happen. When my boss asked me to come up with a project, I found I'd sunk into a rather comfortable but unproductive rut of dutifully taking in all the learning opportunities presented to me but never actively seeking out more.

To my credit (or just to make myself feel better), I should point out that when I step off the subway train, I more often than not plunge directly into researching my thesis, applying to grad school, or cooking dinner. If only I had unlimited mental space and time to devote to making my summer the ultimate internship experience! Of course, nobody actually has that kind of time. Some people manage to cram an awful lot of creativity and productivity into whatever their working hours are, but it's just not easy to be those people, especially during summer vacation.

Luckily for me, my boss is there to remind me of what I've forgotten and push me to do bigger and better things with my time. By the time I finish these 9 weeks, I'll have written two or three articles, edited a couple of videos, gotten a look at the local arts scene, and kick-started this independent project, which hopefully will be taken up by someone else when I leave. And let's not forget all those routine little tasks, without which it just wouldn't be a proper internship.

Movies, movies, movies...

In between eating burgers, drinking Arnold Palmers, and doing other summery stuff, I'm spending my July 4th weekend writing about movies. And movies are perfect for summer, right? I should add that I'm writing two reviews, one about Yann le Masson (a French documentary filmmaker from the 60s and 70s) and one about Bernardo Bertolucci (an italien director of sprawling, colorful, artsy films like "The Last Emperor" and "Last Tango in Paris"). Ok, so I can't really make this sound appropriate to the 4th of July at all.

The Bertolucci piece is about an upcoming retrospective series that my boss wants to review. The other article is for a French website that reviews books and movies - I wrote another piece for them while I was in Paris last fall. It's a coincidence (or the result of poor time management) that the two due dates have fallen in the same week, but I'm looking at it as a good trial run for what it might be like to actually do this as a job.

First of all, I've been reminded that writing about film takes time. There's just no way to rush through movies. If, in the case of Bertolucci, your subject makes 2- and 3-hour films, you better plan in a lot of hours before even thinking about starting to write. Thanks to the training of taking a lot of film classes, I probably have enough stamina to get through two or three such movies in a day, but somehow that seems so much less wholesome than spending an entire day reading or visiting art exhibits. Especially when it's 80 degrees and stunningly beautiful outside.

Secondly, I've found there are unique challenges to reviewing a set of movies instead of just one. Partly, it's really fun, because it's more interesting to suss out the patterns and themes of a director's oeuvre than to decide whether any particular film is great or not. Seeing the span of a career also enhances my appreciation of each individual film, whether for the director's versatility or for his/her ability to plumb the depths of one subject from several angles. On the other hand, when it comes down to fitting an entire career into 500 words, the choices become very frustrating. I love getting down the nitty gritty of writing about one scene, a sequence of shots, or a even a single composition. Those parts are fun to write and fun to read - I tend to skip over other parts of reviews to get to the descriptions. But there is just no place for scene analysis in the reviews I'm writing right now, so it's a real challenge finding the right detail or image to give the reader a sense of the individual films.

Thirdly, there is the ever-present danger of distraction. I've often found myself during finals week, in the midst of writing a paper, falling prey to this most terrifying of foes. One minute I'm looking up a page reference in a book, and the next thing I know I'm 20 pages into re-reading my favorite passage. Thanks to the wonderful technology of YouTube, IMDB, and DVD drives, it's all too easy to fall into a similar trap with film clips. I just wanted to make sure about that one camera angle or that line of dialogue, but look! this scene goes straight into that other scene that was so good, and since I'm on YouTube anyway, that certainly looks like an interesting video.....

Luckily for me, I always manage to get a craving for a glass of fruit juice or a handful of fresh cherries or a few minutes out in the sun before the internet sucks me in too far, and I come back to my computer with renewed resolve. So really, if summer weren't so summery, how would I get anything done at all?

Opinions v. Deadlines

When I arrived at work on Wednesday, I had hardly sat down at my computer before my boss approached with a folder in hand. This was promising. I now expected something more from my day than trawling the internet in search of artsy rss feeds or twitter accounts and storing them for my boss's future reference. I didn't expect to be handed a preview copy of the first episode in a new travel TV mini-series. I certainly didn't expect to be asked to watch and review it for the arts blog. And I most definitely did not expect to be turning in that review by the end of the day.

Given that my work days are only 5 hours long (with an extra five hours every week of out-of-the-office assignments), time was short. Subtract a half-hour for watching the episode, another half-hour to research the blogger-turned-TV-host around whom the show revolved, and another for lunch (I very briefly considered skipping lunch, but immediately pushed the idea aside, to be used only as a last resort) - that left 3.5 hours to turn out a decent 500-word opinion.

I was a bit concerned, then, but I also felt pretty cool (probably disproportionately so). Here was the journalist, typing away furiously, racing to beat the deadline, covering the breaking news of the arts world....Well, not quite, but I think what really got me going was that instead of doing the odd jobs of a certain person (as we interns are so wont to do), I was working directly for the enterprise of the arts webpage. For the entire day, no one bothered me, interrupted me, or asked me to do something for them. I never had to tiptoe to my boss's desk and ask for something to do. A few times, he stopped by my cubicle and asked how it was coming and what angle I was taking. How professional! And how unbelievably flattering, to have somebody put that much confidence in one's writing! It felt pretty great.

But it also put into relief something I've noticed before when writing critical reviews and which bothers me a little. Writing reviews usually requires an opinion, and I'm not usually short of those, but somehow my initial judgments often get twisted up and changed in the writing process. There seems to be a tension between what I want to express and how I want to express it, and when I'm writing under deadline especially, the latter usually wins out. It takes time to translate the ether of thoughts into the material stuff of words on a page. I believe that translation can have good effects, turning vague postulations that seemed interesting in your head into tight arguments that will actually make sense in other people's heads. But when there's no time to really go through that process, the striving for a good, snappy piece of prose can wash out the existence of any opinion at all.

I didn't particularly like the show I was reviewing. I found the host irksome, and more than that, I wanted to make a commentary about the way his background as a blogger - his familiarity with the lightning attention span of web surfers - compounded television's tendency to move so fast from shot to shot and from subject to subject that by the end of the show, you can barely remember how it started. But ironically enough, I was writing for a blog, a few words somebody would read on the run, so there wasn't time for any of that. I included a bit about the influence of online media on the format of the show and tossed in a little softened criticism. In the end, though, it came out snappy but bland, heavy on the description and light on the critical opinion. And then the hours were up, my moment of journalistic glory was over, and it was time to turn in my article.

Into the arts scene

I've lived in the Bay Area my whole life, and I like to think I'm a fairly art-savvy citizen of a fairly artsy town. Every time I drive home from college, I seem to have systematically bought tickets to a show for that very night - just couldn't wait to get my Bay Area culture fix after a few months in the deserts of SoCal. By the end of this week, I'll have gone out to see four movies, including both a classic Arthur Penn picture at the Pacific Film Archive and 'Super 8.' I also like to take in an opera or a symphony every so often, and I've already been through three museum exhibitions and several galleries in the last month. So I get around.

But my first on-the-job foray into the local arts listings left me feeling just a bit overwhelmed. Part of my job is to scroll through anything and everything that's happening in the realm of art during a given week and filter out the best and most interesting things our writers could cover. Best and most interesting, of course, are extremely relative terms, and faced with a barrage of music festivals, theater events, dance extravaganzas, film series, and so, so many gallery shows...I quailed at the task of sorting it all out.

In the end, I stuck with what I know. Confronted with a choice between a small exhibit of ink-brush paintings and a show at the San Francisco MOMA, I chose the MOMA. Unable to differentiate one indie DJ from another, I opted for the Stanford Jazz Festival. I took a couple of risks. Ignoring my boss's one warning - 'Don't give me anything nerdy' - I included a production of 'Oliver!' at a local outdoor amphitheater as well as an exhibition of original artwork from the Green Lantern comic books. But for the most part, I clung to the big venues I trust.

What I found most difficult was allowing shows onto my list that I wouldn't go see myself. I have fairly clear personal taste. One look at the poster art of any movie usually tells me all I need to know about whether I'll see it in theaters, wait for the DVD, or skip it altogether. But what good is knowing what you like when you're trying to decide what will interest and amuse someone else? And not just someone you know - I was trying to gauge first what my boss would like to put on the website, secondly what the writers would like to write about, and thirdly what readers would like to read about and possibly go see.

I turned in my list, and sure enough, the immediate feedback was to get more variety, more quirky, small venues, and more things that no one else has heard about yet. Basically, I need to learn to burrow into the deeper veins of the internet arts network and suss out more than an average Bay Area arts patron like me would be likely to find on their own.

But my boss loved the idea of the Green Lantern exhibit. Some may try to deny it, but nerdier is always better.

Week one on the job

The first thing I worry about when starting a new job, before boarding the subway or preparing my best smile and firmest handshake, is designing an outfit that will work whether my new boss is wearing a skirt suit and heels or jeans and clogs. You never know when you're working in the arts world. In San Francisco, though, that outfit had better also work in fog, sun, wind, and possibly rain. Summer weather here is kind of abysmal.

So a few days ago, I set out for day one of my internship in slacks and a t-shirt, with a sweater just in case. I knew this much: that my primary duties will include some video editing, some copy editing, and some research of local artists and arts events. I'll also get to write a couple of reviews per month, to be published on the organization's arts page alongside those of professional hired writers. 'Required' was the word they used in the interview to describe this task, but 'given the great privilege' sounded more accurate to me.

When I arrived, there was no time to learn more about what exactly I'll be doing for the next two months. My boss told me I should just follow him around for a while before actually starting work, and that's exactly what I did. I trailed him on a whirlwind tour of the building, sat quietly by during several meetings, and dutifully lapped up my free lunch (first and last, I was warned). The building itself is bigger and more official-looking than any place I've worked before. I even had to get an ID card to swipe in, although the fact that the picture on the card shows a Sesame Street character instead of my face makes it a bit less officious. (So far, I've resisted the temptation to flash my badge and introduce myself as the Cookie Monster. So far.) There are miles and miles of beige-colored cubicles, redeemed only by a few cardboard cut-outs of Wishbone and Princess Leia. The IT people are painfully and delightfully like IT people, and I felt a familiar terror upon hearing the words, "And here are our printer and copy machine." (At my first job, the combination printer/copier was a malicious beast who liked to break down under nervous intern's hands, causing unspoken but terrible wrath from the office manager. It ruined my relationship with that particular form of technology forever.)

The best part of the day by far was sitting in on an interview with a new writer. Two weeks before, I'd been on the other side of the table, sweating through my own interview. The contrast between me explaining my slightly hodge-podge array of college courses and internships and this woman elaborating her writing "practice" was pretty stark. She wasn't afraid to announce that she only writes a certain kind of article and to set out exactly what kind of article that is. To my surprise, my boss seemed to be thinking of ways to make room on his website for her specialty - writing about art in public space - instead of laying out his own requirements for what she should write about.

At college in particular, writing is most often presented as a means toward communication and comprehension. Writing as a "practice," a kind of art form with direction and philosophy, has always been linked in my mind to creative writing - fiction and poetry and probably creative non-fiction as well. This woman, as far as I could tell, does not write in any of those genres, but she still has a very clear idea of what she wants to cover and how she will cover it. It's not just that she knows about a certain subject and therefore is qualified to write about it. Her writing isn't just a means of informing people about art in public space. To her, it's also a deliberate contribution to the artistic practices that interest her, a record of those events but also a part of them.

In my own interview, I stumbled through confusion about my goals and hesitancy to honestly present myself as an aspiring writer. Two weeks later, I got a glimpse into a carefully honed practice of writing that smacked slightly of artistic pretension but also gave me a new perspective on what it is exactly to be a writer.