Not all of you may know this, but my older brother is a fine artist, a sculptor, painter and mixed media artist. Our relationship has always been complicated and up and down, a casualty of a chaotic shared childhood (he’s four years older than I am). But when our relationship was in its best places, we would talk a lot about art, about artistry, about our two very different worlds. Because of him (and my extremely New Yorker father and stepmother), I spent a lot of time in the company and in conversation with the world of fine art.
One thing that’s stuck with me about all of that is the idea of a “project.” Fine artists tend to have a project, a particular thing, a subject, an idea, an image that they’re working through. Part of that is in the physical nature of the work: artist make sketches, models, refine their work as they go. Even in the most chaotic-looking work, there’s intention in every stroke, in every line.
In addition, a key part of the culture around fine arts is the artist’s ability to articulate that project. in artists’ statements, in speaking, in courting galleries and collectors. The artist makes a sales pitch, so to speak, to explain their work. Given the class and education and pretension of many art collectors, those statements tend to be loaded with seventy-five cent words and big concepts. But the upshot is that a fine artist usually has to be eloquent about what they’re working on and why.
That idea locked into my consciousness early along. In the literary arts, however, there’s an opposite tendency: for the artist to be inarticulate, unclear and somewhat even mystified about the work itself. For a long time, I had a quote from Romulus Linney taped over my computer monitor: I’m a mystery to myself when I write.
In my early years, though, I studied modern writers like Faulkner and Hemingway and they were much more in the vein of fine artists. They had clear obsessions, things they wanted to say, a message in the story. I imprinted on them and held onto that idea. An artist is someone with something to say. A specific thing.
I just didn’t really have that specific thing. Sure, my plays had recurrent themes. Found family, heartbreak, the impossible choices we all have to make to live a good life. I would (and still do) draw from my own life, following that oldest of art edicts, taking my own pain and making it art. But I didn’t really think I had a “project.” Someone once told me that my plays felt like the hug that never quite comes. I liked that. And still do.
But when I came to screenwriting, I felt like I needed something. Writing plays is a much more loosey-goosey kind of writing. There is, of course, structure in all plays. But there’s a lot of latitude to build your plays however you want. You can get away with just vibes, or one or two good images, even, sometimes, one good, powerful scene. A play is an organic, living, breathing thing that doesn’t need to announce its intentions. It can creep up on what it wants to say, taking the audience by surprise in a way.
Screenwriting is far more rigid. Structure is really everything. And the boundaries are sharper. A full-length play could be 80 pages, it could be 120 pages, it could be 40 pages. A screenplay, whether for a feature film or a pilot, has to fit into a pre-decided time slot. You have 60 minutes, you have 90 minutes, you have 120 minutes. Sure, not all movies fit into those buckets, but, when you’re starting out, you better hit one of those. Otherwise people think you have no idea what you’re doing.
Because of that, there’s less time and space to come to your point. You need to make it clear, sometimes right off the bat. No time for meandering to a point. One of my favorite plays by one of my favorite playwrights, Fifth of July by Lanford Wilson, is about two hours of people just kind of hanging out, doing drugs, making questionable choices until, literally, the last scene when it suddenly becomes a high stake negotiation and bidding war for five minutes and the point of the play comes into sharp focus. You don’t get that kind of luxury in a screenplay, particularly when you’re just starting out.
So I had to think about what I wanted to say. About why I wanted to write. About what I felt about the world. That’s a slow, deliberate process, really. I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. A couple of years ago, it really clicked into place for me.
I have Becky Chambers to thank for that. She’s a science fiction novelist and a couple of years ago I devoured her Wayfarer series. They’re four, loosely connected novels about humans in a sprawling intergalactic society, hundreds of years into our future. But it’s not about huge wars and sweeping epics. In fact, the humans are the least powerful, least influential species in that society. But the books are cozy and lovely and have that meandering to a sudden point quality.
If I had to sum up the point of the books, I’d say it’s that people are the same all over. At least, that’s what I took away from it. Becky Chambers takes humanity so very seriously and applies that lens to every character, every species, every story in the book. It was so refreshing and intelligent. And something inside of me just hummed with connection.
I’ve settled on calling it “humanism.” I’m a humanist writer. I’m a humanist thinker. And the core of that belief is that people are the same all over. And always have been. Another guide on that road has been the biblical scholar Dan McClellan, whose IG account I watch religiously (pun semi-intended). Dan’s scholarship and public project about increasing public awareness of the academic study of the Bible has, at its core, an understanding that people, the human people who wrote, compiled and edited the Bible, are the same kind of humans we are. It’s shown me that societies have always been organized in similar ways. Not with similar morals or concepts, but in pattern that repeat time and again. That there are some things that are indeed hardwired into us.
What that also means is that all of the people you see around you, all of these kinds of humans, have always existed. Queer people have always existed. Trans people have always existed. Selfish people have always existed. Selfless people have always existed. Privileged people have always existed. Oppressed people have always existed. Nothing is new under the sun. But there are some cultural forces that are determined to erase that. To collapse our understanding of humanity into simple, controllable binaries.
It’s my project to push back against that. To celebrate humanity, in all of its complications. And to remind people that people are indeed the same all over. Our capitalist, racist, sexist society runs on the idea that there is an “other” that isn’t quite human. The other is a brute, a monster, a threat, always. The other doesn’t have our culture, our society, our understanding. The other is a predator that we must defend against.
But, of course, there is no other. We are all made of the same stuff. And there is no pure culture of any kind. All culture is a blend of the people in it, the result of the interplay of people groups interacting with each other. The conservative forces in our society are dedicated to the idea that a culture can be “pure” and that the people of the past were somehow very, very different than we are. But once you study even a little bit of history, you understand how impossible that it is.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve embraced the idea of being a humanist writer. When I sit down to write, I think about what aspect of humanity I want to explore. How I want to say, over and over, that we are all the same all over and that the differences we perceive are mostly manufactured. I think about the words I’m writing, the stories I’m telling, the characters I’m creating and how to infuse all of it with maximum humanity.
And not any Pollyanna, airbrushed sense of humanity. We can be cruel. We can be selfish. We can be monstrous. We have been all of those things. But even when we did those things, we were still humans. And if there’s anything I know, as a writer, it’s humans.
I don’t know how successful I am in this project. But that’s also not the point. The point is to keep trying, to keep refining, to keep digging, deeper into myself, deeper into the world around me until I can reach that core, that bedrock of humanity. I probably won’t really get there. But I do want to look back and think, well, I tried.
That will be a fitting epitaph on my work and life. I tried. And kept trying.