Friday, December 21, 2018

Writers-Movies, Day 2: The Man who Invented Christmas

Hello, all, day 2 of writerly-movies or writers' movies or movies that make you say 'huh!' then write.

Those kinds of movies.

Today, day 2, let's take on "The Man who Invented Christmas"



This is a movie about writing, so I loved it. It's a little frilly, sentimental, happy Christmas piece, but it does glimpse into the writer's life and experience in its ups and downs, and its authenticity? Are you looking for authenticity? Look no further

*Charles Dickens does something writerly, like isolate himself, or fly off the handle, or keep really weird hours, or stare off into space morosely.

My wife: "Uh, huh: that's what living with a writer is like."
M'gurlz: titter

What I liked about this movie is that it showed the writing process, not as we'd think it's supposed to be: plot, outlining, sitting down and writing what you planned from start to finish, but as how I've experienced it, with the long, dry, empty silences, the absolute frustration of finally starting then being interrupted just when you almost started getting going, the characters wresting the story from your grasp and reshaping it into something entirely unexpected, unwanted, and alien from what you envisioned it.

It also showed success, but not as, yay! You're published, and here's a ton of money and you lived happily ever after, but success like this.


  • feeling utterly detached from the congratulations
  • feeling despair that you'll never write that good again
  • feeling frustrated when your readers and editors misinterpret your work, or just don't get it.
And then you're published, and you get the reviews (don't read the reviews!) and ...

... and what? Well, your life goes on, and you have bills to pay, that you can't, and you have people standing in line demanding your next work, and criticizing your last one as 'not up to par. Frankly, I expected better of him, given what's come before.'

But then you have an idea – a great idea! – but anybody can have an idea, but just try to put that down on the page and not be screaming at the page and yourself and everybody who comes within shouting range of you. The curse of the writer is that you do have an idea. Now just try to convey that to somebody – anybody – else, and not look at what you've written and scream at yourself: why! why is it not coming together! Why is this so terrible? It was a good idea when it came to me!

And then you write, and you write and you write and you write and you write and it take so agonizingly long. And nobody understands you, and why don't you do something productive with your day, spend time with the family, instead of being cooped up in your room doing nothing?

No, this is not an autobiographical blogpost, this is, honest-to-goodness, in the movie. Swearsies.

Then you've written it.

This movie did skip over the editing phase of writing, thankfully and unfortunately. Writers, unfortunately, think: "I've written it! I'm done!" when they've only just begun! The real struggle is fighting against and fighting with the editors and publishers (which they only hinted at in this movie) to get the work out there, intact, with some shred of integrity in your story remaining. Editors cut deep, sometimes they cut wrong(ly) but sometimes their cuts are good cuts. It doesn't mean that these cuts don't hurt, and some writers have to suffer rewriting their ending, or beginning, or their everything, on the advice of their editors, and, to do that? To dismember your own work because somebody else said what you just poured your heart into wasn't good enough?

The movie skipped that part, but maybe that was an editor's cut who said: "Too hard and too much. This is a Christmas movie." And, again, the editor, here, would be right.

The Man who Invented Christmas also shared the triumph we have as writers. We get to create a world. A world that never existed before until we invented it, and we get to touch lives and touch hearts and connect with people, sometimes even all over the world:



We get to read those reviews of those insightful readers that tell us things about our stories that we didn't see. We get to read those reviews of those readers who write: "You saved my life" and to know that we just did something. We just wrote that, and they can't take that away from us.

The Man who Invented Christmas ends on this high note. Charles Dickens single-handedly reshaped Christmas to what we know it to be today with A Christmas Carol. And we get to see that he saw it happen and know that what he wrote touched hearts.

This is what our writing does, it can be heartbreaking, or silly, or serious, or a flight of fancy, but it's something we wrote, ... something we wrote that touched somebody's heart like nothing else ever has nor ever will, and we did that. The Man who Invented Christmas shares this, our writers' victory.

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