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In 2004 I read Caitlin R. Kiernan's Murder of Angels. I loved it. I loved it so much that I went and found all the other books that she had written and requested them at my local library. When they arrived, I checked them out and took them home; there were five books in all.
I remember sitting on my bedroom floor with my treasure. I was so excited that I couldn't decide where to start. I stacked them up. I looked at them. Quite at random, I picked up Low Red Moon. I opened it and read the first chapter, maybe five pages in all. I closed it and opened up Silk. Maybe I read the first three pages. I then proceeded to bundle the whole lot of books back into my backpack and return them unread to the library.
As a writer, I understand what it means to appreciate the subtle nuances of a finely crafted plot. I also understand what it is to appreciate the skill of execution with which an author tells a story. Caitlin Kiernan forced me to look beyond appreciation inspired a feeling of such intense jealousy that I could not read her books. I wanted to be the one who had written them. I wanted those words to be mine. It was a difficult, humbling (for a moment humiliating) moment to realize the limitations of my skill. How on Earth could I ever write again?
It was eerie to sit in a darkened movie theater and watch Bradley Cooper reflect the ugly, petty, disheartening, green-eyed truth of my experience. The Words is a Matryoshka; a nesting set of Russian dolls in which one story tells another story that tells another story. Clayton Hammond (Dennis Quaid) writes a book called The Words that tells the story of Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper) who steals another man's (Ben Barns and Jeremy Irons) book and claims it as his own. The book, The Window Tears is a story of how a man lives, loves, and loses everything. Jansen steals a piece of The Old Man's life when he steals the story. Unfortunately, outside of my intellectual engagement, The Words isn't as interesting as it might appear.
Although the acting is good, the plot itself suffers from its inability to create a point of real empathy among the primary characters. With the exception of Irons's Old Man, the remaining characters are pretentious and self-indulgent. They struggle in a morass created by bad decisions they've made. Decisions that are concerns of vanity. It is that ego-trip that makes it difficult to care about these men.
That said, I found what little connection that I had as an exercise in intellectual acknowledgement. At one point Cooper's Jansen tells his wife, Dora (Zoe Saldana): "I'm not who I thought I was ... and I'm terrified that I never will be." I get that. I get it deep down and in painful places. Everyone goes through a crises of identity at some point, as we try to figure out how we got HERE and how do we get out again. There is that point in The Words, the point at which Jansen decides to publish the found manuscript as his own, where the movie-goer may divorce herself from the action on screen. For all that I LOVED and LUSTED after Kiernan's writing ability if I found an unpublished manuscript tomorrow, I wouldn't slap my name on it and call it my own.
That disconnect is partially the fault of the frame narrative, we don't get to know the characters well enough to empathize with them because there simply isn't room in the story. It all centers around one very particularly potent moment enacted and reflected between narratives. The moment, the decision, shadows everything that comes after. The other failure is the lack of a clear ending. It's left open to interpretation: is Jansen a surrogate for Hammond. Is The Words a confession? It's all left up to the viewer to decide, although I believe that The Words is indeed Hammond's admission of guilt.
The Words is an interesting film. I wonder if it is more interesting because I write. Perhaps it is more interesting than it should be because once I would have sold myself to write just like Caitlin Kiernan.
Writing is a curious endeavor. A writer is always in search of the right words to reveal some ever shifting truth. It's a difficult undertaking. It's personal, subjective, and left at the mercy of the capricious whims of the reading public. Writing is like lightening in a bottle: equal parts talent, skill, and magic. When I read Kiernan or Nikki Gemmel, or some other author who has successfully harnessed that lightening, I wonder what's the point? How do I go on in the face of someone else's success? And not just any success. How do you go on when you read something that is everything you've ever wanted to write? And maybe that's the point of the movie's ending. Maybe the impetus to write and to create is an unanswerable question. As The Old Man tells us, maybe we just do our best and hope that we can live with it. Whether that is enough is always open to interpretation.
I remember sitting on my bedroom floor with my treasure. I was so excited that I couldn't decide where to start. I stacked them up. I looked at them. Quite at random, I picked up Low Red Moon. I opened it and read the first chapter, maybe five pages in all. I closed it and opened up Silk. Maybe I read the first three pages. I then proceeded to bundle the whole lot of books back into my backpack and return them unread to the library.
As a writer, I understand what it means to appreciate the subtle nuances of a finely crafted plot. I also understand what it is to appreciate the skill of execution with which an author tells a story. Caitlin Kiernan forced me to look beyond appreciation inspired a feeling of such intense jealousy that I could not read her books. I wanted to be the one who had written them. I wanted those words to be mine. It was a difficult, humbling (for a moment humiliating) moment to realize the limitations of my skill. How on Earth could I ever write again?
It was eerie to sit in a darkened movie theater and watch Bradley Cooper reflect the ugly, petty, disheartening, green-eyed truth of my experience. The Words is a Matryoshka; a nesting set of Russian dolls in which one story tells another story that tells another story. Clayton Hammond (Dennis Quaid) writes a book called The Words that tells the story of Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper) who steals another man's (Ben Barns and Jeremy Irons) book and claims it as his own. The book, The Window Tears is a story of how a man lives, loves, and loses everything. Jansen steals a piece of The Old Man's life when he steals the story. Unfortunately, outside of my intellectual engagement, The Words isn't as interesting as it might appear.
Although the acting is good, the plot itself suffers from its inability to create a point of real empathy among the primary characters. With the exception of Irons's Old Man, the remaining characters are pretentious and self-indulgent. They struggle in a morass created by bad decisions they've made. Decisions that are concerns of vanity. It is that ego-trip that makes it difficult to care about these men.
That said, I found what little connection that I had as an exercise in intellectual acknowledgement. At one point Cooper's Jansen tells his wife, Dora (Zoe Saldana): "I'm not who I thought I was ... and I'm terrified that I never will be." I get that. I get it deep down and in painful places. Everyone goes through a crises of identity at some point, as we try to figure out how we got HERE and how do we get out again. There is that point in The Words, the point at which Jansen decides to publish the found manuscript as his own, where the movie-goer may divorce herself from the action on screen. For all that I LOVED and LUSTED after Kiernan's writing ability if I found an unpublished manuscript tomorrow, I wouldn't slap my name on it and call it my own.
That disconnect is partially the fault of the frame narrative, we don't get to know the characters well enough to empathize with them because there simply isn't room in the story. It all centers around one very particularly potent moment enacted and reflected between narratives. The moment, the decision, shadows everything that comes after. The other failure is the lack of a clear ending. It's left open to interpretation: is Jansen a surrogate for Hammond. Is The Words a confession? It's all left up to the viewer to decide, although I believe that The Words is indeed Hammond's admission of guilt.
The Words is an interesting film. I wonder if it is more interesting because I write. Perhaps it is more interesting than it should be because once I would have sold myself to write just like Caitlin Kiernan.
Writing is a curious endeavor. A writer is always in search of the right words to reveal some ever shifting truth. It's a difficult undertaking. It's personal, subjective, and left at the mercy of the capricious whims of the reading public. Writing is like lightening in a bottle: equal parts talent, skill, and magic. When I read Kiernan or Nikki Gemmel, or some other author who has successfully harnessed that lightening, I wonder what's the point? How do I go on in the face of someone else's success? And not just any success. How do you go on when you read something that is everything you've ever wanted to write? And maybe that's the point of the movie's ending. Maybe the impetus to write and to create is an unanswerable question. As The Old Man tells us, maybe we just do our best and hope that we can live with it. Whether that is enough is always open to interpretation.
