This Modern Writer: Stranger Than Fiction or A Fine Grain of Stupidity by Jon Rosen

Having arrived at the Loews Theater at 34th and Broadway, I couldn’t resist taking a long look at the looping trailer for the film “Stranger than Fiction,” playing on a wall-mounted television set. The featured scenes played out with a haunting familiarity: a flesh-and-blood person one day realizes he’s a character in a novel, and, despairing of his fate, tries to contact his author and persuade her to rewrite his story. These scenes played out with a “haunting familiarity,” not necessarily because I myself have had the suspicion that I may be someone’s fictional construct, but rather because I am intimately familiar with this particular story.  After all, I should be familiar with it.  I wrote it.

Here are the facts: two years earlier, in a burst of inspiration, I sat down and attempted, for the first time, to write a screenplay. The basic premise had been germinating in my mind for years: “Can a human being rebel against Fate? If an all-powerful, all-knowing God exists, could a person rebel against It/Him/Her? If so, what form would such a protest take?” In order to explore this particular question, I recast it in this form: “What if a character in a book, despising himself and his life, went on strike against his author and refused to say the words, or perform the acts, dictated by his author? How would this play out?”

Though I had only a rough outline, the script took shape with bewildering speed–after two weeks I had what I hoped was a lively and amusing script called “Stranger than Fiction.” I gave it to my wife to read, and then to a friend. When both of them came back with positive reports, I decided to send the script to my agent. Perhaps—I thought, I hoped—a near miracle had taken place. It’s rare enough that I write something of any length that really holds together, but it is even rarer that I come up with something that may have some commercial appeal—and as I popped the script in the mailbox, I glanced up, as though to thank a generous God.

My agent usually takes a month to read my stuff, so in the meantime I decided to test the script out on a few more trusted readers. One afternoon, as I began explaining to my friend Brian the basic premise of the story, he came to a full stop (we had been walking up Lafayette on the way to a copy shop) and turned to me with a strange expression.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What did you say the name of your script was?”

“Stranger than Fiction.”

“That’s weird,” he said. “I just talked to Mike and—.”

Mike is Brian’s friend who works at the talent agency CAA.

“And what?” I asked.

“I just spoke to him. Just this afternoon,” Brian said, with the same queer expression. “And he was going on and on about this script he had just read. He said he reads hundreds of scripts a year but he said this was the best one he had read all year. And I think—I could have sworn he said it was called ‘Stranger than Fiction.’ Could he have possibly gotten your script?”

“I don’t see how that could be possible,” I replied. “My agent is at William Morris and they wouldn’t… Are you sure it was called ‘Stranger than Fiction?'”

“I’m positive.”

Brian and I were standing still on the sidewalk. It seemed pointless to continue our walk to the copy shop until we had resolved this vital matter.

“And not only that,” Brian said, “Not only that, but I could have sworn—I could have sworn that the script he read was about someone who realizes he’s a character in someone’s book.”

Brian’s initial comment—that the script he had just heard of bore the same title as my script—dealt a substantial blow. But, after all, I figured, a title is just a title, and any number of altogether different scripts floating around Hollywood may bear the same title. But this second revelation, that this other “Stranger than Fiction” script shared precisely the same unusual theme—was staggering.

“It can’t be true,” I said, as I felt my universe in-folding like a collapsing sun. “It just can’t be.”

“I hope not,” Brian said. “Anyhow, I mean, even if it is—you know Hollywood, this other script probably won’t get made, it’ll probably just disappear like most scripts. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

I tried not to worry about it. I really did. To quell my anxieties I considered the possibility that Brian had for some admittedly bizarre reason invented the whole story about the other script. Certainly this was more probable than the other script—a script for all intents and purposes identical to mine—actually existing. But why would Brian do such a thing? Or perhaps Brian had misinterpreted or misrepresented the plot of the other script; after all, he’d just heard about it over a brief phone conversation. But, again, this struck me as more wishful thinking. Or perhaps, as Brian had assured me, this other script would just sort of vanish. In fact, this offered the most reason for hope (maybe the Black Hole of Hollywood would just suck up and render obsolete my script’s doppelganger). But then I remembered Mike’s declaration that this was the “best script he’d read all year.”

Yet the biggest obstacle to my peace of mind—the biggest bugbear of all—was a familiar dreadful sensation that had always lurked in the background of my creative undertakings, an eerie sense that the universe was somehow rigged against me—or, at least, against my loftiest and most vainglorious ambitions. Indeed, the sensation may be familiar to many who have tried to mount the magic carpet of the arts and entertainment industry, only to find that it suddenly disintegrates beneath them and sends them crashing to cold, solid earth beneath.

Still clinging to a thread of hope, however, I called my agent. She told me she had read and loved the script and was going to “send it out.” Happy with the news, I didn’t want to mention the other “Stranger than Fiction” script, but I couldn’t resist.

“By the way, it’s probably nothing, but…”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Of course I’ve read it. We represent the writer.”

Was the script identical to mine?

“Similar—but different,” she said. “I’m really not worried about it. But you’ll have to change the title.

I changed the title to “Third Person,” and my agent did in fact send the script out to a number of producers, directors and actors. I tried to remain hopeful, but I knew in my gut it was a wasted effort. The coincidence was just too great—the bolt of lightning couldn’t miss its target. And, indeed, the screenplay was roundly compared to its identical twin and rejected across the board. The fate of my script “Stranger than Fiction,” itself could not have been any stranger than fiction; but in my story, I had no recourse against my diabolical author.

* * *

But I’m not writing just to bemoan my lousy luck. I’m writing to consider a problem that arose from it—actually two related problems: one concerning the notion of originality and one concerning writer’s block.

Since I first learned how to write, words have poured out with a shameless profusion—novels, short stories, essays, poetry, etc. Much of the work has been unsuccessful or incomplete, or otherwise unpresentable. But the question of its originality had never concerned me.
Yet the nightmarish revelation of my script having for all intents and purposes been written by someone else some months before I had written it—gripped me with a chilling paranoia. What if this was to be no isolated incident? What if everything I had written or were ever to write had already been written, or would be written (with more clarity and style), by someone else?  As I fretted over this question, I could suddenly understand the travails of would-be writers I know—highly intelligent and well-read people—who really want to write but are immobilized by similar self-conscious fears: “Is this good?” “Will anyone understand this?” “Is this what I really think?” “What makes me think my thoughts are important?” “Isn’t all writing narcissistic?” “Why bother?”

I wondered: would my current worry about originality condemn me to a similar creative paralysis? If not, how could I overcome it? How, in short, does one break free from this boa constrictor of self-defeating concerns to unselfconsciously surrender to the creative impulse?
Flannery O’Connor, one of my favorite authors, sheds some helpful light on this problem. In a letter to her friend A. describing her own creative process, she writes: “Perhaps you are able to see things in these stories that I can’t see because if I did see them I would be too frightened to write them. I have always insisted that there is a fine grain of stupidity required in the fiction writer” (Letter to A. March 24, 1956).

A “fine grain of stupidity.” What could O’Connor possibly mean here?  On one hand, O’Connor may mean that if she were to be fully conscious of the (often quite violent) subject matter of her stories, she would be emotionally incapable of writing such stories; in this case, the “fine grain of stupidity” would refer to an emotional blindness to the subject matter of her stories. Yet there is another reading of O’Connor’s remark that may speak to the question of creative paralysis I raised above.  For when a writer writes, every creative choice may prompt a series of reconsiderations; and each one of these reconsiderations may, in turn, prompt another series of reconsiderations, and so on, such that an author will never arrive at a resolute choice. For any progress to take place, there will need to be a break, a short-circuit in this second guessing—a critical blind spot, or, as O’Connor put it, a “fine grain of stupidity.” This “fine grain of stupidity” will allow the writer to settle stupidly (but not too stupidly, hence the fine grain) for one possibility, and thereby permit him to move on.

In other words, O’Connor’s advice to a writer immobilized by critical self-concerns might be read as: “Write more stupidly.”
Such advice may seem counterintuitive.  After all, haven’t we been taught that the success or originality of our work depends on the degree of intelligent understanding and control we bring to it? Haven’t we been taught that an author should be able to explain and justify his creative choices? Isn’t this the most “intelligent” or “responsible” approach to the “craft”?

But perhaps O’Connor’s remark tells a different story. For consider: under what other circumstances in our day-to-day lives can we explain or justify our behavior? Can we explain and justify, for example, why we like certain music? Can we explain and justify why we care about certain people? Can we explain and justify why certain experiences move us to tears or laughter? Can we really set such responses or experiences at a distance and regard them with such detached, critical objectivity?  We certainly can, to some extent, in retrospect.  But, on an on-going basis, we generally don’t do this.  Rather, we just engage—engage whole-heartedly, without critical detachment, without self-consciousness—with an element of “stupidity”. Indeed, doesn’t much of the depth and richness of our experience derive from the extent to which we are wholly and non-reflectively engaged?

If this is the case, why should creative work constitute an exception? Rather, shouldn’t the writing of a story or the painting of a painting or the composition of a piece of music engage us on this primary, non-reflective, level, consuming our entire attention, such that we lose ourselves in the creative act, and thus stand a chance of discovering something in the process? Beyond the desire to produce something “good” or “original,” isn’t this, really, our primary motivation for doing the work?

“But how—,” someone may persist, “how can I just relinquish control? I mean, how does one just surrender to an unconscious process?” But how do we do it every day and all the time—every time we offer an uncontrived, uncontrolled response to the demands of the moment? Every time we burst into tears or laughter; every time we burn with rage or blush with embarrassment. The answer is we don’t “do” it; it just happens. Our behavior spontaneously arises, independent of our critical faculties, just as a creative impulse may arise on its own, dictating its own form and content. As the poet Rilke has written: “Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.” (Letters on Cezanne Oct 21, 1907)

Such, in any case, describes my process. Indeed, three months after the “Stranger than Fiction” episode I was happy to discover that my reflective faculties had gone on holiday and my congenital stupidity (fine-grained or not) had kicked in again. Oblivious of my previous worries, I found myself dwelling on a new cast of characters, a new set of problems, and, before I knew it, originality-be-damned, I was back at work.