The Occasional Deep Thought on Writing
I've always said that writing fanfic and 'real' writing are exactly the same except the money part. The same impulse, issues and frustrations are shared.
I watched a documentary on Harper Lee, Hey, Boo, and was reminded of that again. There're always the great classics in a particular fandom from a writer who never writes another thing. In real writing, figures like Lee and Salinger (And Margaret Mitchell to some extent) have always perplexed me because the urge to write is like the reflex to breath. How could you write like that, and yet, never write again?
The saddest thing that I ever heard from another fanfic writer was: "I want to write just one book and make enough money to live the rest of my life."
That was Harper Lee. After watching the film, I could see her suffering the paralysis I see with One Hit Wonder fanfic writers, who are always 'working on something really slowly,' and talk about their 'muse isn't there,' and spend a lot, a lot of time on comms talking about writing, but apparently have little time to actually do it.
And there's nothing wrong with that. I think some people only have one story in them. The world needs To Kill a Mockingbird. If Lee had written 200 more books and they were all crap, would the original gem have been tainted? (I guess so to some readers and writers and that's one of the reasons not to write when you've been perfect.)
A utterly fascinating bit that I hadn't know was, there was a persistent rumor that Truman Capote had written TKAMB. (Accompanied by a clip from a film with Sandra Bullock doing an AWFUL Southern accent) First off, uh, what??
But one of Lee's defenders was Mark Childress saying that he'd received a letter from her once, and it was exactly the voice from TKAMB. There in lies the answer to the mystery, in my mind. A letter can have a beautiful, distinct voice, but it's not a plot.
There were some quick references at at the beginning of the documentary about how her editor worked with her for over 2 years to get her series of vignettes and sketches into a plot for the book. Two years? When she had NO OTHER job? The book isn't that long!
So I ended up wondering if Lee wasn't capable of plotting and that's the 'help' she received from her editor. (Why she then wouldn't get his help again, who knows.) And once she'd told the one story that was so close to her heart (Just like a fandom), she had no will to write more; it was just too damn much work.
Or am I just writing Harper Lee RPF?