How Screenwriters Can Change the World – Part 1

I have been worried for most of my life that I am deeply useless to society, ever since my skate shoe fell off under a waterfall in Guadeloupe in 1998. I watched the shoe sail downstream in a lively fashion, floating on its sole, and I did not move, oblivious to its immanent disappearance into the Caribbean, until my friend’s godfather (an incredibly hairy man, by the way) ran along the bank and rescued it with a palm frond.

The look I was given along with the (still dry) shoe will never leave me. My inaction was not due to laziness, as I had climbed a mountain to get to the waterfall. Nor was it due to squeamishness about getting wet, as I was standing under said waterfall when I reached clumsily for my shoe, thus knocking it off. The reason I did nothing, which is the same reason I was pushed over by a tramp a few months ago, was that I was too interested in the situation to be an active participant in it. Panic in either situation would have turned me from audience to agent, an unwelcome transformation. I like stories way too much to get involved with them.

This makes me, according to Harold Pinter’s Nobel prize address, a ‘writer’ rather than a ‘citizen’. I think Pinter is implying that citizens have an added responsibility not placed on writers. Citizens have to take part, where writers can sit like Diogenes in his barrel and admire a situation for its narrative arc, so if an election is stolen or an illegal war waged, a writer has the luxury of admiring the cheek, while a citizen has a duty to protest.

I hope my cluelessness will be an asset when I begin properly to write screenplays. It’s definitely not an asset as a banker. I am often told that the information I have gathered is not relevant, though interesting; I find it hard to see the difference between the two. This means that, in order to save the world, I will have to write stories that inspire citizens to act in a certain way, writing from a position outside the world I want to change. Since I don’t know what I think about politics or finance, and so cannot deliver carefully structured opinion and/or polemic, my only weapon will be interestingness.

[my reasons for wanting to change the world can be writerly ones rather than citizenly ones, by the way: it pisses me off that Republicans are in power because they don’t like debate, and debate is always a good story.]

In Part 2 of How Screenwriters Can Change the World, I will suggest that change can most efficiently be brought about by writers and not citizens. Specifically, screenwriters, and only screenwriters, can change the world. It’s a large claim, and I’ll think it through before I write more.