Just to prove I am a screenwriter: here is a plan for a screenplay I have been tinkering with and recently abandoned, called The Love Letter. It was to be about twenty minutes long, and concerned and angry man, a meek man, and a taunting woman who played the men off against each other. The gimmick was the meek man had a love letter that he didn't want the girl to see, and spent the twenty minutes trying to prevent the angry man from spilling the beans. At the end we find out that the love letter is from the meek man to the angry man, and the taunting woman is the meek man's wife.

The reason I shelved it is because, at bottom, it was pretty boring. Aside from that, it had everything: an easily derivable structure, a taut and dramatic set of relationships between people, a mystery and a diminutive object that serves as a focus for the action. The best parts of The Lost Weekend use a bottle of whisky in the same way as the love letter here: they anchor all the interesting things in the scene to an object close to the skin, so that our immensely powerful senses of personal space inform the response we give to the story. Guns do the same thing, in my opinion: they are not only shiny and deadly, but they are no bigger than a hand (when I think of guns in films I always think first of pistols).

But all the advantages of The Love Letter didn't outweigh the fact that I didn't myself care who ended up on top or dead or whatever. I will come back to the question "What makes things interesting? Why do most people like what they like?" again on this page; for now let it stand that, while pissed off at the wasted time, I am glad to find that some things are just plain boring and some things are interesting. It means that, no matter how clever and successful you become, the responsibility to be interesting - the only responsibility a writer has - never goes away, and there is always the chance that a stupid, boorish, devilishly interesting young idiot will shoot you in the butt and take your Sheriff's badge.