As someone who almost always stays within the realms of the humanities and strictly philosophy, I often forget that when I am in engagement with art, it is almost always in such an abstract, distant interaction. As a writer, my control and distance from my work is obviously much closer, but even then, there seems to be some abstraction in the control I have for it. When writing screenplays, I am thinking about my work in the same ways that I think about art in general as a philosopher, there isn't just an off-switch to become a practicing-only, anti-theory artist. As much as, ironically, I would like to be that in theory, there is something unappealing about disregarding the ideas and values that make the art of writing so powerful in order to truly live it.

For example, this week I went to a screenwriting festival and sat through workshop after workshop, lecture after lecture, telling me all of the practical how-to's as a screenwriter. The first lecture was on what a story was, and the lecturer gave us a strict guideline of how the protaginist needs to have a goal and has to have a hard time getting there. I mean, this line to me, from a conceptual point of view, was so narrow and completely leaves out so many storys that could have real meaning. It seemed more like he was a talking point for a specific school of cinema rather than telling us what a story really was. Nonetheless, I went through the festival, learning about how to pitch, what a logline was, and, despite what they wanted, wrote a good amount of my story during the breaks! But really, I didlearn a good amount of practical lessons about the world of screenwriting, and even some gossip about the program itself and some grad students (Marcy, you shouldn't have asked that grad student for a letter of rec, she wasn't a fan!) Despite my mindset going in, you would think that would be a great help to someone like me who is constantly stuck in my work because I either give up, mid-way, because it is not going perfectly, and someone who is writing concepts and scripts for the screen but has no resources or connections to taking them anywhere further than just that, words on a screen. Part of me likes it that way, as I've heard, many times, that my writing isn't the best. The one thing that has kept me from really caring about that criticism and working on it is the fact that it is always followed up with the compliment of my concepts, analysis, and ideas. The thing I hate the most about writing, and why writing, for me, is more of a personal hobby rather than a skill I like to share is that it isn't a conversation.

Writing, say posts like these, or essays for class, are never really about the engagement with the material, analysis of what someone is saying, or anything close to that. Sure, you might end up actually saying something meaningful, but the whole purpose is to become an efficient communicator through one-ended writing. I mean, sure, in the 1700s-1900s, the only way for scholars or professionals to engage with a large amount of ideas from people not around them, was through these open-ended, static papers that they would probably just put in one of those journals. I do think that there is some benefit for this, as it does increase or at least create a platform for looking at ideas, but the irony is probably most people reading it know the author personally.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, as an academic and a creative writer, it has allowed me to see the beauty, bureaucracy, and out-datedness in both practical senses of creative writing like how a "story", according to that lecturer is supposed to go, or how in academic writing, in order to tell each other ideas we are still writing papers! Part of why I am so interested in becoming a professor or academic, as well as my devotion to the virtual world, is because I am so tired of how the modern experience of art has become so narrow and structured as if it had been beheaded from what it started with and is pumped with paper every now-and-then and called living.