Bored though you may be, you’re a mover and shaker in Hollywood. It’s not what it used to be, as you enthusiastically, and constantly, tell everyone. It’s not as it used to be. But you’re here, either still or newly. And you’re prepared to make some films. Someone told you your face looked right, or possibly your pen was held in the right hand the right way up, or maybe you’ve graduated from shooting YouTube videos with clever effects on them and now you’re making features or prestige TV. Congratulations!
It’s a good life. It’s a good life in the heat, in the sun.
Now some time has passed. You’ve been around the town a few times, in the back of cars while you talk on FaceTime. You talk a lot to a lot of people. You’ve made it. People know your name. That’s all you want: people to know your name. But now you have another problem. You’ve made it but people think of you a certain way. That’s a problem — wouldn’t be for many, but it is for you, and so you’ve got to do something about it.
What are your options? Most people go for health and wellness, now: that slop, that soup of good-feelings nothingness that can print money as the world’s anxious and wealthy go to you to save their lives or their souls. Or you could pose as the intellectual. Write a book. Write a book, why don’t you? Write a book.
Other people like you write memoirs and you could do that. You’ve had an interesting life — so full of incident, so full of drama. And so many stories about things people said and did on set, while being fitted for costumes, while having make-up applied by the trowel-load and then removed with industrial strength non-biodegradable, not-free-range acids. Ah, the talk of trailers, and director’s chairs. Dinner at restaurants normal people only see on TikTok. Clubs tht don’t have names. You could give them their names!
People love to hear about all of that. You could publish your diaries, if you wanted. You could publish your diary, if you kept one. But you don’t, and memoirs are cheap and they’re basically eternal paperbacks, even the good ones, destined to be remaindered and forgotten, even if they mint New York Times bestsellers quite often. You need to come up with something else.
You’re sitting before the mirror, communing with your ancestors, when all of a sudden, it hits you. You’re surrounded by famous people, so many famous people. And you’ve heard of a lot of gossip. Why not put it down — put it all down — but under false names. Call it fiction, call it a fantasia — like the one with Mickey Mouse. Humour and satire, humour and satire. It’s satirical. It’s ironic!
People will want to guess who Minx Glamourpuss, your star, really is; who Joel Ethan Pursestrings might be. Oh, it’s perfect. It is perfect. And you, with all your wonderful, endless talent — you are the man to write it.
Other men use ghostwriters and you have considered it. If all they do is make voice notes or recordings of your conversation and paper over the gaps, turn the whole thing into prose, you’ve no complaints. People have always said you were a lovely talker. They’ve always said you were a wonderful talker.
But, people say, the ghostwriter business is a bad one. It distorts minds and memories. Many people who’ve had something written for them can graduate, as it were, truly certain that they wrote it. That it emerged from their pen or Google Docs wholly formed. That the ghost was just a fussing little editor, a kind of secretary, someone you actually didn’t need, someone who barely helped. It worries you a little, this symptom of minor mental illness.
It might yet happen to you.
Better do it yourself. After all, people love the way you talk. You’re famous and on the late night talk shows. People love the way you talk. And people are told to write what they know and to write like they talk. A bit of thinking is required, but not all that much. You’ve contributed — that’s a bit of a euphemism — to screenplays before. It’s easy. It’s easy. Dialogue is easy. Just write down what people actually say — talk about the things they actually talk about. If they want to talk about TV or what restaurant they’re currently shilling to their friends, do that. Do that. It’s easy. And you are such a wonderful talker.
Bored no longer. You’re bored no longer. You sit down before the blank page. You think a little about your life, and then you start typing, typing with two fingers. It’s almost like sending a text to your agent.