May the FLORK Be With You!
Mood Tools Week 9: Hold fast to your sense of humor
As I lay me down to sleep one night last week, my writer brain decided right then would be a fantastic time to catalogue the myriad issues in the ending of my novel in progress.
Normally my rational brain would bang the ceiling and yell at my writer brain to knock it off already, but before I could channel the requisite grumpy-grandpa-in-boxers energy required, my writer brain stopped chattering about the issues in my ending and started to offer up solutions.
FLORK!1
I scrambled for my phone, opened up a text message to myself, and recorded a breathless voice note about how I might—just might—untangle my ending. I was so excited my finger slipped off the recorder, and I ended up sending not one, but TWO breathless notes.
This was it!
This was the breakthrough I was waiting for!
Satisfied I’d unstuck my sticky widget2 du jour, I slept soundly.3 But when I woke the next morning, I didn’t spring from my bed, eager to listen to my nocturnal breakthrough, no. Instead, I lay in bed giggling as my favorite scene from Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation played on the movie screen of my mind.
For those who have never seen the movie, it’s Charlie Kaufman’s “adaptation” of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. But instead of actually, you know, adapting the book, Kaufman wrote an entertainingly batshit movie about the process of turning Orlean’s lyrical nonfiction book about a flower into a Hollywood movie.
Nicolas Cage plays Kaufman, and while Cage’s performances tend to be hit or miss for me, his performance in Adaptation as a neurotic writer on deadline was *chef’s kiss*.
My favorite scene is a two-minute clip of Kaufman’s dark night of the writerly soul. In what he believes is a genuine eureka moment, Kaufman captures his idea by blissfully blathering into a tape recorder, but, alas, the clip ends with him slumped as he listens to his patently absurd idea with mounting despair.
For your consideration:
For my taste, the actual clip from the movie plays far too quickly to fully render its brilliant writerly nuance. The clip that has played in syndication in my brain for twenty-one years goes a little something like this:
Adaptation Clip: A Flower’s Journey
INT. Kaufman’s bedroom — night
Charlie Kaufman is flopped face down across the bed, despairing, but, because he’s a professional, he forces himself to pace and think, dammit, think!
KAUFMAN(v.o.)
To write about a flower. To dramatize a flower, I have to show the flowers arc and the flower’s arc stretches back to the beginning of life. How did this flower get there? What was its journey?
INT. Kaufman’s Desk — night
As Kaufman continues prattling on, the camera pans over the detritus he’s collected in the name of research—books, a crumpled fast food wrapper, more books—and lands on yet another book: Darwin’s ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES.
Kaufman picks up said book.
INT. Darwin’s study — night
As the camera shifts from Kaufman’s sweaty face to a close up of Darwin’s bearded and sickly face, the viewer presumes we’re not in Darwin’s study at all, but in Kaufman’s imagination (maybe?)—and this is one of the lesser whackadoodle moments in the movie.
DARWIN (writing)
Therefore, I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one (cough ) primordial form into which life was first breathed.
INT. Kaufman’s Apartment — night
Back on Kaufman, calmer, reading (because reading makes everything better).
KAUFMAN(v.o.)
It is the journey of evolution — adaptation — the journey we all take, the journey that unites each and every one of us. Darwin writes that we all come from the very first single-cell organism, yet here I am.
INT. Kaufman’s car - day
Kaufman climbs into his car with a sack of fast food.
KAUFMAN(v.o.)
And there’s LaRoche.
INT. LaRoche’s workshop - day
The orchid farmer does orchidly things to—you guessed it—an orchid!
KAUFMAN(v.o.)
And there’s Orlean
INT. Orlean’s (home?) office
Susan Orlean (as played by Meryl Streep) looks all writerly
KAUFMAN(v.o.)
And there’s the ghost orchid.
EXT. Swampy McSwamplands - night
A money shot of a ghost orchid that looks suspiciously like every other orchid on earth.
INT. Kaufman’s Apartment—night
Back on a pensive AF Kaufman, thinking the shit out of his thoughts.
KAUFMAN(v.o.)
All trapped in our own bodies in moments in history. That’s it! That’s what I need to do! Tie all of history together!
And here comes the Eureka moment!
Kaufman’s face lights up!
He snatches his handy tape recorder and—with manic zeal—dictates the hairy heck out of the big idea his writerly brain has right this very moment hatched!
KAUFMAN (Muppet arms flailing as he paces)
Start right before life begins on the planet! All is lifeless, and then like, life begins, um, with organisms, those little single-cell ones—oh!—and it’s before sex, ‘cause, like, everything was asexual, ah, from there we go to bigger things! Jellyfish! And then that fish that got legs on it and crawled out on the land, and then we see, you know, like, um, ah, dinosaurs, and then, they're around for a long, loooong time, and then, and then, an asteroid comes and, and—
FLORK!!
INT. Kaufman’s Apartment—later that night
Camera cuts from Kaufman’s flork-citement to what can only be described as his utter despondence as he listens to his own voice ramble through the rest of his useless idea.
KAUFMAN (sinking into deeper despair every second)
The insects, the instinctive mammals, then primates, monkeys, the simple monkeys. The, the old fashioned monkeys give way to the new monkeys, whatever, and then apes, whatever, and, and—MAN!
Kaufman’s face sags into even deeper despair as he shuffles the shuffle of dashed hope across his dark apartment.
KAUFMAN (shuffle, shuffle, shuffle)
Then we see the whole history of human civilization. Hunting and gathering, farming, war, love, religion, heartache, disease, loneliness, technology. We bring it all the way to this moment in history and end with Susan Orlean in her office at The New Yorker writing about flowers and—BANG!—the movie begins! This is great!
Kaufman’s continued shuffle says this is most definitely NOT great!
KAUFMAN (staring into the void of his bust of an idea)
This is the breakthrough I’ve been hoping for!
But as Kaufman reaches the window and stares out into the dark night, it’s clear this is absolutely NOT the breakthrough he’s been hoping for.
Like, at all.
END SCENE
Back to me, now.
Lying in bed the morning after my own midnight breakthrough, I have no idea whether my nocturnal ramblings are actually a breakthrough or a depressive delusion that will send me to stare out my own window. In the interest of full transparency my past experiences with eureka moments seem to indicate my middle of the night solution is quite likely to be more reek than Eureka, but if I use today’s writing time to draft this playful little newsletter about one of my favorite film clips about the writing life, I can hold onto the delusion that my breakthrough was all FLORK and no despair!4
At the very least, I can keep laughing, which, as it turns out, is a terribly important skill to keep yourself sane when the people you invent in your own mind decide that the end of the book would be the perfect time to organize a revolt.
Flork, flork, flork!
At this point you’d be forgiven for thinking this week’s mood tool seems to be embracing the idea of blowing off working on your novel to instead write a silly little throwaway post, but it’s not. This week’s mood tool is a reminder that a sense of humor is a powerful tool in your writerly toolbox.
If you’ve been writing long enough to recognize your foibles, your writing sessions will be a lot more fun if you can laugh at your bad habits.
For example, in early drafts, I have a tendency to overcomplicate my plots.
A lot.
Like, if my characters are trying to get from Boston to Cambridge5, I'll send them by way of Timbuktu.
I'm working on trying to change that instinct with prep work, I swear, but in the mean time, whenever I catch myself planning seven beats where one would do, I mutter Timbuktu, laugh at myself, and revise.
In another example, when my characters start sniffing too much, I sniff-sniff-sniff like a dog, laugh, and revise those sniffs.
And when I’m despairing that I will ever actually slash a path through the thorny weeds of the end of my current novel in progress, I take a morning off to write a silly essay about how important it is for writers to have a sense of humor about their work. I even extend my micro-vacation from my novel to tinker with a Gif until the words FLORK and DESPAIR actually flash over the florking and despairing Nicolas Cages.
Because, honestly, time spent laughing—particularly when you’re frustrated enough you could cry—is time well spent.
And not to brag, but I’ll have that silly flork/despair Gif to cheer me for the rest of my writing life, even if I’m the only person in the world still giggling at it ten years from now.6 In the meantime:
May the FLORK be with you!!
The meaning of this word will be revealed soon, I promise.
It’s come to my attention that this word should be wicket, not widget, but I say cricket can keep its wickets because when you’re talking about a sticky plotting issue, a sticky widget summons the idea of machinery so much better than a sticky wicket, so I’m doubling down. Sticky wickets for the cricket set and sticky widgets for us writers, OK?
Or as soundly as a woman whose sleeping self treats her dreams as improv prompts possibly can. You think I’m kidding, but I swear, I am a pretty odd bedfellow. One night last week I earnestly tried to explain to my groggy husband that he had a lion head—on waking the only memory I had no memory of this moment. On another night I leapt out of bed, yelled, I’m so sick of this shit, and stormed off to the bathroom—I have a vague memory of the outburst, but zero memory of its root cause.
My luddite self is prouder of creating this gif than I am of just about every technical achievement, and I’m from the generation that once used dial up.
For my out of town and international readers, Boston and Cambridge are on either side of the Charles River, so all you need do to get from one to the other is cross one of several bridges between the two.
So was my phone note a moment of FLORK or despair? I don’t know! I’m finishing this before I check because the point of this post wasn’t about the solution but the laughter. But if you really must know, I suspect the moment was more FLORK than despair because the revelation—as I remember it—was of the replacing-a-jaunt-to-Timbuktu-with-a-walk- across-a-bridge variety, and those tend to have legs. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a few voice texts waiting for my undivided attention.
If you haven't read Kaufman's Antkind, get thee to a bookstore posthaste! It's absolutely brilliant (and long!). It's a book about an unfilmable movie and the book is, according to Kaufman, supposed to be unfilmable. One of my fave books I've read in the last few years.