The Demon
So I just reviewed William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade. (Again. I've been reviewing everything, needing all the help I can get.) This is one of my favourite quotes, too good not to inscribe somewhere.
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound. If you're trying a screenplay, you know it's never going to be Bergman. If it's a novel, well, what kind of a novelist can you hope to be when Dostoevski was there before you. And Dickens and Cervantes and all the other masters who led you to the prison of your desk.
But if you're a writer, that's what you must do, and in order to accomplish anything at all, at the rock bottom of it all is your confidence.
You tell yourself lies and you force them into belief: Hey, you suckers, I'm going to do it this one time. I'm going to tell you things you never knew.
