Please Break My Heart, I Need To Create

I'm a little worried about Michel Gondry.

Christened Le Romantique in Lynn Hirschberg's profile of the director in the Sunday NY Times Magazine, he sounds a bit far gone in his forlorn romanticism even for a Frenchman (hey, I kid the French -- I'm such a defender of Gallic culture that I've been meaning to have a t-shirt made that says Don't hate me because I'm French, except wearing it would confuse people and possibly get me assaulted).

Gondry, in case you haven't been following his oeuvre, is one of the world's great video directors (see Bjork's Human Behavior, the White Stripes' Fell in Love With a Girl, Daft Punk's Around the World, et al) and a great film director as well (see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I rest my case).  You may have seen the trailer for his forthcoming The Science of Sleep, featuring sexy Spanish Gael Barcia Bernal losing it over sexy French Charlotte Gainsbourg amidst Gondry's trademark charmingly chaotic low-fi animated images of giant hands and crayoned horses springing to life, etc. (and if you haven't or want more, you can access a lot of clips'n'stuff on Gondry's site).

The Times article documents, among other artistic pursuits, the director's preparation for an art show at the Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Soho:

“These are all about an ex-girlfriend,” he said, as he took several curious-looking items from the box and placed them, one by one, on an oval conference table. “I made all these when she left me, two years ago.”

Gondry held up a bra with exaggeratedly uneven cups. “I made this because her breasts were two different sizes,” he said. He displayed a necklace constructed out of the tips of his fingernails. “She complained about my long nails,” he said, “so I added some chain and made them into jewelry.” There were pages taken from a French book and an English book that he had overlapped so that the resulting text spelled out his former girlfriend’s name. He had modified a Nike sneaker by inserting into it a doll that held in its hand a key to the apartment that he and his girlfriend once shared. He picked up a cartoonlike illustration that he had made of another girlfriend heading out the door of their apartment; he had mounted the image on a tree-shaped piece of cardboard that had been cut out of a composition notebook. “I still use the notebook with the tree part missing,” he said, as he stared rather forlornly at the remnants of his love. “It always reminds me of her.”

Don't you just love how the psychotic behavior that might get some people put away gets some other people one-man shows in Soho?  Ah, art.  Oh, artists.

Let me be clear about this, especially since Gondy is such a sensitive fellow: I love the man and his work, which has given me and millions of other folks such profound pleasure.  And is he alone in fueling his creativity with unrequited love and unceasing romantic suffering?  Please! 

We all know (that would be, all of us who pay attention to such things) that at least half -- more than half? -- someone really ought to do the stats on this -- of the greatest artistic creations in history have been born of heartbreak, from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone.  Without it we wouldn't have Goethe's Faust, Godard's Pierrot Le Fou -- God forbid, we wouldn't have had Nick Drake (or The Smiths, or sub in the le romantique gloom-god of your choice).

Look at contemporary literature.  Take for example, another article I read today, in the same paper (!!!) about another guy, a writer named Gregoire Bouillier -- okay, also French -- whose memoir is the direct result of having had his heart figuratively ripped out, sauteed and served to him, steaming, in a nice Gallic sauce:

Bouillier’s girlfriend left him, just like that; vanished without saying goodbye. Years pass and he’s stuck with nothing, no explanation, only mystery and sorrow. Then the phone rings, and it’s her, calling to invite him to a party, a party for her husband’s best friend, who happens to be the artist Sophie Calle. “Yes, exactly, Sophie Calle,” Bouillier writes, “the one who followed people in the street — anyway, every year this friend had a birthday party and invited as many people as she was years old plus a ‘mystery guest’ who stood for the year she was about to live, and this year she was in charge of bringing the mysterious stranger and she couldn’t say no, and so she’d thought of me (another faint laugh), and that was the reason, the one and only reason, for her call.” So there’s the setup for the book...

And having read an excerpt from The Mystery Guest in The New Yorker which was quite funny, in a mordantly painful way, I've already got it en route from amazon.  Just as I will, of course, be the first on my block to see Science of Sleep (also based, as Gondry's quick to admit, on an early failed love affair) as soon as it opens.

Which brings us back to me, thank goodness (what took me so long?!) and a confession: the reason these two items kind of jumped out and said "Hello there!" to me today is that I am a writer whose most recent work was born of heartbreak and deep desolation (a work of fiction that's a romantic comedy, of all things), who's just started a new book -- barely, getting my trepidicious little toe dipped, is all -- and I have a problem.

I'm not unhappy.

I'm not happy, mind you, as in gamboling about the streets of Venice Beach with an idiot grin on my mug -- happy is a very big word, and I don't mean to imply that I'm living stress-free and bereft of the need for a better... um, almost everything (except my car; I love my car), for am I not human?  But what I mean is, I'm not heartbroken, I'm no longer one of the walking wounded.

Having spent three-plus years in productive lovelorn misery and post-misery, writing that last novel, I find the sensation of beginning a new one when I'm relatively misery-free downright peculiar.

I'm not saying it can't be done.  There are centuries of great writing and art born of happiness, from Dante's Divine Comedy to Outkast's Hey Ya! to set me a good example. 

But I admit to you (not proudly) that it has been on occasion easier for me to write from pain.   So I do feel a bit challenged, writing from okay.

The thing about writing from romantic grief and mourning is that these feelings are so intense and present; you wake up with them, they haunt your dreams.  It's no wonder that so many writers go all Gondry on their shit -- the materials are right there (they won't go away, the bastards) and they positively invite expression and dramatization.

Happiness, on the other hand, is infernally ephemeral. 

Moments of joy can spur on creativity (speaking of oeuvres, just look at Matisse), but as many of us have learned the hard way, the work that comes out of a giddy high often doesn't make the grade in the cool and sober light of day (it can be like picking up the meaning-of-life message you ecstatically scrawled in your notebook at the peak of a mescaline trip and finding that it reads: the sky is blue!).  And if you're really, truly content... why do the work?  A good deal of the artistic impulse comes from some kind of itch that wants scratching. 

But all too often writing from misery is just an excuse to puke, mewl and wallow.  So I'm not advocating pain-as-the-means-of-creativity.  I don't really believe in it.  I have done good work that didn't come from Wound and know many writers, musicians -- artists in every medium -- who don't require a proper grey cloud over their heads to do what they do.  I believe a good writer is someone who shows up at their desk every day, regardless of the emotional weather, so I don't at all promote the You Must Suffer To Create School.

Even Michel Gondry has found other means of inspiration; his next project doesn't even have a whiff of the unrequited about it:

“Be Kind Rewind” takes place in a car junkyard. In the movie, Jerry, the character Jack Black will play, accidentally becomes magnetized by a power plant. His magnetic field erases all the tapes in a video store where his best friend, Mike, played by Mos Def, works. The duo end up re-enacting and refilming their own versions of movies like “King Kong” and “Ghostbusters.”  These re-enactments will allow Gondry to recreate well-known films, many of which have elaborate special effects, in his inventive, handcrafted style.

Again, I am like, so totally there.  Even though it's set in New Jersey. Nonetheless, there is something a little... heady about the concept in Be Kind Rewind.  I wonder where the heart of its matter will lie.

And I do find it takes a little more ingenuity to access the ready emotions necessary to get me into the heart of the story I'm writing now, one that isn't heartbreak-motivated.  How to write a romantic dramedy when it's not motored by the throes of romantic upheaval?  I'm genuinely curious to know what you, my stalwart, clever and deep-feeling Living RomCommers, think about this issue.

Comments

[Ann Wesley Hardin]

I'll tell you what I think. It's hard! Wahhhhh!

Like you, I hate to whine about being content. It's ridiculous and I feel vaguely humiliated that I've been struggling. Woke up with that humiliation, in fact, and found your post, which made me even happier because there was someone else out there experiencing the same thing. Curses!

The way I decided to handle it is to write about someone else who's brokenhearted and miserable. It's a band-aid, I know, but what else is there to do? With any luck I'll be able to channel his/her misery into a bestseller. I hope you can too.

[jamy]

I'm trying to remember how I felt when I last wrote fiction....yep, it all pretty much came from heartbreak or wish-fulfillment. Some disillusion was at play too. But it hardly seems essential. I've had plenty of heartbreak since and none of it was quite so inspiring. ;)

[MaryAn]

Wait. Uneven cups are worthy of a show in SoHo? You couldn't have posted this BEFORE I called the Salvation Army?

[binnie]

Finally!!! Yahoo, Billy, happy is GOOD!
I've only been creative (and good-creative, not tortured-creative) when I've been happy or at least relatively content. Depression and heartache have only made me curl up into a fetal ball eating pints of Ben and Jerry's, with no desire to do anything, let alone something artistic.
(Aside to MaryAn, your comment made me laugh so hard I did a spit-take with my coffee, AND, by the way, you do have a lovely voice.)

[mike]

Hey billy,

I commented a while back, when The Break Up came out (coincidentally right after my beloved girlfriend broke up with me). We talked about using the pain for scripts and such. Coincidentally, I've been tasked to write a rom com for a friend of mine. Using the pain is a lot more helpful, and adds a lot of edge to the situation.

As for Science of Sleep, having seen the movie, this article sheds a lot more light on the film. It's good, but it definitely comes from a painful place.

The film is absolutely gorgeous, it should be noted.

[Sal]

To quote Shane Danielson, no great art ever came out of a permissive society; the corollary for romance is perhaps that no great feelings ever came out of a contented place. For if you are contented, you cannot see the anguish, and if you can't see the anguish, then the heights and depths are somehow missing. I had an extremely painful break-up with someone, having had some great highs with that same person - for a while, I wished for middling ground, to feel nothing, no highs or lows because the highs and lows I'd had were so extreme they left me drained. The thing is, no-one wants to see middling ground in stories, they want to see others experience the extremes, partly so they can experience them in proxy. A story without heights and depths is no story. But I'm not saying you have to be miserable in order to write; just that, maybe, experiencing extremes brings something to the story you're trying to tell. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out how a person with no romance in their life for a long long time ends up writing romantic comedy. Talk about wishful thinking.

[E.C. Henry]

Congradulations on staring your latest novel, Billy. Hope its a great one. How are you coming along with that other one you mentioned in a previous blog? When I am I going to be able to buy a copy? I'm very eager to read your last story, as your teaser sounded awesome.

No, I don't believe you have to be romantically distraught to write a good romantic comedy. Yes, emotion fuels imagination and vise-versa. BUT I believe to write a good romantic comedy, you just have to have latent romantic desire within yourself. To make the romance meaningfull you make your characters, not yourself, suffer.

To me, romance in a romantic comedy is ALL about that "ah" moment, when the couple is together, the stars align, the couple closes in on each other, and their on the presibus of phyically expressing the desire that is noticibly on both of their face.

Buy to achieve this romantic payoff, the author needs to make their couple suffer a little. Suffering creates empathy in the audience, which in turn hooks the audience in to share the couple's bliss when the relationship is consumated. Does a writer have to suffer him or herself to use this dynamic? I don't think so.

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

[MaryAn]

Thank you, Binnie, very kind coming from you. And hey, important beauty tip -- people who laugh a lot while drinking hot coffee have fewer nose hairs.

[mernitman]

Welcome, Ann: Curses indeed. Channel that misery, and I'll meet you in the bookstore.

Jamy: Goes either way, don't it?

MaryAn is it hot in here or is it just you?

Binnie The Fortunate.

Hey Mike, glad to hear the pain into pages conversion is going well...

Sal, "experiencing extremes brings something to the story you're trying to tell" is a great quote and i hereby borrow it for future classroom use.

EC, "latent romantic desire" is a good one, too.

When Audrey Wells (Truth About Cats...) spoke to my first rom-com class, she said: "Steep your characters in pain. Make them miserable. Then, after they've really suffered... make them happy."

[MaryAn]

So, it's like passive/aggressive treatment of your characters.

[Ann Wesley Hardin]

MaryAn, I can tell you that it's not P/A at all. It's sociopathic. We have no conscience when it comes to characters, and it's not hidden or sneaky. We know exactly what our torture will do to them, and we enjoy doling it out.

The problem is that when we're happy, we're pretending to know what our victims feel. This pretence always comes through in the writing. So we're trying to manufacture ways to hide it.

I suppose Sal would call this attempt "acting". (Yes, Sal, I read your blog and found it utterly fascinating)

And it made me wonder, if we "act", if we pull out a smidgen of heartbreak, magnify it, exaggerate it, and write it, will it override our need to be experiencing it?

That's what I'm doing right now. I'll let you know if it works.

PS--thanks for the welcome,Billy! I've been flitting in here on and off for a year or so. It's one of the more enjoyable blogs on the 'net!

[Paul Lacques]

Hey, Billy:

This newcomer is enjoying your blog greatly!

"Please Break My Heart" is a great comfort to me. I always thought I was psychotic, but now I realize I'm an artist.

[MaryAn]

I'm honored, Ann - first, that you remember Sal and second, that you used superlatives that didn't sound like "she has a great personality". I DON'T WANT A GREAT PERSONALITY! So thank you. Seriously.

[Susan]

Maybe people who feel more "deeply" (including deep pain) have a greater access to the full spectrum of human emotions. Maybe the deeper the lows, the highers the highs that you feel? If you have a relatively harmonious life, you might not understand the full range and depth of human emotion? Just my thoughts. And what IS it about some French Men Growing their FINGERNAILS Longer than most American women (sorry but that's a definate Turn Off). It Creeps me out - Creepier still he made it into a necklace. But don't get me wrong I LOVE French Cinema too (and my sister is married to a really cool French Guy)

[Susan]

And the deeper the understanding of human emotions, the more likely the person is to have more depth in his/her writing...

[Ann Wesley Hardin]

I'm in complete agreement with the "extreme feelings" posters. Contrast is everything.

I know so many people who have flatlined emotionally. I try to stay away from them, but, you know, there are social obligations. They smile small, they hug small, they frown if they can (Botox and everything...) and they make small talk. Everything is small. And it's so freakin' depressing.

Where are the large people? The people who laugh out-loud. The people who don't take the drugs the doctor ordered.

Is Jackie Gleason really dead?

It's sad when you think about it. But I have no answers. Somehow it reminds me of that Beatnik from Happy Days: Little birdy, with your face pressed up against the bakery window. There are no pastries for you today, only death.

~Ann, who's pretty sure she wore out her welcome today and is now going away to write.

[Ann Wesley Hardin]

Back.

MaryAn, are you Sal, or related to her? I'm new here and have no idea of the relationships.

But I did click on your name and saw that you appear to be a fencer! I fenced for nine years. Epee and sabre. But Epee is my love.

I know the European method is more intense than the American, so you could probably wup my yankee ass with footwork alone, but it's cool to meet another fencer. There aren't too many around!

[jess]

as an artist who holds fast to her sanity, balance, and clarity...i find it disturbing when other artists seek out, or draw out, pain.

That's why we have recal. (two L's? one?) Memory. My life has had it's 2 years of heartbreak and therapy. I see no need, and have absolutely no desire, to revist that again. I'll tap into it every so often, tentatively, but then i'll throw on some J. Timberlake (or K. Clarkson, as you have so SMARTLY spoke about), and rejoice in the fact that I am not horribly, mind-numbingly, depressed.

And you know, being young, and in new york, i think there's enough material for "dramady" in the whole idea of ..."how am I EVER going to find someone to love again?"

it's not depressing. It's just incredibly...perplexing.

...well, and also depressing. But that doesn't help my point.

[binnie]

Billy, sarcasm? Without a ;-) or a ! attached to the answer to my comment, it's hard to read it any other way. Did you infer that I'm never unhappy or haven't had my heart shattered? Please. You know as well as anyone that at times I've had to claw my way out of the depths (does THAT make me more artistic?), but the truth is that MY good stuff comes out only when I've gotten past the pain and I've climbed over to the happier side of the equation.
On another subject, I'm really enjoying the conversation between Ann and MaryAn...

[Ruth]

When I am in a good place, from joyful to serene to having plenty of money and enough good people in my life, I can write anything, from ecstacy to unbearable anguish.
When I am in the depths, when even salt and vingar potato chips don't do it, I can't write anything, least of all making this the moment I can access my pain productively.
But when I am writing (prose here--still working on the screenplay part of it) I pretty much can dredge up whatever mood I need, and at the end of the writing session, I'm in whatever shape I was writing about. This is why the people in my life prefer it when I'm working on something funny.

[binnie]

Hey, and another thing! I just remembered a story I heard about the making of "Marathon Man". Dustin Hoffman's character is supposed to be exhausted from running away from the bad guy. To get himself into character, Hoffman ran around and around the set for quite some time so he'd be breathless, huffing and puffing and sweaty in time for his take. His co-star, Laurence Olivier, allegedly took one look at him and said, "Next time, try acting".
I don't think being heartbroken and depressed are the necessary emotions to write or compose well, but the sense-memory to recall those emotions, definitely.

[Ann Wesley Hardin]

"Next time, try acting".

LMAO!!

~Ann, who is really going away now. For the time being.

[mernitman]

Hey Ann: It's been quite a ride figuratively spending the day with you. "The people who don't take the drugs the doctor ordered," I love that... And a fencer, no less. I do hope that the smidgen-ing experiment worked and that you got some writing done...

Jess but that's GOOD perplexing. As in, the Energy of the Unrequited that keeps all of us going...

Binnie put the gun down! :-)))
Actually my comment was said with a smile and no sarcasm -- just some genuine admiration for (and a rueful touch of envy of) someone who seems to have struck a happy balance of equanimity in her relationship between her emotional and creative life.

Ruth I think many writers have had this same issue with The Others (i.e friends, mates, family); it's one reason why writers are notorious as difficult-to-live-with.

(Binnie, I heard the punch line of the Olivier story as, "But my dear boy, why not try acting?" but LOL no matter how you tell it)

Ann Et Al:

Seems to me that what's emerging here is an issue that intrigues me: how DOES a writer access his/her emotions to do the work, be it dark or joyful?

And for that matter does one ncessarily have to be stuck with the emotional residue (see Ruth) once one has plumbed the necessary depths? (I say yes, it comes with the turf, unfortunately) And how does one come to one's own emotional rescue? (Presently I say nighttime driving with the top down heading for the ocean and blasting Strays Don't Sleep, but that's just me. Possible follow-up post...)

[Ann Wesley Hardin]

Writing actually sops up my emotional residue rather than creates it. I tend to get loopy and have strange thoughts when the creativity has no outlet--especially now that I've had a measure of success and keep those creative windows open all the time for inspiration.

Of course, when the writing isn't up to standard I can get a little snippy. But it doesn't matter if I'm writing a funny scene, a steamy scene or a wrenching one, I'll always emerge in a good mood.

BTW--the smidgening would've worked last night, I think, if I hadn't fallen asleep ;)

[mernitman]

Ann: How Crazy Writers Get When They're Not Writing... a whole other post topic...

Meanwhile, Susan, sorry I skipped you in the last comment -- I got lost in the Ann & Binnie of it all -- Anyway I agree with you about the fingernails (there's a local character famous here in Venice for having grown his Mandarin emperor-long, like a full foot of curling fingernails, talk about creepy, yeesh!) -- and your depths of people (depths of understanding = deeper writing)thought seems totally right on to me...

And Paul Lacques: Welcome to Living RomCom! Of course you are an artist, sir. And also -- for the benefits of fellow readers, I point out -- leader of one of the best bands in L.A., I See Hawks, which you can hear on their myspace page: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=35441466

Looking forward to more pithy Paul commentary...