On Writing

I think I finally understand why I like Jason Reitman's writing so much. Aside from the fact that he delivers meaningful, complex ideas with a good amount of levity, is essentially a writer's writer, has a gift for dialogue and a sharp economy that I can appreciate, he writes/explores women the way I'd like to write/understand men. I am always conducting informal surveys with men I know. Polling them on hypothetical questions, trying to understand the mysteries of their psyche. Because ultimately, the experience of being male is one that I most likely won't have in this life. And I sometimes wonder what it must be like to occupy a male body and see the world through a lens of male emotionality, even in our post-gender era of hyper-emotional/hyper-sensitive men.

And I know it's not about binaries, about either/or, about making gender-determined conclusions. Because ultimately, we're all individuals and generalizing based on gender is kind of a pointless activity. But you can tell from the way that he portrays women that he's studied them carefully, painstakingly, for years. When I saw him interviewed, he was asked what's made him such a sharp writer, and he said, "Just growing up." This reminds me of something I heard Arundhati Roy say once - "You don't work on writing, you just refine your way of observing the world. That's what ultimately makes you a writer," she said. I have to remind myself that it's not about the writing. It's about living in a particular way, in a meditative way. It's about watching and listening. And slowly, slowly, your vision of the world becomes more refined, and the vocabulary to carve it out springs out of a kind of necessity, organically, on its own.