Movie Reviews for Writers: The Girl in the Book

 

Do you ever look back on your life as a writer and think that you should have been so much farther along than you are? That you should be more successful? That you should have so much more to show for all that time, effort, and the internal world you have committed to your writing life? Do those thoughts ever make you want to just stop writing and focus on something else?

If so, you really need to watch this indie drama film. 

Alice is the daughter of two literary agents. Her mother is doing okay and is fantastic at discovering new talent, but her father is even better at stealing them away from her and turning them into household names. That's how young Alice (an amazing performance by Ana Mulvoy-Ten) meets Milan Daneker (Michael Nyqvist), a new writer discovered by her mother and poached by her father. 

Her father introduces her as a budding writer, and she glances away and excuses herself. He says later over dinner: "I expect great things from you." Ouch. No pressure, as the cliche goes. 

Milan takes an interest in Alice's writing and strikes up a friendship with her that is more than a little inappropriate for a grown man to have with a teenage girl. 

While exploring the house, Milan intrudes on Alice as she is writing in her journal.

Milan: You're a writer? 

Alice: I don't know.

Is that not all of us at the beginning? Sure, we know we are writing -- that's what we are doing -- but are we writers? As if there is a chasm between the act and the person acting. 

For some of us, that question continues to haunt us. Do you ever read fellow writers on social media admitting they suffer from "Imposter Syndrome"? No matter what they've written or had published, they still feel like they're just play-acting at being a writer, and the "real" writers are busy doing something else, something different, something that actually matters. 

It's an easy trap to fall into. 

Cut to years later when young Alice has become young adult Alice (Emily Van Camp). She works in the office of a literary agency, having long given up the ideals of discovering new talent to just maintaining the status quo of the current roster, basically hating her life and trying to disappear into one-night stands and hiding alone in her apartment. 

So, when her boss assigns her the task of helping prepare and market an ebook edition of the re-release of Milan's book, Waking Eyes, to stoke the fire for his newest novel, her world is thrown off balance, and she suddenly begins to evaluate her past and how it has led her to her unsatisfied life. 

One of the first memories she revists is when Milan confirmed that she was indeed a writer. She lets him read and edit her story, and he ultimately hands it back, bleeding. 

She is surprised to hear him he liked it.  

Milan: It's good.

Alice: But you made notes all over it.

Milan: I wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't any good. But it could be better. 

Can you relate? As an editor, I tell people who entrust their words to me something similar. I say something like, "If it's good, my job to is to make it cleaner and tighter, so you'll see a lot of edits."

Good writing is easy to edit. You aren't distracted by beginning errors or a slew of basic proofreading, grammar, and spelling mistakes. Bad writing is hard to edit because you're having to teach as your edit. You're having to explain 

But the flip side of that is important to remember too. The more our manuscripts bleed at the hands of an editor, the quicker we can be to judge ourselves as failures -- when the opposite is often true.

But let's return to Alice's life after the big crisis from her past that has led to her current lifestyle (which I'm not going to spoil for you). Remember that expectation from her father: "I expect great things from you." It's compounded when her dad discovers she's getting privately coached by Milan. So what went wrong? Why isn't Alice riding the bestsellers charts or at least the evergreen list with a publisher?

After she meets and begins dating Emmett, he asks her what she does. Rather than saying she works for a literary agency, she says instead, "I always wanted to be a  when I grew up," indicating clearly the gauge by which she measures her life and her failure. 

The conversation continues:

Emmett: And are you?

Alice: Grown up?

Emmett: Writing.

Alice: No.

Emmett: How come?

Alice: I set there waiting to hear the characters speak and instead I hear this voice in my head saying, "It's just shit. It's just shit. It's just shit."

Emmett: Aw, that voice? Everybody hears that voice. It's the same voice that says, "I caqna' t believe you just said that. You're a fucking moron." Everybody hears that voice.

Alice: Do they?

Emmett: Most people, they just ignore it.

Alice: I just succumb.

It seems Alice's life has become like this meme I saw the other day about folks formerly in the gifted program at school. 

There is often a law of inverses at play when great expectations are thrust upon young creatives (or young anythings, really). The pressure can lead to the opposite outcome. And when/if that occurs, the one who "failed" loads themselves with even more expectations they are failing to achieve. It's too easy to believe oneself to be a "how the might have fallen" character in your own life. 

So perhaps, this movie is a sort of warning. You don't have to live up to anyone else's expectations of you but your own. Put the past behind you. Move on. Write something new. And be kind to yourself. You're still a work in progress.