Writing

I’m taking a screenwriting class right now. The coaching is to just write. I am at a point in development of my screenplay where I have been going from writing, to reading screenplays, to watching movies, to writing things that have nothing to do with my screenplay but are just writing, just to work the muscles. This is one of those.

I saw something recently that said people are losing whole categories of friendships. The pandemic has cut people off from casual acquaintances, including co-workers, spouses of co-workers, people you see every once in a while after church when they serve the donuts and coffee, your children’s classmate’s parents, the crew that ends up at the sports bar on Seahawks Sunday, people you bump into at the theater – and on and on.

This is alarming. It’s also harder to keep connected to people who were closer. It’s hard to maintain the same intensity of interaction with friends you never see. The co-workers you relied on for more than chit-chat about TV shows are at a distance.

What if we made an effort to bring back written communication to stay connected? I am thinking of the civil war documentaries that show couples maintaining their relationship by writing long, loving letters. There are those books with the “collected letters” of some scientist or philosopher or writer where they maintained – seemingly – vibrant relationships with just pen and ink.

I had one relationship where the two of us lived some distance apart. We would write each other long emails about our day, what was on our minds, poetry, nonsense, whatever came up. A friend told me it was a way for us both to maintain psychic distance along with the physical distance. It was a fair point but I think there are possibilities of expression in writing that you don’t have in-person or on the phone.

I have another friend who would always rather talk on the phone than send any written communication. He says you lose cues in writing that you could hear in a phone call. He thinks you can get more across. But on the phone or in-person, one person can do all sorts of things, intentionally or not, to throw the other person off track, and pretty soon your point is lost and afterwards you realize you said only half of what you wanted to say.

When you write a letter, or something like it, you can say everything you want to say.

I have been saying, mostly to myself, that written communication is humanity’s greatest achievement, right up there with, like agriculture, and even that has had lot of drawbacks. I think we should write more.