Authors Anonymous: A Few Thoughts

From the first I was all but certain that I would dislike Ellie Kanner's 2014 film Authors Anonymous, but watched anyway--mainly because I thought it would be a handy reference for something I was working on at the time about how film and television depict writers and writing. And indeed the film lived down to my lowest expectations, wallowing as it did in every horrid cliché of treatment of the theme, not least in its probably earning a world record for "number of book signing scenes crammed into a single movie." (Groan.)

Still, there was one bit that rang true, namely the idea the Jonathan Bennett character (William Bruce) had of "revision," which was, to put it mildly, irritatingly minimalist for the other members of his circle of aspiring writers meeting weekly to offer each other feedback on their manuscripts. In going over his work they ended up having to read through pages and pages and pages to find a single word altered to no effect whatsoever, week in, week out.

I have never been a member of such a circle--but teaching composition classes I found that Jonathan Bennett's attitude toward revision was pretty much the norm. There are, of course, reasons for that. Most students in a composition course do not care to write a paper in the first place, and care still less to revisit it after having written it, let alone really do the hard, grinding, work of making the paper better.

I get where they are coming from, believe me I get it.

But it does not make the job any easier--and is one more reason why the job gets dumped on those who cannot avoid it, rather than those best-equipped to do the job.