The 2021 Writing Series is a series of daily writing exercises for both prose writers and poets to keep their creative mind stretched and ready to go—fresh for your other writing endeavors. The writing prompts take the impetus—that initial crystal of creation—out of your hands (for the most part) and changes your writing creation into creative problem solving. Instead of being preoccupied with the question "What do I write" you are instead pondering "How do I make this work?" And in the process you are producing new writing.
This is not a standard writing session. This is pure production—to keep your brain thinking about using language to solve simple or complex problems. The worst thing you can do is sit there inactive. It's like taking a 5 minute breather in the middle of a spin class—the point is to push, to produce something, however imperfect. If you don't overthink it, you will be able to complete all of the exercises in under 30 minutes.
For today's exercise we have split paths for fiction and poetry, though I highly recommend that even fiction writers try the poetry exercise, because erasures can be a blast!
Poetry: For poetry do an erasure or black-out poem from the following: Roger Ebert's review of the 1970 film "Tora! Tora! Tora!" (One Star).
Roger Ebert has been the archetypal film critic for decades, and he's written thousands of reviews. Because of their nature, almost their own bit of ekphrastic art, this series of erasures will be lots of fun!
An Erasure/Blackout is really simple: you take the given text and remove many words to make it your own new piece. One way to go about the erasure that I like to do is to copy the text and paste it twice into your document before you start erasing or blacking out (in MS Word set the text background color to black), that way if you get further into the erasure and decide you want a somewhat different tone or direction, it's easy to go to the unaltered version and make the erasure/black-out piece smoother. Another tip is to look for recurring words, in this example 'bingo' occurs multiple times and could be a good touchstone for your piece.
Fiction or (poetry): If you insist on fiction (or just feel like writing a "Title Mania" piece), write a piece with one of these titles taken from this section:
- Timid Epic
- Claustrophobic
- Back to the Open Terrain
- Sand and Sky
- The Attack on Pearl Harbor
- Incredibly Lifeless
- 1940s Pearl Harbor Potboilers
Erasure Selection:
"Tora! Tora! Tora!" is one of the deadest, dullest blockbusters ever made. The very word "blockbuster" may be too lusty to describe it; maybe "blocktickler" is more like it for this timid epic. The subject is grand enough, but the screenplay mostly concerns itself with clerks, secretaries, teletype operators and government functionaries.
The task of the actors is to stand around reciting verbatim quotations from military histories at each other; we can almost see the screenwriters lurking behind those badly painted backdrops, trading three-by-five file cards like high school seniors. If you get the quotes and the footnotes right, you get an "A" no matter what you say. Right?
This is a big, incredibly expensive movie, and yet the final effect of its 25 millions is claustrophobic. We want to escape from all those offices, and all those bureaucrats misreading cablegrams at each other, and get back to the open terrain of a good old grade "B" war movie. John Wayne's World War II flicks may not have been masterpieces, but at least they had sand and sky in them, and heroes, and girls.
The old Hollywood moguls used to hate "message" movies. "When I want to send a message," David Selznick used to say, "I use Western Union." Selznick, presented with the script of "Tora! etc." and the information that $25 million was to be spent on it, would have had apoplexy. Here's a movie that doesn't even send the message; it's only about Western Union.
The direction mostly seems to be the responsibility of Richard Fleischer, and that's believable enough. Fleischer was responsible for "Dr. Dolittle," "The Boston Strangler" and "Che!" (1969) and the same leaden touch is evident in "Tora." He never seems to have asked himself how the attack on Pearl Harbor could be effectively presented in dramatic terms. The 1940s Pearl Harbor potboilers at least gave you some characters to identify with, and a sense of suspense (will the hero die? The heroine? The best buddy?)
"Tora," on the other hand, offers no suspense at all because we know the attack on Pearl Harbor is going to happen, and it does, and then the movie ends. We don't even feel sympathy for the officers responsible (if that's the word.) They've been directed as wooden puppets reading security reports, etc.
The Japanese puppets at least have more life; Japanese directors who seem aware that SOMETHING should be happening controlled the Japanese sequences. By contrast, the Fleischer footage has the visual imagination of one of those dreadful Doublemint TV commercials. Everything seems to happen twice, to no purpose, and after the same lesson is drummed in long enough, we get the feeling we're watching the world's longest, most expensive audiovisual aid. Trouble is, it doesn't aid us much. Now that, you know that the Pearl Harbor attack was possible because of bureaucratic botchery on the American side, what do you know you didn't know before?
The acting is anti-dramatic, if anything. In reviewing "Catch-22," I mentioned Martin Balsam's overacting. "Tora" could desperately have used some overacting, which would have been acting, anyway. Fine actors like Balsam, Joseph Cotten and E.G. Marshall are, incredibly, lifeless.
The action sequences at the end are supposed to be the pay-off; we're all waiting, somewhat ghoulishly, for the bombs to go off and the ships to sink. And they do, for about 15 minutes, but the level of the special effects isn't particularly high.
Considering that we Americans have been derisive for years about the Japanese special effects in "King Kong Escapes," etc., I wonder how they'll take our cardboard battleships, blowing, up in our back-lot tanks. With a sigh and a shot of sake, likely. Meanwhile, "Tora" is playing at the Bismarck. Let's hope it doesn't sink it.
