Musings on Writers, Portrayals and Californication

Most movies or TV shows that involve writers as main characters make me laugh.

They never get it right. The writer is portrayed as just an ordinary guy (Stephen King does this a lot), as some sophisticated font of knowledge (usually older writer, Hemmingway Syndrome), or an amateur sleuth who gets called on by the inept local police force to help them solve a complicated mystery (a la Murder She Wrote).

The dirty little secret here is that, for the most part, writers are a bit on the socially inept side. You see, we spend a lot of time by ourselves, locked in our own heads. Often, even when we’re with people, our thoughts are turned inward.

When we talk to you, we don’t just hear what you say. We hear (or try to hear) why you said it. Because motivation means much more than actual words. Every writer knows that.

So between taking little vacations in our own heads, and hearing a little more than most people hear in a conversation, we don’t tend to respond in the ways that you might expect us to respond. What we say might tend to be inappropriate, sarcastic, sometimes downright insulting. In our minds though, there’s nothing else we could have said. It was the right line for the scene, the perfect piece of dialogue.

It is not our fault that you’re a real person and not a character in a story.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Californication, a new series airing on Showtime. It stars David Duchovny as a (you guessed it) writer, living in L.A. It is not only Duchovny’s best work, but the single best depiction of a writer that I have ever seen on film. The dialogue is a work of art.

You should watch it, unless of course you don’t like writers.