writing in restaurants

I first bought David Mamet's Writing in Restaurants at a time when I was doing a lot of writing in (not surprisingly) restaurants and coffee shops. And it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, in terms of improving the writing I was doing in these places, but it was far more inspiring than that.

It was a call to arms for meaning. At a time when special effects were conquering movies, and were well on their way to taking over theatre as well, Mamet demanded that you as a writer concentrate on story, i.e., what happened. Description (not just flowery description but any description not demanded by the action of the story) is not only irrelevant but an impediment to the reader or viewer. It tells that person that they can not pay so much attention, that there are words and passages that don't mean as much as others.

The line that gets me to this day comes when he talks about how people (even over 20 years ago) were tending to respond to the question, "How was the movie?" with an answer along the lines of "Fantastic cinematography."

Mamet's response is, "So what? Hitler had fantastic cinematography."

To this day I am suspicious of style that calls attention to itself. I don't much like portfolios that are consistently pretty no matter what clients's work is being shown. And I think that everything can be shorter; it's better to compress and let intentions be found within the language, instead of shoved forward. That's where the poetry in Mamet's work happens. Because when it works, as it (mostly) does in the classic Alec Baldwin cameo in Glengarry Glen Ross, I think it really is poetry.

It's easy to parody the butch, tough guy quality of Mamet's writing (and as Steve points out he's even capable of parodying himself), but with Writing in Restaurants, he helped me think, for the first time, about what I was doing when I sat down with a pen and paper. He slapped (or maybe punched?) me in the face with the fact that style is empty, and that writing has to have purpose.