Daniel Wallace, who wrote the novel Big Fish, sent me the syllabus for the college writing class he’s teaching. I love the first week’s assignment:
Write a story as close to 100 words as possible, each and every word a single syllable.
Then write a story as close to 100 words as possible, a single syllable, but add this twist: no word can be used more than once.
For inspiration, he includes a link to 420 Characters.
Writing for The New Yorker, Oliver Sacks recounts his interactions with monologist Spalding Gray:
Spalding had had occasional depressions, he said, for more than twenty years, and some of his physicians thought that he had a bipolar disorder. But these depressions, though severe, had yielded to talk therapy, or, sometimes, to treatment with lithium. His current state, he felt, was different. It had unprecedented depth and tenacity. He had to make a supreme effort of will to do things like ride his bicycle, which he had previously done spontaneously and with pleasure. He tried to converse with others, especially his children, but found it difficult. His ten-year-old son and his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter were distressed, feeling that their father had been “transformed” and was “no longer himself.”
Sacks traces Gray’s mental state to both a recent brain injury and a family history of depression. Gray described himself as a “failed suicide,” and was hospitalized several times.
He said that his mind was filled with fantasies of his mother, and of water, always water. All his suicidal fantasies, he said, related to drowning.
Why water, why drowning? I asked.
“Returning to the sea, our mother,” he said.
Anesthesia from surgery would lift his symptoms temporarily, but the darkness always returned. He would ultimately take his life.
On January 10, 2004, Spalding took his children to a movie. It was Tim Burton’s “Big Fish,” in which a dying father passes his fantastical stories on to his son before returning to the river, where he dies—and perhaps is reincarnated as his true self, a fish, making one of his tall tales come true.
That evening, Spalding left home, saying he was going to meet a friend. He did not leave a suicide note, as he had so often before. When inquiries were made, one man said he had seen him board the Staten Island Ferry.
I learned about Spalding Gray’s connection to Big Fish the day after his death. Daniel Wallace, who wrote the novel Big Fish, emailed me a link to an article about Gray’s disappearance and presumed suicide, which included the detail that Gray had just seen the movie.
At the time, Big Fish was in theaters, and we were in the middle of the awards season campaign. At press events and roundtables, journalists would occasionally inquire about Spalding Gray and his relationship to Big Fish.
What was I supposed to say? I had no insight on Spalding Gray’s mental state, so I stumbled around saying nothing, or as little as I could before getting back to safer questions.
But privately, I wondered: Was it all just a morbid coincidence? Was there a thematic correlation? Or could one reasonably claim that Big Fish killed Spalding Gray, as some web sites suggested?
Eleven years later, Sacks’s article finally offers the missing context. Gray’s suicidal thoughts had arisen years earlier, and despite the efforts of Gray, his family and his doctors, the impulse to drown himself ultimately won out.
It’s tempting to imagine Gray seeing himself in Edward Bloom; both are storytellers facing their own mortality.
It’s also a mistake.
Real people aren’t fictional characters. They don’t follow a plot. None of us wakes up in the morning with the aim of advancing our narrative or reinforcing our core themes. Instead, we simply live, pursuing our interests while adapting to the changing circumstances around us. It’s messy. It’s unwritten.
As Sacks makes clear, Gray killed himself after seeing Big Fish, but it wasn’t his first attempt, and the film wasn’t the cause in any meaningful sense.
Still, our story brains want the movie to be the cause. We want A to lead to B, post hoc ergo propter hoc, especially when there seems to be such thematic similarity between the two events. As a writer, it’s an instinct Gray no doubt understood.
Even Sacks, the famous neurologist, concludes his article with the detail of Big Fish. For all his discussion of the “delicate mutuality” between the frontal lobes and the subcortex, Sacks still looks for a narrative reason to answer the question, “why now?”
And maybe that’s the right choice.
One of the key points in Big Fish is that there’s often a middle ground between the facts and the fiction, an emotional truth that is more universal and ultimately more useful. Science tells us how things work, but stories tell us how things feel.
The truth of Spalding Gray’s connection to Big Fish exists in both the realms of fact and feeling. It’s important to understand the clinical realities of depression, and also to empathize with those affected. Eleven years later, this new account of Gray’s struggle has helped me do both.
Kelly Kazek looks at what became of Spectre:
Spectre was a “town” built as a set for the filming of the movie “Big Fish,” which premiered in December 2003 but had its wide release 10 years ago, in January 2004. With the exception of one scene in Paris, the entire movie was filmed in Alabama, a rarity in a time before the state offered film incentives.
The road and fake trees leading into the town of Spectre, and the buildings, mostly just facades, were never demolished but were left to the elements.
We shot Big Fish primarily in Wetumpka, Alabama. The town of Spectre was constructed on a privately-owned island.
In the film, you see Spectre in three incarnations:
We shot the rundown version last, so that’s what remains on the island: the ruins of the ruins.
Spectre doesn’t exist in the musical version of Big Fish. Instead, Edward’s home town of Ashton plays a much bigger role, ultimately becoming the town he needs to save at the end.
Several years ago, Derek Frey (Tim Burton’s assistant for Big Fish) visited the Spectre sets to see how they were holding up. You can see his photos on Flickr.
In an interview with Billboard, producer Patrick Leonard talks about writing “Like a Prayer” with Madonna.
I like to start really early in the day. She would come in about 11 and I would have the musical idea on whatever piece of gear I was using. I think it was just a Yamaha sequencer or something at the time. […]
I would just put the track, the chord changes, some kind of drum beat, bass line — something simple — and say, “here’s the idea, here’s what I have for the day.” She would listen, then we would talk a little bit. Oftentimes I’d say, “here’s the verse, and here’s the chorus,” and she’d say, “no, it’s the other way around, switch ’em.” So I’d switch ’em. This thing is an hour old, it’s not etched in stone.
Then she would just start writing. She’d start writing lyrics and oftentimes there was an implied melody. She would start with that and deviate from it. Or if there was nothing but a chord change, she’d make up a melody. But, a lot of the time in my writing there’s a melody implied or I even have something in mind. But she certainly doesn’t need that.
She would write the lyrics in an hour, the same amount of time it took me to write the music (laughs). And then she’d sing it. We’d do some harmonies, she’d sing some harmony parts, and usually by three or four in the afternoon, she was gone.
That’s how “Like a Prayer” was written, and then the next day we wrote “Cherish,” and then the next day we wrote “Dear Jessie.” And that’s how it was. We wrote the album in less than two weeks.
This recap demonstrates something I’ve often found to be true: a large part of making art is showing up to work.
As a writer, yes, sometimes you get flashes of inspiration and genius, but if you sit around waiting for them, you’re unlikely to get much accomplished. Most screenplays are written a scene at a time.
One of the great things about writing with a partner is the ability to hold each other accountable. When working with Andrew Lippa on Big Fish, we had limited days — sometimes hours — to get stuff accomplished. So we buckled down and tackled items one-at-a-time. This song. This moment. This transition.
That’s how you finish things.