Recently, I sent the first draft of my first novel to my excellent agent. “I love it,” she said, followed by a detailed list of the things that needed fixing big time. I’d largely forgotten subplots, for example (I was like, you mean I’ve done this one big plot and now you want several other, smaller plots? Outrageous).
I had a miserable afternoon of deep self-doubt, sat in a dark room brooding, flailed around the house dramatically, declaring that I would retrain as something else and never write again, and then went for a swim. My boyfriend got me to read my agent’s email to him out loud so that I could see it for what it was: extremely helpful feedback, not a list of my personal failings as first thought.
I texted some of my most trusted writer pals including
and and something along the lines of HELP WHAT DO I DO IF MY FIRST DRAFT ISN’T PERFECT?? THE VIBES ARE RIGHT BUT THE PACE IS WRONG and they reassured me that this revolting feeling of baffled anguish is a very normal natural part of the writing process.So now I am busy Googling “how to structure a novel” and listening to podcasts called “So you just got heaps of big feedback from your agent and you’re spiralling.” It’s gonna be fine. Fun, even.
THIS MORNING my dear darling fantastic friend Anya sent me a link to a very important article: An Oral History of The Emperor’s New Groove, a raucous Disney animated film that almost never happened by the film critic Bilge Ebiri for Vulture.
I love this movie. It is a great, great movie. One of the greatest, if I may be so bold.
AND IT ALMOST DIDN’T GET MADE
In fact, the making of this endearingly unhinged cult classic was complete chaos.
Read the article for the joy of hearing it first hand, but the short version is that it started out as an earnest musical about Incan culture starring Owen Wilson, with songs by Sting. It was in production for four years when they realised it just wasn’t working. They split the creative team in two and got them to compete for the right to remake the movie their way (brutal). The people who said “what if we made this into a goofball comedy about an emperor who turns into a llama and John Goodman does the voice of a kindly peasant” won.
What followed was the sort of delirium that only comes from trying to create something great under constant threat of being shut down. Not knowing how long they might have a job, the guys working on this film gave themselves permission to be very, very silly. It’s like they said to each other, hey, these stakes are high, this gig is so precarious, let’s go full ridiculous on this one and see what happens.
Sting quit five times. Disney almost shelved the entire project more than once. The best character (Kronk) nearly got cut early on. The writers spent a lot of time chasing each other on desk chairs.
Now, I don’t know how well you know The Emperor’s New Groove but there’s an incredible scene where the villain (an angular purple woman called Ysma) and her sidekick (a tender beefcake called Kronk) are preparing to poison the emperor (the man who will soon become a llama, as per the premise of the movie). The comic genius of this scene is that Kronk cares about the meal. He’s meant to be assassinating the emperor but he’s more concerned that each course is perfectly cooked. He keeps running off to check things in the oven. That’s funny! It’s very funny.
One of the writers said this about the day his colleague came up with the idea:
“He was like, ‘I think Kronk should be a great cook! And he should make spinach puffs!’ And I was like, ‘yeah that’s what he should do’. It was that kind of vibe. Where people could just come in and say, Kronk should make spinach puffs, and we’re like, yep, go with it, dude.”
If Kronk had made lasagne or quiche, it wouldn’t have been so funny. The delicacy of the spinach puff, the care with which he makes it, the panic when he thinks they might overcook - all during an attempted poisoning? Flawless. One of those beautiful creative decisions that works in a way we can’t fully explain or understand.
This was an unexpected learning moment for me.
The lesson here is this.
We’ve gotta be open to the introduction of spinach puffs!!! Create an environment for ourselves in which spinach puffs are welcome. Choose collaborators who endorse spinach puffs.
It’s OK if we are told again and again, by ourselves or others, that something isn’t working. Put aside ego, amuse ourselves rework - and who knows, we may seomday come up with something as good as Kronk fretting about his spinach puffs.
I’m about to rework my novel in quite a significant way. Like the creative team who started out with an earnest musical about Incan culture starring Owen Wilson, I have to adapt and persevere and keep going till it’s great.
Those guys? Those guys were balls-to-the-wall, will-I-ever-work-again level stressed. Surely their experience of crushing self-doubt would make my moody afternoon at home seem easy. They had Disney executives breathing down their neck; Sting’s wife making a documentary about their production process. They couldn’t stop David Spade ad-libbing while he was recording the voice of the emperor/llama. They did not ever produce a full length script for the film; they just kind of made it.
It was mayhem.
The possibility of failure was ever-present.
And yet, eventually, they made this wonderful, stupid, fabulous film. A wonderful, stupid, fabulous film we never would have got if they’d given up after the first ten, twenty, hundred rounds of feedback.
What I’m saying is, creativity is messy. Making movies, writing novels. It’s an emotionally fraught, daunting, weird, exhilirating mess. Creating something, putting it into the world, bracing yourself for the opinions of others. It’s not even easy for the people who work at Disney; why should it be easy for me, for you, for anyone?
What I’m saying is, who am I to tremble at the diligent, accurate feedback of my beloved agent when the makers of The Emperor’s New Groove made ART in these conditions?
I cannot mope because my first draft was imperfect. I must push and push and push through the fear. To get to the spinach puffs.
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Pa poor old Sting 😂😂😂😂😂
The only reason I stopped reading is because I now have to prioritise watching this movie I guess.