Maybe I Should Just Write Something Honest

I’m glad the theater was empty, because after the closing scenes of the movie The Whale I was bawling like a child.

The movie had mixed reviews, but the trailer intrigued me enough to catch an afternoon matinee. Also, I was curious how the lead actor, Brendan Fraser, would handle the role. Fraser had been away from acting for several years.

Fraser plays Charlie, a 600-pound college writing professor who teaches his students online from the privacy of his dimly lit, disheveled Idaho apartment. Charlie is grotesquely overweight and blocks out his online image, telling his students the camera is broken.

But Fraser’s voice as Charlie is full of warmth, humor, and humanity. In fact, throughout the film, Charlie’s sweet soul shines beyond his enormous and tortured body.

American filmmaker Darren Aronofsky directed The Whale. Aronofsky’s films are known for their theatrical, surreal, and sometimes shocking elements of psychological drama.

Some critics felt Aronofsky fell short with The Whale, allowing the cameras to gawk like a voyeur at Charlie’s startling obesity. And I agree, there were some scenes I could have done without.

Film critic Christy Lemire, in her review of The Whale, noted:

“In theory, we are meant to pity him or at least find sympathy for his physical and psychological plight by the film’s conclusion. But in reality, the overall vibe is one of morbid fascination for this mountain of a man.”

Lemire has a point, but in the end, I was moved by the film and Fraser’s amazing performance. Charlie’s humanity glowed beneath the girth that was slowly killing him.

The film explores Charlie’s desperate efforts to reconnect with his daughter, reconcile his grief, and encourage his online writing students. It was the parts of the movie about literature and writing that resonated with me.

Later in the film, Charlie becomes fed up with all the “ridiculous essays” and class readings and sends a frantic email to his students with the following desperate instruction:

Just write me something honest

These days it seems increasingly hard to just write or create something honest.

Algorithms and shallow public appetites often result in creatives depersonalizing their work to appeal to the masses. The quest for approval and attention entices us to cater to the crowd. To play it safe.

Little value ever comes from playing it safe.

All that stuff I had pushed way down

I often look up the writers behind popular movies, to better understand their ideas, themes, and bodies of work.

The writer and playwright Samuel D. Hunter didn’t set out to create a movie or a play when he wrote The Whale. He wrote it primarily for himself.

Hunter noted in an essay for the Los Angeles Times:

“Maybe keeping it to myself would allow me to put some personal stuff on the line that I’d previously been too scared or too embarrassed to access in my plays. The stuff that made me feel unworthy of being an erudite New York playwright. All that stuff I had pushed way down about growing up gay in Idaho, attending a fundamentalist Christian school, battling depression, and subsequently self-medicating with food in my late teens and early 20s.

Maybe I should just write something honest.”

Back then, Hunter was teaching a course in essay writing at a public university in New Jersey to dozens of disaffected college freshmen. As Hunter wrote in his essay:

“I was teaching a kind of writing that felt anathema to my work as a playwright — I was asking students to depersonalize their writing, to stamp out any trace of emotion or personality in service of cold, hard objectivity.”

But deep into the semester, Hunter became fed up with shallow analyses of Malcolm Gladwell’s essays and the like. He pleaded with his students, not unlike Charlie does in The Whale:

“Just write something honest. Don’t worry about making it a good essay. Just tell me what you truly think. Let’s start there.”

One student responded with a heartbreaking and utterly honest response that ended up in the film version of The Whale:

“I think I need to accept that my life isn’t going to be very exciting.”

There’s something about cold, hard honesty that stops us in our tracks. Often the best writing and creative work emanates from such heartfelt, utterly truthful honesty.

Apparently, there’s a market for honesty

Hunter eventually decided to share his draft of The Whale with his agent. Later, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts produced a reading of it, and the following year, the center mounted a full production.

After that, Playwrights Horizons, one of Hunter’s favorite off-Broadway theaters, produced the play in its smaller, 125-seat theater.

When we share something honest, it often resonates with others who long for something real and true. But the best part is what happened next.

As Hunter wrote in his Los Angeles Times piece:

“Next came the truly unbelievable plot twist, a scene so grossly overwritten that it can be only real life — ‘Darren Aronofsky saw the play, and he wants to meet with you.’”

It would take another decade before the play was adapted into a screenplay, but eventually, The Whale came to light.

Not only did it jettison Samuel D. Hunter into the spotlight as a promising new writer, but it also revived the career of Brendan Fraser, who went on to receive an academy award as best actor for his portrayal in The Whale.

There’s a market for honesty.

The rest will take care of itself

Over the years, I have often written about my father, the late John B. Weiss.

Dad was an administrative law judge, amateur historian, weekend painter, and all-around polymath. But his most enduring lessons centered around kindness, the golden rule, and living a life of virtue and character.

Some of my most popular essays recount the exploits and lessons taught by my father. And the reason for this is that they were honest and true.

Every time I’ve been tempted to write for popularity or online clicks, I catch myself. Just like Samuel D. Hunter, I remind myself that “Maybe I should just write something honest.”

I think readers deserve that. In fact, in this day and age of superficial social media piffle, people long for what’s real and true.

During my university years, I sometimes visited Dad in his law office in San Francisco. He’d take my friends and me to lunch, and discuss politics, books, and the important things in life. Things like family, vocation, and doing the right thing.

The algorithms and online content mills will forever bend towards clickbait and superficial musings. But that’s not what the world needs.

The world needs honesty and truth.

If you’re a writer or creative, you owe it to yourself and the world to embrace honesty and truth in your work. It may be scary and intimidating, but it might also produce your best work.

As the film critic Vaughn Swearingen noted eloquently in an essay:

“It’s hard to be honest with ourselves. Sometimes, it’s the hardest thing there is. To truly reflect and to consider holistically everything around you. To be honest with yourself often opens challenges and difficult decisions, to be honest with yourself is to actually stand up and face your existence. The very notion of such a thing can be unbearable. We are the sum of our experiences and decisions, often constructed by impulse and influence, built on regret and trauma and tragedy, the many dimensions of pain that we would rather not return to. So it’s easier to remain in the shelters we create for ourselves. Within the little bubbles, whether it is to section off our mental state and willfully ignore honesty or whether it is to stay at home and simply imagine that the outside world doesn’t exist. To pretend that the outside is nothing but shadowy figures, ghostly apparitions passing by the drawn shutters, faceless and nameless. If you don’t have to face them, you may not have to face yourself.”

My advice is to face yourself.

Face your fears and uncertainties, and then sit down and create the most honest work you can, like Samuel D. Hunter.

Make it real and true.

If you succeed, people like me will wind up bawling, moved by the truth and poignancy of your work. Before long, others will talk about and share what you produce, because it’s authentic and refreshing in this ocean of inauthenticity and clickbait drivel.

Just write something honest, and the rest will take care of itself.

Before you go

I’m John P. Weiss. I write elegant essays about life. Learn more here.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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The author and his father in San Francisco, photo by John P. Weiss