It will surely not surprise you that I was never cool. Not even close. Like all young men (and old men, to be honest), I longed to be effortlessly effective and gracefully dangerous. The kind of guy that women wanted, as they say, and men wanted to be.
When I was entering my teen years (the horror! The horror!), there was abroad in the world a clear and universal ideal of coolness, one that will also not surprise you – James Bond, played by Sean Connery. Now, make no mistake. Young prig that I was, I strenuously disapproved of James Bond. All I heard of the books and movies offended me. Sexual promiscuity plus a license to kill. One article I read somewhere described the stories as “a moral holiday.” I made tsk-tsk noises and bragged that I’d never seen any of the movies, which I imagined tantamount to porn.
But for all that, I was not immune to the mystique. The tall, dark, handsome physical form. The tailored suits and tuxedos. Even the graceful lighting of a cigarette. If I never watched a James Bond movie, I watched a score of his substitutes on TV – Patrick McNee as John Steed, Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo, Robert Culp as Kelly Robinson. When those guys walked down the street, they never stumbled. They never walked into things. They never dropped anything and had to bend down and pick it up again.
As years passed, I came to realize that (though it’s undoubtable that these guys – like almost every guy on the planet – were cooler than I am) even they weren’t as cool as they looked on the screen. They had one advantage none of us mere real-life humans have.
They had re-takes.
When a movie is shot, they ordinarily film a scene over and over. Even Sean Connery stumbled and tripped from time to time, I’m pretty sure. Forgot to zip his fly up. Dribbled sauce on his shirt.
When it’s a movie, it’s no problem. Go back to the beginning, change shirts if necessary, and the director yells, “Take two! Action!”
The result – the perfect illusion of Coolness.
Secondary, unintended result – an illusion of inferiority among audience members.
There’s something similar that goes on in writing. So many aspiring writers feel paralyzed by the illusion that they’re expected to get it right the first time. They look at their first draft, and they’re unhappy with it, and their spirits plunge. “I’m a failure!” they scream.
(I am, by the way, experiencing the same reaction myself, in my fledgling efforts at producing audiobooks. I permit myself to be discouraged by failed first attempts at recording. Every new challenge, it seems, brings identical emotional reactions. Nothing new under the skull.)
As writers, we enjoy the same advantage Sean Connery had in the James Bond movies. We don’t have to get it right the first time. We can shoot as many takes as we want. In fact, we have it better than Connery, who was working with expensive film. With word processing, we don’t even have to pay for cheap typing paper. We can revise our work into oblivion.
Which is another, different temptation, but one I’ve never personally had a problem with.