Spellbound (directed by Jeffrey Blitz): This documentary on eight youngsters attending the National Spelling Bee is both funny and sympathetic. These kids come from a wide variety of backgrounds but they all have one goal, to win. One wonders how much of this ambition is their own or their parents. I (and the rest of the audience) really identified with these kids and when one missed a word, everyone would groan aloud in disappointment.
In one way, spelling is brute memorization. These kids literally just go through dictionaries and tutors. Their superior skills in spelling may be impressive, but they remember little of those words' meanings.
Like most people, my spelling is terrible. Just take a look at my older archives when I didn't use spellcheck. I remember having spelling tests until 11th grade and they were all nerve-wracking affairs. My first and only "spelling bee" was in third grade between classmates. I got out on my first word "grey" which I had spelled "gray". I think I was too young at the time to know that there were alternate spellings of words.
The only thing I can compare it to my own experience are math contests and quiz bowls. But I was never really "hard core"; I was never the best at any of those things. I didn't even really try either--I never studied and only practiced when the teachers held sessions a few weeks before the competitions. Maybe I had the bigger picture or maybe I was just plain lazy--just do enough to get by. The rest of my life is not going to depend on pointless trivia.
Yet another documentary, Stone Reader (directed by Mark Moskowitz), is one man's journey to find the author of one of his favorite books: The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman. Mark Moskowitz, our narrator and journeyer, reminded me a lot of my high school geometry teacher--bald, bewhiskered, bumbling, but articulate. In 1972, The Stones of Summer came out with rave reviews in the New York Times but was promptly forgotten. With his film crew, Moskowitz decided to hunt down the publishers, reviewers, and the author himself to find out why the book virtually disappeared and why there were no more books written.
I find it interesting how the director points out that a good book acts as a communication tool where the author shows himself through his writing to establish a relationship with the reader. I've always thought that it was somewhat the opposite: a good book is when the author succeeds in writing a story that engrosses the reader--the author himself is supposed to be irrelevant to the prose no matter how much he has poured himself into the words.
What's probably most important to any would-be novelist (which includes everyone taking part in the madness on November) is that the film shows that writing a book--a polished book--can take years of hard work. You have to write at the same time you're working a job that actually provides money to live on. Writing is a "hobby" yet it's a dangerous one. Writing can take away your sanity. Both success and failure can break a writer.
Yet it's funny how this film has brought back the return of an out-of-print book. It only shows that as a novelist, if you've touched just one person, it can be enough.
