I first watched F1, Joseph Kosinski’s 2025
Hollywood blockbuster, at home rather than on the big screen, had mixed
feelings about it, and did what I usually do in such cases – read a few reviews
the next morning. The most pithy (I’ve forgotten where it was) stated: ‘this is
not the film you want it to be.’ True on many levels, including the most fundamental.
This is a story about a never-has-been fifty-something racing driver, Sonny
Hayes (played by Brad Pitt), whose Formula One career was cut short by his
youthful recklessness but is given one last shot to compete by his friend, a former-teammate-turned-owner.
Spoiler alert, Sonny achieves what he couldn’t manage thirty years ago, winning
the final race of the season, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The problem from a
narrative point of view is that Sonny’s character is as static as his driving is
dynamic. The most basic story human beings tell is about someone who went
somewhere or did something and was changed by the going or doing. At the end of
the film, however, Sonny is not only the same man he was at beginning, but the
same reckless, fearless, and rootless man he was in his twenties. And in case
this isn’t disappointing enough, the film rubs its flaw in our faces in the
closing scene. In the eighth minute (of one hundred and forty-eight), Sonny is
heading for the Baja 1000 when his friend catches up with him and makes him the
offer he can’t refuse. What does he do immediately after victory in Abu Dhabi?
Leaves without saying goodbye and signs up for the Baja 1000. The places he
went and the things he did changed nothing. It wasn’t the film I wanted it to
be.
So why write about it at all, never mind in a zine
dedicated to speculative fiction? About two-thirds of the way through the
narrative, there is a scene where Kate McKenna (played by Kerry Condon),
Sonny’s love-interest in what is for the most part a sausage-fest, asks him why
he has come back to Formula One at his age. With typical masculine reticence,
he declines to answer. Then, after a suitable amount of encouragement and a
single manly tear, he says something very interesting: ‘It’s rare, but
sometimes there’s…this moment in the car where everything goes quiet. My
heartbeat slows…it’s peaceful and I can see everything and no one, no one,
can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t
know when I’ll find it again, but man, I want to, I want to…cos in that
moment, I’m flying.’ The moment about which Sonny is talking is difficult
to describe, but is something like what the philosopher (and Nobel laureate in
Literature) Jean-Paul Sartre called being-in-itself, a kind of purity of being
that we, as conscious and self-conscious living things, can rarely, if ever,
reach. (In Sartre’s taxonomy, we are being-for-itself). It is pure
consciousness, meaning consciousness of nothing or just nothingness itself
(Sartre’s magnum opus was called Being and Nothingness), the
breaking down of the barrier between subject and object, selfhood and
worldhood, and perhaps even mind and body. That moment has frequently and
fraudulently been sold to us as ‘flow’ and ‘mindfulness’, the latter as a snake
oil remedy for exploitation by our employers or Big Tech. I wondered what the
equivalent moment in writing might be.
Once again, I did what I usually do (when I have a
question about writing), turned to my three favourite books on writing, all of
which I have read or listened to multiple times and all of which I will no
doubt read or listen to many more times in the future. In order of precedence, these
are: Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), Chuck
Wendig’s The Kick-Ass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get
Published, and Earn Your Audience (2013), and Brian Dillon’s Essayism
(2017). Stephen King needs no introduction and I’ve written about him many
times in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction and elsewhere. Chuck Wendig is an
American speculative fiction author best known for his Star Wars: Aftermath
Trilogy (2015-2017), three novels that connect the original trilogy of
films to the sequel trilogy in what is now known as the Skywalker Saga.
Brian Dillon is an Irish author best known for his nonfiction, especially his
essays, and is also a highly respected art curator. As the title suggests, Essayism
is about Dillon’s forté
rather than fiction writing so I shall replace it with a recent find, Gareth L.Powell’s About Writing: The Authorised Field Guide for Aspiring Authors
(2022). Powell is a prolific English science fiction author who has been
publishing short stories, novellas, and novels since 2002. I want to call
Powell and Wendig ‘mid-list’ authors, but I’m not sure if I should because,
first, I’m not sure if a mid-list of professional novelists still exists and,
second, it sounds disrespectful…which is not my intention: as much as I love On
Writing, I never aspired to be a bestseller so there is a sense in which
Powell’s and Wendig’s books are much more relevant to my experience as an
author.
King describes something very similar to Sonny’s moment
and even uses ‘moment’ to introduce it. This passage appears during his
description of the problems he had writing The Stand (1978), his fifth
novel and one of the half-dozen for which he is most famous: ‘At one moment I
had none of this; at the next I had all of it. If there is any one thing I love
about writing more than the rest, it’s that sudden flash of insight when you
see how everything connects. I have heard it called “thinking above the curve,”
and it’s that; I’ve heard it called “the over-logic,” and it’s that, too…The
rest of the book ran itself off in nine weeks.’ Wendig prefers ‘momentum’ to
moment and focuses on its significance in completing a first draft rather than
on the experience of writing with (or in a state of) momentum: ‘Momentum is
everything. Cut the brake lines. Careen wildly and unsteadily toward your goal.
I hate to bludgeon you about the head and neck with a hammer forged in the
volcanic fires of Mount Obvious, but the only way you can finish something is
by not stopping.’ Powell is concerned with something similar to the
ever-elusive moment when he writes: ‘I think you find your voice when you give
yourself permission to stop trying to write like anyone else and just put the
words down on the page as they occur to you. And you find your groove when
you’re writing in the right way for you.’
None of these are describing Sonny’s moment,
although King comes very close. King is actually discussing two separate but
related experiences: the first is thinking above the curve, the moment
when the solution to his narrative problem came to him; and the second what we
might call writing above the curve, finishing what many consider his
best book in nine weeks. It is the writing above the curve in which I’m
interested. Comparing Sonny’s dialogue with King’s passage, I have a bone to
pick with the F1’s script. Sonny says, ‘I want to…cos in that moment,
I’m flying.’ Flying is just a version of driving, with much more speed and freedom
and I imagine many pilots who fly professionally or for pleasure don’t experience
the breakdown of subject and object, selfhood and worldhood, and all the rest to
which Sonny is referring. When he says driving in the moment is like flying,
it’s akin to an author saying that writing in the moment with a pen is like
writing on a keyboard. It’s not that the moment makes one experience like a similar
experience that is more intense, but that in the moment, all experiences are
intense, regardless of whether one is driving, flying, writing, typing, or
practising zazen. While King writes about thinking above the curve rather than
writing above the curve, it seems likely he had some (or perhaps a great deal
of) experience of the latter in those nine weeks he mentions.
Describing the moment in writing is very
difficult, which may be why so few people have tried and why I should cut the
screenwriters of F1 some slack. For me, writing above the curve is when
I cease being conscious of what I’m writing – the genre, the structure, the
audience, the publisher, all of that – and simply write (the story, novel,
essay, monograph, whatever it is). It feels like writing without any rules or
restrictions. It’s not, of course, because the rules and restrictions are all
there, but I’m no longer aware of them and am just typing one word after
another. At such times, I often touch-type too, which is something I can’t do
when I’m aware that I’m typing. It seems like the manuscript is writing itself
(which it’s obviously not either). I don’t have much more to say about the
experience except that while it’s not the only or even main reason I write, it probably
is comparable to racing (or zazen, or whatever). I first felt it when I was
writing my first (and, in retrospect, best) novel and the last thing I will say
is that, for me, it only happens when I’m working on a manuscript that takes multiple
sittings, like a novel, monograph, novelette, or long essay. I’m not sure why,
but the sustained attention required for these medium-to-large projects seems
to facilitate writing above the curve in a way that short stories, blog posts,
and reviews don’t. I’ve sketched a poor picture of the experience, but if
you’ve felt it (in writing or elsewhere), then I think you’ll understand precisely
what I’ve failed to articulate.
