What the Paris Olympics opening ceremony can teach us about first drafts
The freedom that comes from saying "oui" to creativity and chaos.
Friends, hello, and happy Sunday.
I don’t usually send a newsletter on the weekend but we MUST discuss the phantasmagorical experience that was the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
The night of the ceremony, I was in Kinderhook, NY at the newly opened independent bookstore Kinderhook Books for the inauguration of their wine garden. For this seminal event, they had two of my favorite writers in conversation with one another: Laura van den Berg (STATE OF PARADISE, just out) and Marie-Helene Bertino (whom you can watch discuss how she arrived at the voice in BEAUTYLAND in our first Craft from the Couch episode.)
Look how magical this set-up is! What a lovely evening!
Laura van den Berg (left) and Marie-Helene Bertino (right) getting ready to start discussing their incredible new novels at Kinderhook Books in upstate NY.
This bookshop really gets it. In addition to creating this garden space for live events, they’re also launching a book club called “The book was better” in which members will argue whether a film adaptation was better than the book or not. (I’m throwing my hat in the ring to debate the film adaptation of Pat Conroy’s “Prince of Tides.”)
The cherry on top of this already special Friday evening was that I was able to discuss the surreal Olympics opening ceremony with two of my favorite speculative writers. After all, whom better to discuss the otherworldliness of the opening ceremony with than two women who craft actual portals with their words?
Friends, writers, writer friends: DID YOU SEE THE OPENING CEREMONY? Marie texted me this morning about it, and I couldn’t agree more with her assessment: “PARIS GOES HARD.”
It is true, my friends. Paris goes très hard. At a bar after the Kinderhook event, we imagined what the brainstorming session must have looked like when the ceremony’s artistic director Thomas Jolly pitched his zany ideas. Marie decided that Jolly’s mantra must be “Every idea is a oui.”
Every idea is a oui! You know what you get when you approach creativity from an abundance mindset?
Ballerinas in psychedelic rave dresses catapulting through the Place Vendôme on mile-high stilts? Check.
A recreation of the beheading of Marie Antoinette featuring 40 decapitated heads singing opera while France’s most famous heavy metal band blazed their guitars from the alcoves of “La Conciergerie” where Antoinette spent her last days before her head was cut off and—that’s not all!—a pirate ship arrives bearing a soprano before the palace explodes in a literal torrent of blood??? Check!
A galloping metal horse bearing the Olympic torch on top of the Seine river and ridden by….(you can not make this up) a woman dressed entirely in metal allegedly based off the video game character of Arno in Assassins’s Creed? Check!
Celine freaking Dion bursting from the Eiffel Tower to sing her godang heart out for the first time since she started having neurological issues four years ago in goosebumping, history-making, pitch point perfection? Check!
A recreation of a solar eclipse that contained the Olympic flame and—once lit—turned into a fiery hot air balloon that soared above where Celine Dione was singing in a completely over-the-top and magical homage to Jules Verne? Check!
Can you imagine the pitch for all of this? “We’re going to have our best opera stars singing famous French arias except that the singers will be singing through decapitated heads at the same time that the death rock band Gojira is shredding on the palace balconies and then we will have all of the windows in the palace explode with Marie Antoinette’s blood? Oh, and we’ll need a submarine to carry a galloping metal horse through water and then the horse needs to turn into a real horse that we can ride out of the Seine…all of this works, right? No potential problems? Cool, cool….”
Me catching up on the ceremony over breakfast with my husband (who happens to be French).
The reason I am writing about this absolutely wild opening ceremony is two fold.
First of all, I want to encourage you to watch it. After the difficult years behind us, trust me—your soul needs this level of drama and high camp.
And secondly, I want to encourage you to bring Thomas Jolly’s esprit of abundance and openmindedness and positivity and chaos to your creative projects. Listen, I know what it’s like to want and need to think about the market, to research optimal book lengths, research what should and shouldn’t be in a book proposal, to hire developmental editors to give your opening pages a fighting chance, to take all of the classes, to go to all of the conferences, to work as hard as possible to become discoverable and develop a platform, to pitch—and land—off-the-book-pieces and on and on and on.
But there is another part of creativity, a realm where our thoughts and dreams are roving and spontaneous and totally joy-filled. That is the realm where—as Marie put it about the opening ceremony festivities— “every idea is oui.”
You want vampires and bankers and a talking couch in your novel but everyone says it will hurt your publishing chances? Fuck it—bring in the vampires and the bankers and the talking couch.
You want to write a 900-page historical novel entirely in the second person point of view? Say oui to that idea.
You want to write a memoir that is just a list of items you purchased post-divorce? Go for it, I love it.
You want to combine the aesthetics of death metal, classical opera, political revolution and also…pirates into your academic writing? Please, please, please, please do this.
Can we all make a pact together for this coming year? Yes, we will work on some of the business of publishing stuff, but we will work even harder at putting joy and folly and a little bit of lunacy back into our writing. Let’s have wild fun together—let’s break a bunch of rules. Let’s listen to our guts more. Let’s experiment and play. Go big. Go bigger. Bust out of the box.
I swear, if you are in a creative rut, please watch the highlights of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. Watch the rules these people broke. Revel in the sheer scope of the spectacles lined up across the expanse of four whole hours. Appreciate the fact that Jolly’s team pulled it off in a total downpour and then, come Monday, I hope that when you go to your computer, you’ll think, Screw this computer! I’m going to write with an ostrich feather today! I’m going to write with blood! I’m going to sing my story across the mountains and the hallways and the parking lots and the mountains once again. I’m going to do something big and crazy and important that nobody but me believes I can pull off, and I will do it MY way.
Can we make a pact to do it?
Say “oui” to all of it? The good ideas, the bad ones, and the ones that make us scared?
Thank you, Paris, and Thomas Jolly and conspirators for the unbridled act of joy that was the Opening Ceremony and for showing us what “unforgettable” really, truly looks like.
See you on Wednesday,
Courtney
And you know what? If you go the indie route, you CAN write whatever you want because there are no gatekeepers saying you can't - you can use whatever outlandish and joyous concept you can create in your imagination and not once worry about whether it will hurt your chances at publication because you control the gate.
I live in Paris and WOW OUI OMG MON-DIEU! I was in raptures. The sequence of "musicians" (workers with hammers and saws) and dancers on the scaffolding of Notre Dame is what brought my first round of tears. I watched every.single.second and was, am, SO PROUD of France. This ceremony was vintage France, the best of France, the "joie de vivre" that's so very French.
Not to belabor the metaphor, but those of us who live close to the Seine might offer an additional lesson about writing. It was NOT easy to live with the couple of months of insane construction, barricades, severe transport disruptions, denied access, etc., not to mention the helicopters (otherwise very rare here), police vans EVERYWHERE, and MANY tough-looking guys (and some gals) with AK-47s striding along the pretty Paris streets -- all of this also having been part of creating that Opening Ceremony. Everyone was bitching and complaining, and you literally couldn't get to your normal places. But when I saw that Opening Ceremony, I thought, Oh wow -- it was worth it. Every bit of it, worth it.
So maybe the next time our life is "wrecked" for the sake of our art....