I think it comes back to breaking out of that scrum of 350+ contenders. They culled about 90% out and I was still there when it was done. As with the “roomful of strangers” auditions of which I’m most proud over the past year, it gives me a lot of confidence that my work not only stood on its own but made a worthy noise. Even for the best work, that’s no guarantee with the inverted taste pyramid that mass contest reading can create, and the subjectivity of the small number of people who will read/evaluate your work.

Breaking through is a powerful affirmation of the work. It makes me think about what Stephen King said about why he published those books under the “Richard Bachman” alias – that restless, wondering itch as to whether he had made it due to talent or luck, whether he could DO IT without the strength of his name to backstop him.

I have no such name strength, but I am constantly wondering if I can DO IT. So that explains the balance of the satisfaction, I think. Whether I win or not, someone thought I was good enough that I might be worthy of winning, and the difference between that and zero response at all is amazing.

I know, proportionally-speaking, this is in a far different league than anything I’ve got happening, Hollywood-wise. Even if I was one of the 10 winners to be staged, I’d probably win about $30 and some pictures from the production. Going to SEE it would set me back hundreds since it’s halfway across the country.

But as I said not long ago, I’m at the very beginning of my efforts to let the world know I’m a playwright, too. And I am fueled by any opportunity for an audience to really see my work realized, which is so rare in screenwriting.

Plus, this was the first submission I made, and there are a couple others still floating out there right now. That’s a confidence booster. After all these years there is still a voice inside me suggesting that the moment I show work to anyone, I’ll be found out as a total fraud. So now the delusion can continue!

Since trying to get my prose published involved a very similar process, this feels more familiar now, and if (when – say WHEN damn it!) I finish this full-length piece, I don’t want to be caught napping if I try a reading of it and find out I’ve actually created something pretty good. Not to mention, as long as I’m working up to the magic number of scripts to produce that 10-minute play showcase, nothing’s stopping me from getting the already-finished ones out there.

Since I was still semi-cold-whacked last night and couldn’t focus much on writing, sniffing out targets was a satisfying use of my time. It ended with me in a terrific muddle, though, because I have a lot of different goals for my writing time right now, all of them require finishing large projects in different forms and then a LOT of dedicated non-writing time for stuff like editing and submissions.

Seriously – do I edit my existing short stories and do a bigger, better-informed batch of lit mag submissions using what I’ve learned on Duotrope? Do I finish the two novelette-length prose pieces I’m well-into and start prepping the self-published story collection I’ve been thinking about since last year? No reason I couldn’t pursue both those goals relatively-simultaneously, but the picture gets more complicated when you throw in this full-length play. And the 10-minute plays (I’m 3 pages into #6 out of the 8 I need). And oh, right…screenwriting.

The short film has everything it needs – I just have to get my ass to the restaurant I want to book and charm the owner. So no writing needs to happen there. I have a good enough number of finished un-circulated scripts right now that arguably there’s more advantage in trying to circulate them and get more people interested in my work than in just writing another spec that nobody’s reading.

But then I think things like – you know it’s kind of ridiculous that you haven’t written a horror movie yet. The appetite for horror is inexhaustible out here, and I do have a premise that’s already gotten a chuckle out of a highly-successful horror filmmaker I know. So really, why not just throw that in there? It wouldn’t take long, right?

No, idiot, it would take months. Months in which not much else would be advanced.

I think I need to take a long walk with myself and find a little clarity about just what I want to get done writing-wise in the next few months. After all, I’ve got to squeeze all this in around work – AND play rehearsals.

Man, I’m lucky my girlfriend understands me.

As with any creative expression, what makes great writing great comes from somewhere else, and that thing has to compel and help guide you along with whatever advice you find. Seek wisdom wherever you can, by all means, but then make it work with whatever’s driving you to write to begin with.

I felt myself ready to go to sleep, but decided to try something. I had just been talking with Heather about my tendency to get into a weird, half-asleep nonsense state on some nights; and that women who have shared my bed have occasionally heard me speaking some incredible gibberish when they try to talk to me. I have been noticing lately how similar my “falling asleep” brain feels to my brainstorming, free-associating brain. It’s the same luxurious drift, only the type that I get from sleepiness is much weirder and more potent then when I’m, say, out drinking cocktails with my legal pad. It’s all the same destination, I think – the cave of wonders from which our unconscious emerges.

So this time, I grabbed my legal pad and, while trying to neither rouse myself more awake nor succumb to the sleep completely, I just started free-associating. Naturally, “sleep” was one of the first words. But my eyes drifted past the white stucco on the ceiling, and I wrote “snow”. And as I looked at “snow” and “sleep”, I wrote “hibernate”.

And that took me somewhere very interesting.

As of this morning, I have a new story idea. And I really, really like it. I think it’s strong stuff; if I can write it well. I don’t know when I’ll write it, but the broad outlines are already there; recorded, in slightly languorous letters, on the notepad by my bed.

On this Saturday with nice weather, at this moment in the afternoon, I apparently do not know how to write.

(Maybe you never did, ho ho ho.)

Perhaps this post is meant as a riposte. Or – if it can’t manage to be that – at least an exception.

“F*^ing loved it”.

He want on to compliment the characters, the jokes, the emotion, and closed with:

“My only real complaint is that you make it look easy. Bastard!”

It’s nice to hear that it LOOKS easy. You and I both know different, don’t we, Jimmy?

This was a real boost. I believe this story has big, mainstream potential, and that I have managed to write it in a way that doesn’t insult real movie fans. When it comes to the stuff in my arsenal that has a chance at triggering a payday, I think that after a little tweaking this will immediately rank first. It was great to hear that I’m on the right track. It was great to be reminded that I can run with the pros – hell, I AM a pro.

Soon, it will be time to remind the rest of town.

At least twice a year I would dig those pages out, realize yet again how strong they seemed, and once again try and fail to add to them. I think a grand total of two people have ever even read them. One of them is Adam, and he thinks they might be the best screenwriting I have ever done. So there’s that.

Last year I had a breakthrough and cracked what I thought the ending should be. But I was deep in those long doldrums of not finishing anything substantial, and I felt like I needed to harness all my screenwriting mojo for that comedy I just finally completed.

There’s a gig I am chasing that may yet require all my attention, but for the moment I have done enough writing that is career-focused. While a couple of different initiatives play out, I have a window wherein I can screenwrite what I damn well please. So I’m playing with a couple of different projects right now, adding bits to each depending on the mood of the evening. But I am settling into a pattern where, if I go out with the purpose of writing in mind, that no matter what I do, I am going to add a page to this sci-fi thing first. And so, finally, I have taken the ball from the 25-year-old me and, trusting that he did his job with the first 40-50% of the script, I am starting to carry it the rest of the way. I’ve written about 7-8 pages so far, and they don’t feel like something he would have written. But they feel good. They feel right for the project. Maybe that’s why it took so long to find the next part of the story – I had to grow into it.

There’s a scene in X-Men: First Class that I would gladly show in the screenwriting class I teach. It happens in the first ten minutes, so it’s not as big a SPOILER as some things I could mention from the movie, but if you don’t want this pivotal scene laid out in detail for you in advance (some of you are that pure in your desires, bless you), then read no further.

The movie opens with a reprise of the scene that opened Bryan Singer’s 2000 X-Men –a young Erik Lensherr (Bill Milner) being separated from his family at a World War II concentration camp, and revealing his mutant magnetic abilities in a desperate rage as he twists a metal gate. This was always the key to making this franchise something more than just superheroics – you could never tell Magneto that he was completely wrong in his belief in the capacity of man for evil.

But this time around we see the immediate aftermath of that scene, where Erik is brought to Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) for study. In this scene, Shaw wants Erik to show off his powers, and offers him patronizing encouragement and chocolate. He asks the boy to move a coin – the boy can’t. Now Shaw sighs, and says that for all their small-sighted bumbling, the Nazis have ways of getting results.

And now the camera switches position, and reveals a room on the other side of a glass wall filled almost floor-to-ceiling with surgical tools; a nightmare lab. In the characters’ world, this was there the whole time, but we’re seeing it for the first time. The filmmakers have chosen to expand the context, and make us dread in that exact moment what Shaw could have in mind next. We would not put it past someone to cut into a mutant to see what makes them tick.

The room didn’t change, but storytelling changed it for us, gave it additional meaning.

Now guards come in with Erik’s mother. Again, Shaw says, move the coin. Only this time, if Erik cannot, Shaw will shoot his mother. Fear is quite a motivator – Erik wants to do it more than ever. Still he cannot. Shaw counts to three. His mother tells him everything will be alright. Erik can’t do it. And Shaw pulls the trigger.

(Slightly more SPOILER-y tangent: grown-up Erik seems to have an obsession with stopping bullets, deflecting bullets, even turning missiles back on those who fire them. The movie never needs a character to say that it’s because of the one he didn’t stop here. Good writing has faith in the work it does.)

Now Erik is grieving. Now Erik is enraged. A bell on Shaw’s desk crumples. Then a filing cabinet. Then the helmets of the guards – crushing their heads and killing them.

And now all those surgical tools on the wall start to rattle and fly. And for the second time in this really cracking scene, the room is transformed by storytelling. Suddenly, the dread is not what the Nazis could do to little Erik with that stuff. It’s what Erik could do to someone, anyone, who has hurt him, with all that lethal metal. As Rorschach best said it in Alan Moore’s Watchmen: “None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with *ME*!”

But Shaw doesn’t react with fear – he’s delighted. Laughing. We just learned something about him – he’s either more of a maniac than we knew, or there is something about him we don’t know yet that makes him less afraid. Later we will find out both things are true.

Erik, the future Magneto, holds onto that coin. One of a hypnotist’s most basic tricks is to put a coin in their subject’s hands and tell them that, after they count down from 10, they will drop it. Erik carries this coin for a long time, and has planned meticulously the moment when he will let it go. His fatal flaw is to think it will have enough meaning to the person he became getting there.

The message Shaw has for that little boy is “I am going to take away your childhood and make you a weapon.” And the way the writers and director use that manipulation of environment, the introduction of an object that will become a talisman representing a volcanic emotion, and the mysterious, horrific behavior of a character who will obsess us the way he obsesses his creation, is an elegantly-constructed mount for a gem of a scene that dramatizes exactly that. That someone could do that to a child, and that it cannot be undone by kind words or Charles Xavier’s unwavering friendship, gives Erik Lensherr more dignity and pathos than most comic book villains could ever dream of.

That little scene gets that much right and more, and yet never feels dense or complicated. It never looks like it’s working that hard. That’s what good screenwriting does.

I think, because I give 40 hours a week to The Man, and grab what writing time I can in other wakeful hours in order to pursue a life that doesn’t belong to The Man, that I have trouble with doing Nothing. If I’m not at the office or being social, I wonder why I’m not writing. Re-organizing a bookshelf the other night felt downright restful; I think because it was something with a visible result that didn’t involve staring at a screen.

There’s a technique many screenwriters use where they will lay out their ideas in a series of notecards – dividing up the prospective script by story beats so they can visualize the skeleton of it and see where things are lacking in material or just not connecting up. I’ve never tried it myself because I have this ridiculously self-defeating resistance to adopting the methods of others until I’ve blundered through something myself. I blundered my way into proper formatting and blundered my way into outlining and treatments; now I’m prepared to give this a try.

So last night I went to yon office supply store and picked out a corkboard, pushpins, and a big pile of 3×5 cards. I hung it on the wall, stared at it, and then started filling out cards with the names and summaries of story beats, then tacking them up in a rough order. This started stimulating ideas unbelievably quickly, and by the time I stopped I realized I had already blocked out over half the movie, and I don’t even have a title for it yet. And once again, I find it very refreshing that it’s a working mode that doesn’t involve staring at a screen. It’s right there in the analog universe – all the plot elements, and all the blank spaces that need filling. Whenever I have an idea it’s no trouble to scribble it out and tack it up. I did two more cards this morning without even making up my mind to work.

It’s writing I can do on my feet. When Adam and I work together, he’s the one pacing a mad groove in the floor while I type. Now I can be the pacing one, and get things nice and prepared for the Typing Me to take over when it’s time. This script could get written very quickly if I don’t overthink it, which is the only way I want to write it. This is a shot at a payday – no sense dragging it out.

And that all sounds so good and productive, and yet I still feel like this is a calm, breezy Saturday overall. I like that.