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.

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.

That made me smile. I think I’m on the right track.

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.

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.

This script will never sell on the spec market; I think I work on it to prove to myself that I can do something whose sole impetus is creative satisfaction. I want to let a feeling be my lighthouse, guiding me towards what needs to be written rather than what, consciously-calculated, solves the equation for x. I think, with all the words I throw at getting employed in Hollywood, that this sort of thing keeps me from stagnating. I do wonder how it will turn out, if I ever actually complete a draft.

In both it and the more mercenary idea I was brainstorming, there are rites of passage for teens and young adults involved. I’ve had a couple of conversations recently about the late John Hughes – one of the pillars of his legacy was that he took the tumult of that period seriously. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off may be a fantasy lark, but look past the cute hooky antics and realize it was also, just under the surface, a suicide intervention. Ferris has a girlfriend, but the love story in that movie is with his guy friend Cameron, whose cathartic, car-destroying rage, I am certain, saves his life.

When we’re adults we look back at the big questions we had as kids and dismiss them as stupid or naive; and that’s always the challenge for a writer trying to capture that and depict them honestly. Most movie and TV children and teens act like winsome and tiny grown-ups, and the insult of it grates. It’s not done out of malice, but out of fear – that audiences will react with the same embarrassment we feel in contemplating it.

What we have to remember is that young people are on a quest to discover themselves; and at that moment, it is the most important quest of their lives. They may ask questions that we grown-ups already answered – or, possibly, simply gave up asking – but we cannot let our cynicism about our own separation from that stage of life block us from getting to know these characters. Knowing them means looking at them with unguarded eyes, and it is the first step towards loving them.

I already know two places I can go – I’ll have to write a short new scene that will replace a three-page sequence, and I can save a page at the end because I basically wrote two consecutive endings, and I need to pick the better one and just get out of the audience’s way. So with those two fixes and the more cosmetic stuff, I think I can get there.

The truth is, though, that I ought to go further than that. Comedies are almost always on the shorter side, so even squeezing my way to 119 still makes it look heavy. Under 110 would be stronger, but it’s too soon to make the category of decisions that will need to be made to get there, and I want to get feedback from friends first.

This makes two comedies in a row for me that have bumped up against traditional length limitations. I admit that, in both scripts, I put a lot of emphasis on incident. These are complicated plots – not necessarily farce in the classical sense, but definitely turning over actions at a high velocity, and with a larger-than-average cast of characters. Given the choice, I’d rather a script I write suffer from a saturation of ideas than a dearth – it’s why I put a lot of time into brainstorming and outlining. Cutting back, as much as I may carp about it, is ultimately easier than trying to pad something in a way that doesn’t leave it looking padded.

The next script I work on needs to exercise other muscles, though. Something atmospheric, with minimal characters, and 100 pages max, please!