Jesus, this sucks. Due to a very freak set of circumstances, I find myself with a broken right ankle. The only bright side to any of this is it’s not like I broke my arm, hand or wrist.
The current state of my right ankle.
I can still write.
And, for the time being, I’m definitely encouraged to write and read because it’s extremely difficult for me to do much of anything else. Just tonight, I’ve managed to prove to myself that I can, in fact, just listen to music and write because if I don’t I grow very, very bored and frustrated.
As such, for the time being, I’m going to spend ever more of my waking time working on these four novels. Though, I will admit, my current run-in with the medical system has me again thinking about a novel or screenplay I have rolling around my mind that is pandemic relatedly in its theme.
But, for the time being, I’m just going to focus on these four thrillers I’ve been working on while dabbling in the screenplay concept I’ve discovered I work to work on as well.
I have a pretty good system for management of the development of a big storytelling project established. It’s taken me about three years to get here, but I finally have a pretty good system.
One of the reasons why I find myself interested in screenwriting is it should be easy for me to retool that system from writing novels to writing screenplays. The hardest part at the moment will be learning Final Draft. The actual development of the story is far easier than that I know how *I* develop a longer-style story.
I already have a general idea of the plot of this screenplay and its themes tap into my general, lingering rage over MAGA that the same dynamic that was at work with the initial development of the four thrillers I’m working on should be in play with this screenplay.
But, as of the moment, all I have for sure down pat with the outline is the very beginning and the climax. Other than that, I’m at a loss right now.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the issue of learning Final Draft. But I hope that I’ll be so excited with a finished outline that when I get to the point where I want to start writing on the screenplay, I’ll be able to use brut mental force to learn Final Draft.
At least, that’s the hope.
I have a huge amount going on creatively at the moment, which is what I want. The main focus has to be on the thrillers, though. It’s just, sometimes, I need to let of some steam doing something totally different that uses a slightly different part of my mind.
I’m still very interested in fashion photography, but getting the equipment has been far, far slower than I expected. So, for the moment, occasionally dabbling in screenwriting is it.
One of my favorite books is “The World According To Garp” and in it, we learn that Garp’s literary agent has a “secret weapon” — his office’s cleaning lady. She’s the person who read Garp’s mom’s feminist manifesto and loved it so much, giving the agent some sense of its potential.
I’ve kept that plot point in my mind since I first read it many, many moons ago as a young man and I’ve gone out of my way to find just an average person to bounce novel and movie ideas off of to see what they think. The latest incarnation of this secret weapon is the young woman who cuts my hair.
I told her the plots of the four thrillers I’m working on and she was quite impressed. This made me very happy. So, I decided to try again when I got my hair cut today and gave her a broad outline of the screenplay I’m currently mulling.
She really liked the third act, which is currently the most developed part of the story. I’m even more determined to see if I can develop this specific concept into something I at least won’t be embarrassed by — the same metric I have been using for the thrillers I’m working on.
She liked the premise of the story even though it subtly belies my liberal-progressive leanings on an existential basis.
But I still have a lot — A LOT — of work to do. And I am going into this side project knowing I have the severe headwinds of Hollywood agism, where I live and also my general Twitter reputation as nothing more than a crank.
So, I’ve got my McGuffin and I’ve got a general plot. Now, the thing I’m struggling with it how I might toy with gender expectations with the characters I’m thinking up in my mind.
I like the idea that that my Hero has a lot of “potential” as the story opens — much like Luke Skywalker — but his Princess starts off as a tough as nails broad who helps him become the man he always could be. I guess that’s pretty much every Hero’s Journey, but I like to think I’m following the old saw of “Tell an old story in a new way or an new story in an old way.”
I’m really trying to follow the beat structure of A New Hope with this first attempt to write a screenplay. Since I have four –4! — thriller novels to work on, for the time being, this screenplay is just what I work on when I need to burn off some steam.
I’m not going to get too wrapped up in making the first draft perfect. In fact, at the moment, I don’t even know how to use Final Draft at all. That’s something I’m going to have to work towards. But I do actually own it, so once I figure out how to use the software, I can hopefully just sit down and start writing.
But to get that point, I need to flesh out the outline I have. I really like how with a screenplay you have some very strict beats you need to meet. I find that very freeing. I don’t have to re-invent the wheel. I just think up my beats for the outline and when I get to them, I pull the trigger.
The universe I’ve come up with is pretty cool. The screenplay itself has elements of Alien, Logan’s Run, The Time Machine, Star Wars and any thriller movie where a McGuffin is involved. But it’s also meant to have a pretty strong romantic element to it which would be the heart of the story.
But I have noticed, even this early in the process of development, that by making gender expectations more modern, the story is flowing a lot easier. The trick is, of course, not to be so “woke” that no one wants to watch it. You see, Olivia Wilde, there is this thing call “subtext” where you can preach all you want to and not alienate every CIS white male in existence.
As such, my Hero starts off a lot like Luke Skywalker, but by the end of the story he and his love interest throw themselves into the future as equals. I think audiences will really like that.
As of right now, things are moving really fast with the development of this first screenplay. A lot of this comes from my white hot fucking rage against MAGA and how this screenplay, like the four thrillers I’m working on, help me feel some agency when it comes to striking back at those fucking fascists.
I’m not a violent man, so, like the Little Drummer Boy, I can use my one talent — the ability to tell a damn good story – to fight MAGA at least in my own mind, if nothing else.
I’ve stumbled across a minor obstacle –what to do at the midpoint.
At the midpoint in your story, you’re supposed to have a false victory or false setback for your Hero.
At the moment, I honestly don’t have either one of those. But I still have time. I like the dynamic I’ve established between my Hero and his love interest. My Hero is very much inspired by Luke Skywalker, but in such a way that he feels a lot more modern.
It helps that the character is pretty much based on ME, too, but not in a bad way. I’m just taking elements of my own personality and running with them in such a way that hopefully it’s interesting and entertaining.
Your Hero is NOT SUPPOSED TO BE YOU. So. that’s another element of development I need to think about. I really like the universe I’ve constructed, now I need to figure out how to force my hero and love interest to be forced to run around it in a way that helps the audience see it.
I’m beginning to dread having to write a sex scene. But, I think as my first screenplay I’m going to grade myself on a curve when it comes to things like that.
The character of Ellen Ripley in the Alien franchise was originally written as a man. I find myself working on my first screenplay and in my mind, I’m using Star Wars as my guide for structure.
But as I really begin to get into the development of this story, I realize that following the Star Wars plot too closely just doesn’t make any sense for modern audiences. People have grown so accustomed to a tough as nails woman in stories that they might feel any variation from that in a story like I’m working on is rather quaint.
Having given it even more thought, the idea now is we will have a Hero like in Star Wars, but the context is different. Or, the spin on how our Boy Hero becomes a Man Hero is different than you might expect. If things work out the way I hope, the story will have a lot of heart.
It’s a real relief that I’ve figured out how to pivot what I know about developing a novel to doing the same with a screenplay. It really speeds up the process of getting myself to the point where I can start to attempt to get past the learning curve of Final Draft.
But my main focus is going to be on the four novels I’m working on. It’s just occasionally, I need to distract myself from working on the novels so I can look at them with fresh eyes.
The four novels I’m working on are going great at the moment. And, yet, a growing part of me feels as though in conjunction with developing and writing these novels, I have it in me to also work on a scifi screenplay.
This feeling within me has been growing for some time. The thing that really sparked a more intense interest in doing this was a comment I heard on the Scriptnotes podcast. They said, essentially, if you’re having trouble picking a screenplay concept to go with, pick the one that you have the best ending for in your mind at the moment you start to develop and write it.
The moment I heard this, I realized there was one screenplay concept I’ve been mulling that I know the ending really well of. Or, at least everything from the end of the second act to the climax. This movie concept has been dear to my heart for some time because it taps into my white hot rage over not just MAGA, but how otherwise intelligent people are willfully ignoring global climate change.
My personal rage against MAGA has been the source of the creative energy necessary to write four thrillers.
One key element to all of this is I know how to outline a big story like a novel, so it’s easy for me to pivot to outlining a screenplay. I’m already a very visual storyteller in my mind, so I feel confident that I can put the vision on the page of a screenplay.
But there are some problems to overcome. One is, I have Final Draft, but have no idea how to actually use it. So, I’m going to have to buy a book and maybe look at a tone of YouTube videos about how to do just that. But now that it has occurred to me that I can map out the story like I would a novel, then that means I can work on outlining the story while I’m doing all that to give myself some sense of forward momentum.
The thing is — I’m not getting any younger. And, in real terms, I’m being extremely delusional to think I can break into Hollywood at such an ancient age. And, yet, in my defense, I can have a very larger-than-life, engaging personality — especially when I’m lit — and, as such, in the end, the biggest issue might be simply getting myself to LA with a few scripts so I can see if I can weasel my way into a cocktail party.
Or not. The thing at the forefront of my mind is now that I’m well on my way to wrapping up the first draft of the first novel in this four book thriller series, I want to branch out to at least attempt to do some screenwriting. I also continue to be interested in fashion photography and, maybe, at some point writing pop songs.
It’s times like these when I really regret that I’m 20 years too old for all of this. But you can’t help how old you are when the Muse finally looks your way.
For the better part of a decade, I’ve been fascinated by the following scenario — what if a Galactic Empire came to humanity and said, “Earth is doomed. We’ll give you a second chance in your own ‘homeland’ of a few habitable places in a different solar system, but there’s a catch. We will only zap you there, you have to use your existing technology and unite enough establish a planet-wide government.”
This would be an amazing opportunity, of course, but the story would deal with how difficult it would be to unite humanity to do such a thing. If you treat all humans as equal — as we should — how do you figure out how to unite the very, very diverse and divided humanity?
Given that under this scenario, the Galactic Empire would be zapping a huge number of people to this new solar system — in the hundreds of millions — it seems to me that the only way to do it would be to use the United States as the basis of your new, planet-wide government, culture and civilization. The reason is, the United States has a huge population and history of being a nation of immgrants.
Where the story gets really interesting is you could use the whole thing as a proxy to talk about fucking cocksucker MAGA idiots who want to turn the United States into white Christian ethno state of “blood and soil.” So, part of the plot would be how Americans balanced this amazing opportunity with the natural inclination of MAGA to flip the fuck out because even though say, 200 million Americans would settle this new planet, 400 – 600 million non Americans would also settle the planet as well.
So you have much gnashing of teeth about how the “American way of life” would be in jeopardy.
And this doesn’t even begin to address the whole bootstrapping issue. You could have all these really interesting scenes of how to start a global economy from scratch — it would be The Martian, but on a global scale.
Anyway, I don’t have a plot at the moment. And I have a lot of other stories I’m working on — four thrillers at the moment — but this continues to be fascinating to me because of how difficult and complex it is.
It is slowly beginning to dawn on me that now that I know how *I* handle a huge creative storytelling project, that it’s easy for me to piviot from developing and writing four thriller novels to working on screenplays.
I don’t intend to stop working on these novels, but I definitely have my eye watching a lot of YouTube videos in the near future so I can figure out how to use Final Draft (even though, according to the way the guys on ScriptNotes talk, that’s now passe.)
The biggest thing I’ve learned about telling a great story is how important development is before you even write a single word. So, once I get to a point with the four novels I’m working on that I feel comfortable shaving off some attention from them, I’m going to begin to do development on a few screenplays to see what I come up with.
Screenplays are different from novels because by definition if it’s on the screen, people are nearly forced to accept it’s real. You don’t have to spend 20 pages explaining why this or that thing happened — you see it on the screen, it exists. As such, I feel like I can engage in more elaborate flights of fancy because I don’t have to spend on this time researching things. Also, with a screenplay I have a very strict number of scenes to work with — NO MORE THAN 120!
I know the general structure of good storytelling to the point now that it is at least possible that writing screenplays — after doing development — will be much, much faster than working on novels. There are certain beats that you have to hit during the course of your 120 scenes and as a trained journalists, I love, love, love tight structure.
It makes things a lot easier, at least in my mind.
You can be as creative as you like, you just have to stay within the established conventional wisdom of structure.
But this is all very speculative. I continue to be very hard at work on four novels. And I idly think about writing some short stories when I need to take a short break from working on the main project. And, yet, I’m so absolutely consumed with these four thrillers that I doubt anything will come of that.
I can begin to feel the old white hot rage against MAGA from the early days of this writing project begin to creep into my soul again. I’m livid and powerless. So, not being a violent man, I’m throwing myself back into working on my art. The first two books of this four book series are not overtly anti-MAGA and while the last two books are pointedly anti-MAGA, hopefully they won’t come across as too terribly preachy.
At the moment, I’m taken aback by how smooth things are going with the first draft of this first book in the series. I’m just trucking along, following the outline and, really, the only issue at the moment I have to worry about is keeping myself entertained. I don’t have the challenge that the struggle of the first act has associated with it.
The past….and the future?
All I have to do is, as they say, “just write.”
Of late, I’ve been jumping ahead as I work on this first novel, trying to nail down the outline of the second book. I’m really going to try to force myself to have no more than maybe 120 scenes at 1,000 average words. The first book is way too close to 200 scenes for my liking, but that’s just the first draft. I can always always trim that down some in the first draft.
You can’t edit a blank page, as they say.
And I continue to have a lingering insecurity about writing all four novels at once. I mean, I guess I could just try to get the first novel published and see how that pans out. And, yet, if Stieg Larsson can write and sell three novels, I can write and sell four novels. I have a huge ego and thinking like that is just the jitters associated with being an aspiring novelist.
Also, all four of these novels tell a compelling story. I’m going to keep going until something concrete prevents me from doing so. While it’s very possible that someone is going to steal a creative march on me and I’ll have to piviot to some other concept, you have make decisions on what you know, not on what you don’t know.
You can’t live your life in fear.
Or, as my father would say, “No one ever got anywhere in this world without taking a risk.”
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