Welcome to 2009

The holidays were pretty good at WriterDad Manor.  It was the Peanut’s first Christmas which gave the usual festivities even more of a glow than usual; the Missus went on a baking frenzy that resulted in my waist size expanding by what feels like about ten inches; and my sister-in-law gave us a Wii as a family gift which, when you take into consideration the Xbox 360 already sitting in the TV cabinet, virtually guarantees that I will get no writing done if I don’t discipline myself.  It also guarantees that my wife will kick my ass at Wii bowling on a nightly basis.

As I face the prospect of not only a new year ahead of us but yet another year behind us (in case you’re wondering what’s going on with this whole time thing), I’ve found myself making the inevitable new year’s resolutions, the new wrinkle this time around being that I intend on actually following through on them for longer than a day or two.  They are, in no particular order:

Finish at least two screenplays this year.  And by “finish”, I want each of them so polished, a woman could apply make-up in its reflection.  I wrote a lot in 2008, but — aside from the Wedding Comedy rewrite and the latest pass through a spec I started in 2007 — they were almost all first drafts.  That’s all well and good, but it’s time to get something to the point that it’s ready to actually show somebody other than the Missus and my trusted circle of readers.  Ideally I’d actually like three polished scripts, but with a day job and a family, that’s pushing it.

Land a new agent. I’ll settle for a new manager, despite my reservations.

Go for more walks.  I love walking; a good hour-and-a-half walk in a park in nearby Encino almost always does wonders for my mood and fires me up creatively.  I can’t tell you how many story problems I’ve solved over the years during those strolls.  Since the birth of the Peanut in July, however, I’ve gone on exactly one such jaunt.  This needs to change.

See more movies.  The last feature-length film I saw in 2008 – either in a theater OR at home — was The Dark Knight.  In July.  Granted, the baby takes precedence over, say, The Wrestler (which is as it should be), but for a guy who wants to make his living writing Hollywood features, this is unacceptable.  I hope to find more of a balance this year.

Better manage my writing time.  Discipline, discipline, discipline.

Be a better husband and father.  I’d like to think I’m pretty solid in both departments, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.

Cut my credit card debt at least in half.  No, it’s not nearly as bad as many folks’.  Yes, it still bothers me.  A lot.

Lose ten pounds.  You think I was exaggerating about my expanding waistline?  I suppose I was… but not by much.  If nothing else, this should get my ass walking again.  Hopefully.

Oh, and one more –

Blog more often.

So that’s it.  We’ll see how many of these I can make a reality this year.

‘Tis the Season

This past weekend was pretty busy. On Saturday, the Missus and I went to her company’s annual holiday party at a swank hotel in Santa Monica, where we gorged ourselves on all-you-can-eat sushi and a chocolate fountain and enjoyed the benefits of an open bar. We left the Peanut with my sister-in-law, the first time we’ve had a babysitter (daycare excepted). To be honest, part of me really didn’t want to go to the party. I know, what could possibly go wrong? In my mind the answer to that was, Everything. The kid could get sick. My sister-in-law could get sick. The house could burn down. Aliens could swoop down and abduct the Peanut, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS-style. Who knows. Why risk it?

Despite my hand-wringing we went anyway, and when we got home, the Peanut was fast asleep in her crib and my sister-in-law was alive, well and about as sane as when we left her. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

The next day, the WriterDad clan trekked out to the local agricultural college to buy our Christmas tree. I’ve lived out in Southern California for more than a decade, and I will never get used to the notion of picking out the perfect Douglas Fir while surrounded by palm trees. Afterward, the Peanut got her photo taken with the Santa, who was hanging out nearby. This was an unexpectedly awesome experience, one of those moments when I stepped back and thought to myself, “Holy shit, we’ve got a kid. And she’s visiting Santa for the first time. And, perhaps most importantly, she’s not crying, vomiting or pooping on Santa.” The fact that she would probably soon be crying, vomiting and pooping on me and/or the Missus didn’t detract from the moment in the slightest. Nor did the arm full of badass tattoos that Santa accidentally flashed when we passed him our daughter.

At some point during the weekend, I also finally finished my latest draft of the Apatow Rip-Off. Considering that it’s only 99 pages, there’s no reason why that sucker should have taken me over a month to rewrite… but it did, and at least it’s finished. That’s about all it has going for it, unfortunately; I threw the script in the drawer to get some distance before I eventually read through it, but I suspect that it’s a B- effort at very best. I know — that’s why we rewrite. But is it even worth rewriting? I’m honestly not sure; the whole thing feels very middle-of-the road to me, and I fear that no matter how much I polish, I’ll still end up with a highly polished mediocrity. But that’s a decision I’ll make when I actually read the stupid thing.

So what now? I’ve got drafts of two other projects to rewrite. I also have a couple of new ideas that I find myself mentally circling around. Given how un-fired up I feel about the scripts I’ve already got, maybe tackling a fresh project is precisely what I need to jumpstart my enthusiasm. My office is closed for the last two weeks of the month, giving me plenty of time for a first draft — theoretically, anyway. We’ll see what the Peanut has to say about that. Probably “Whaaaaaaa!”

Grindstone Cowboy

I seem to be in danger of becoming one of those bloggers who, you know, doesn’t actually update his blog on a regular basis. What the hell is wrong with me? I’ll bet you can guess. Let’s all say it together: “I have no time to write.”

Sadly, this does indeed seem to be the case, at least lately. The Peanut is approaching her five month mark, and just when the Missus and I think we’ve got this parenting shit down to a science, our offspring makes another developmental leap and screws us up all over again. Recent occurrences include such milestones as rolling from her tummy onto her back (a hilarious and weirdly touching sight), the beginning of the teething phase (decidedly less hilarious) and reaching out for random objects — for example, the catalog that Mommy’s holding while the baby sits in her lap — and stuffing them into her mouth. When the Peanut is sitting on my leg and we’re talking gibberish to one another, an experience that occasionally seems to resemble one of my more awkward prodco meetings, I experience a profound happiness that I previously never believed to be possible without illicit substances or religious brainwashing.

Unfortunately, a more active and interactive Peanut keeps me away from my computer for even longer stretches than before. I’m lucky if I have twenty minutes to work on the rewrite of the Apatow Rip-Off, which I’d hoped to finish in time for the tracking board contest and completely and utterly failed to do so. The get-up-at-4:50-with-the-wife-and-write plan is still in effect — unless the Peanut wakes up around that time, in which case it becomes the get-up-at-4:50-and-take-care-of-the-kid plan. A Thanksgiving trip to visit the in-laws in San Diego — traditionally one of my most creatively fertile periods of the year — yielded exactly zero pages this time around. Being stuck in the third quarter of Act II hasn’t helped, either: for the past two weeks, the little time I’ve spent at the keyboard mostly involved A) staring blankly at the screen, B) occasionally trying out and then promptly discarding ideas that I’ll charitably describe as half-baked, and/or C) writing vicious hate mail to myself, then deleting it before the Missus could read some of it and hide the knife block in the kitchen.

I now understand why pro writers often seem to take long stretches of time off for their families. Part of me feels like going on hiatus to let the well refill and enjoy the first year of my daughter’s life without the burden of shoehorning in writing time. I’m not going to do that, of course. The fact is, I’m not getting any younger — I’m rapidly approaching the age range in which most guys settle into whatever profession they’re going to toil in until they hit retirement, and here I am, on a career track to nowhere. Screenwriting is pretty much the only existential “Get Out of Jail Free” card I have to play at this point, which compounds my frustration when circumstances prevent me from putting in the time and effort I need to make my professional aspirations a reality.

I have to keep my nose to the grindstone, even if it ends up shearing off my face.

(Coda: The Missus made me promise to be more cheerful in my next post.)

Yes, I’m Still Alive and Blogging…

… Do you really think I would abandon you, after all we’ve been through together?

Things have been busy at WriterDad Manor. I’d like to say that I’ve been away on a production rewrite in some exotic locale, knocking out pages from my five star hotel room and basking the adulation of a cast and crew who can’t believe the good fortune that I was available to grace their film with my creative genius. But really I’ve just been changing a lot of diapers and trying to find the time to vacuum our home before the dirt and bacteria start evolving and build a technologically advanced civilization in our carpet.

On the domestic front, the big news this weekend was that we moved the Peanut from the bassinet in our bedroom into the crib in her own room. Truth be told, she’s a bit overdue; the kid is now four months old, and when she held her arms straight out from her sides, her hands would stick through the slats — I almost wanted to give her a tin cup that she could rattle against the bars of her tiny cage. Still, the Missus took it pretty hard; I half-expected to wake up in the middle of the night to find her side of the bed empty and her sleeping on the floor of the baby’s room. Fortunately she toughed it out, and the Peanut didn’t seem to care in the slightest that she was now sleeping in a different area of the house, away from Mommy and Daddy. We did, however, discover that we missed the ocean sounds of the Peanut’s Sleep Sheep so much that we hijacked the travel version of the critter that we kept downstairs and installed it beside our bed.

My plan to wake up with the Missus at the ungodly hour of 4:50 every morning is still in place, which is good because the only writing I’m getting done lately is between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., before the kid wakes up and the day lurches into overdrive. I’m in a mad dash to get the rewrite of my latest script — the Apatow Rip-Off — finished in time for the December 1st deadline of this contest. I’m currently wading through a rough patch in the story (the dreaded second half of Act II) and I honestly don’t know if the script will be ready to send out even if I do get to “Fade Out/The End” in time, but the ticking clock of the competition is providing me with a much-needed kick in the ass. I don’t have nearly enough time in the day to accomplish what I want to accomplish, creatively speaking, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that even if I only write a quarter of a page, it’s a quarter of a page that wasn’t there yesterday. It may be a crappy quarter of a page, of course, but I’ll take what (little) I can get.

We’ve also been marginally more social than usual. Two weekends ago my parents flew out from the east coast for a weekend-long visit, the first time we’d seen them since the Peanut was born in July. (Mom tried not to take it personally that the baby cried every time she tried to hold her.) And this past Saturday, my buddy Dave came over for a brief two-man writer’s group meeting, discussing his latest script; followed by a typically amazing dinner cooked by the Missus, who is to kitchen applicances what Hendrix was to the Strat and Marshall stack; and some Xbox playing, during which Dave introduced me to the joys of multiplayer mode in JEDI ACADEMY and the awesomeness that is the original GEARS OF WAR, the latter of which prompted the Missus to remark, after watching some serious onscreen ultraviolence, “I never thought I’d miss BIOSHOCK.”

So that’s what’s going on — oh, that and the bout of stomach flu that wiped out the entire WriterDad clan just in time for the Peanut’s first Halloween, but that horror story (and trust me, it was a horror story) is so far behind us I won’t bother rehashing it. Now we’re prepping for Thanksgiving and the feast that the Missus and her sister are going to unleash upon the family. I’m slipping into a food coma just thinking about it.

Hopefully I’ll stay awake long enough to finish my script.

The Reluctant Early Bird

It’s been a real struggle to get back into the writing groove over the past couple of weeks. The good news is that I’ve finally figured out what I need to do to get things rolling again creatively: time, focus, and energy.

The bad news is that I have none of those things.

I realized that the key is time: if I could carve out an hour during which I would face a minimum of interruptions, I could focus. I finally made my peace with the fact that until the Peanut starts going to bed around 8:30 pm or so (and when that will be, I can only dream), I will not be able to get any serious writing done after work, and even if I could, I would most likely be exhausted anyway. My energy level is at its highest when I first get up, naturally. Ergo, the best time for me to write is before work.

Of course, the time between waking up and punching in at the office is hectic — get up, get showered, wolf down breakfast, get the kid up, get the kid to daycare, get to work. No time to write for ten minutes, let alone an hour.

I decided that my only solution is to rise when the Missus wakes up to do her various mommy duties before she has to drive off to her own white collar hell. If she can drag herself out of bed, then so can I: the buddy system worked like a charm on Boy Scout camping excursions and school field trips, so it should work just as well for my marriage, right?

Trouble is, she gets up at 4:50. Every damn morning.

Ugh.

The Missus likes to remind me that way back at the beginning of our relationship, I told her that I would turn her into a morning person. Well, turns out that I was right, though I suppose I had to knock her up to do it. And now I miss the woman who wouldn’t wake up before double digits unless she had to.

ANYWAY, I guess that for as long as I can crawl out of bed and pump myself full of coffee before I drift back into a coma, I’ve got my writing hour. Now I have no excuse to not get my shit together… at least for the time being. I’m sure I’ll come up with something sooner or later.

Matt’s Column – “How Do I Write a Script that Attracts an Agent?”

Here’s something that will hopefully happen fairly regularly in the future — a guest column from reader Matt. Unlike my previous guest, he didn’t even have to sleep with me to land this gig. He only had to achieve what I and many of you reading this blog dream of: breaking through and making a living in the screen trade. Take it away, Matt…

WD offered me some space to detail the last year of my life when I went from writing my fourth spec (the first three went nowhere) to getting an agent and my first work as a professional screenwriter. This column will be the stuff I wish someone had told me before I was signed and in the first few months of my career. If there’s anything specific you’d like me to address please make note of it in the Comments. Schedule permitting, we’d like to do a couple times a month. Here we go.

The question I am asked with the most frequency is HOW DO I GET AN AGENT? There is no helpful answer to this question. You either get an agent from a connection passing the script along or a manager passing the script along. You get a manager through a very witty query letter or the recommendation of a connection. If you live in Los Angeles and are reasonably extroverted, it isn’t too hard to find someone young and hungry to take a look at your script.

The real question should be HOW DO I WRITE A SCRIPT THAT ATTRACTS AN AGENT? To be honest, 95% of that answer lies within your own talent. You’re either good or you’re not, and no amount of blogs, books, or practice will change that. But many writers, myself included, are probably good enough to achieve some success, but are going about things ass-backwards. So here is my step-by-step guide (with digressions) to writing the script that will get you an agent.

Wait. There’s just one step.

Mark Twain once said something to the effect that the tragedy of most lives is people never do what they’re best at. And it’s the same with most writers, I’m afraid. I believe that most writers are simply writing the wrong script. Maybe it’s because they’re writing for the marketplace. Maybe they’re just scared. But unless you write from the basic, essential core of your writing DNA, a long career just isn’t going to be in the cards.

What is your writing DNA? Thankfully, you can process your own genome with one simple answer:

What is the most important movie in your life? Not your favorite movie, not even the movie you’ve seen the most — I mean what is the one movie that you saw and decided I Want To Make Movies! For Kevin Smith, it was SLACKER. For Martin Scorsese it was FACES. And with both of their first movies, they made stuff heavily influenced by that — Smith with CLERKS, Scorsese with WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR (writing in your favorite genre is something Scorsese sticks to — his next movie, MEAN STREETS, was a re-telling of his favorite Italian movie, I VITELLONI).

Now that you have that movie in your mind, drop whatever you’re working on and write a movie like that. I can’t tell you how many amateur writers — myself included — don’t write a movie like their most important movie. I wrote a kid’s comedy, a romantic comedy and an action comedy until I realized that my most Important Movie was A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. “But wait,” my brain said, “There is no chance anyone would ever buy an ultra-violent satirical fantasia in this day and age.” I was right: no one bought the fucker. But there was so much passion — Kubrick had been so encoded into my writing DNA — and originality (we are most original when we are grounded in the past and ourselves) that it got me an agent and my first job.

Moral of the story: don’t write broad comedies if your Most Important Movie is STAR WARS. Don’t write thrillers if it’s JERRY MAGUIRE. Stop writing what you think will sell. Stop writing what you think people want. Write the exact movie YOU are dying to see.

If you do that, and if you have talent, you will have a career. Because the point of that first script — and by first I mean the one that gets you attention — is not to sell. It’s to attract attention and get you work. And the only way that’s going to happen is to nurture your voice. Go forth!

I Am the Master Chief of My Domain

So much for the quickie rewrite.

I’m currently stuck in the middle of the second draft of my Domestic Comedy. No, that’s not right.  Truth is, I’d like nothing more than to be stuck in the middle of it; I’m actually bogged down at the beginning. And I’m talking the beginning-beginning — I’m less than ten pages in and I feel like somebody’s dropped me in the middle of the Congo with nothing more than a bread knife to hack my way through the jungle.

At times like this, distractions are everywhere. My house seems to come alive as I sit there at my computer, fidgeting and wishing my daily quota of pages was done already — I can hear our DVD collection beckoning, our CD spinner whispering sweet nothings in my ear, my shelf of unread books whistling my way and asking if I want a date.

And then there’s the Xbox.

Lately, the console is sounding like that loudmouth jerk who hawks Oxyclean and Kaboom on TV: “COME PLAY ME!  THE SCRIPT CAN WAIT! YOU WILL OBEY!!!”  Increasing the temptation is the brand new copy of HALO 2 that I bought on a whim at Fry’s a few weeks ago. 

Here’s the thing — when I’m in the zone and a script is clicking, nothing can keep me from writing.  I’ll write anytime, anywhere.  (This can make driving a little challenging and occasionally death-defying, but hey, sometimes the Muse takes precedence over traffic laws and common sense.)  But when I’m blocked, I find myself drawn to other people’s stories.  I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t read a long work of fiction while making my way through a difficult first draft; if I do, I usually have a better chance of finishing the LA Marathon in flip-flops than I do of finishing my own draft.  And now that I’m a born again gaming geek, I’ve recently discovered that if I’m playing a story-driven game such as, oh, say, the original HALO or BIOSHOCK, there’s no way in hell any work is getting done.  (Unless the Missus cracks the whip and guilts me into getting my ass in gear.)  I know that I need to focus, to concentrate all of my energy and attention on my own tale.

Consequently, I refuse to let myself open HALO 2 until I finish the second draft of the Domestic Comedy.

And now, naturally, as I struggle with my script, I can’t stop thinking about HALO 2.

Sad, right?  What’s even sadder is that I’m actually trying to bargain with myself now.  It’s gotten to the point that I’ll ask the Missus if it would be okay for me to play ten minutes of the game as long as I get my quota of pages done.  Her answer is always the same: “Is the script done?  Then the answer is no.  Now get back to work, asshole.”  (Okay, she doesn’t actually call me an asshole.  It’s certainly  implied, though.)

This inner struggle is not necessarily due to the fact that I’m dying to play a five-year-old video game — though I am, of  course.  It’s just that by denying myself this minor pleasure, I can’t help but focus on it.  ( What can I say, I was raised Catholic.)  But if I give in, then I’ve lost this battle of wills with myself.  I’m starting to feel like I’m in my own one man version of the legendary masturbation episode of SEINFELD.  And I must remain the master of my domain.  The Covenant and the Flood can wait.

Maybe.

The Better Half Speaks

This is great — I have a blog that I don’t even have to write for anymore!  Okay, maybe not, but as I deal with various issues on the writing and dadding fronts, the wife asked if she could contribute in my absence.  It turns out that she was only joking, but I made her do it anyway.  Take it away, honey…

Hello, it’s the Missus here. WriterDad has been too busy being a Dad and a writer to write about being a Dad and a writer, so I’m stepping in with a guest blog entry.

Of course, once I started writing this, WriterDad stepped in with suggestions. “Tell them about how becoming a dad changed my writing.” Or, “Write about how hard it is for me to find time to get anything done.” Well, WriterDad, that’s why you have a blog — so you can write about this stuff. As for me, I’m no writer — my experience is limited to boring memos and captions for our various photo galleries of the Peanut. But today, I’ll be writing about this little star:

So, WriterDad and I are not the most outgoing people you’ll ever meet. You know those people who can just strike up a conversation anywhere they go? Yeah, that’s not us at all. But three and a half months ago, we were graced with the presence of our little rock star, who attracts attention wherever we go. As we left a fine dinner at Chili’s last night, we were stared at, smiled at, and even stopped by a random person, just to look at our little Peanut. It was enough to make the introvert in me want to drop my head and run screaming from the restaurant.

Everywhere we go, we hear comments about the cute baby. Even single young men, ones at an age when they’d rather be nailed to a wall and forced to watch an endless replay of Sex and the City than touch a baby, will smile in the presence of the Peanut. Older ladies have stopped us in the supermarket to look at our little one. Not that I blame them. Who can resist this?

Anyway, the Peanut loves the attention. She doesn’t pass up an opportunity to return a smile to a stranger (just ask the lady at the bar at Chili’s who had a good buzz going on and tickled the Peanut’s arm with her acrylic nails that were desperately in need of a fill). She’ll happily let anyone hold her. (And no, I’ve never let a stranger hold her. I’m not that crazy.)

It’s been challenging at times to have such a little social butterfly. Occasionally I feel a bit like I’m the baby’s entourage, while she’s out conquering the world. But I’m actually getting to a point where (with the exception of the occasional buzzed middle-aged woman in need of a manicure) I enjoy stopping to talk to people about the Peanut. I’m always amazed that people genuinely seem to want to meet her, or say hello to her. I mean, I think she’s the cutest baby in the world, but that doesn’t mean everyone else does, you know?

CHINESE DEMOCRACY = The PHANTOM MENACE of Rock & Roll?

(An open letter to Axl Rose)

Dear Axl,

I know it’s just the first single, but seriously, man– after 17 years, roughly one hundred zillion dollars’ worth of studio time and half the musicians in the free world joining and leaving the band, you cough up this?  I might have given you a pass if you put this out in 1995 (which is when I’m guessing you first recorded it) – at least then you’d sound like a hair metal guy desperately trying to keep up with grunge.  But in 2008?  Unacceptable.  This makes your atrocious mid-90s cover of “Sympathy For the Devil” sound like  “Stairway to Heaven.”

Nostalgia and the irresistible siren call of advertising might lure me into Best Buy on November 23, but I don’t know if I can actually commit to this new so-called GNR record.  If I DO shell out the $13.99 plus tax, I don’t know if I can get myself to pull off the shrink wrap and actually, you know, play it.  Maybe I’ll just put it in my CD collection and leave it be,  ’cause — let’s be honest – imagining a new GNR record is invariably going to be way more fun than actually listening to it.  The chase is always better than the catch.

And by the way, Axl — lose the corn rows.  We know you’re going bald.  We’ve known for a long time (since the time CHINESE DEMOCRACY was supposed to come out, actually).  Much like your slapping the name “Guns N’ Roses” on the album cover, you’re fooling no one with this.  Give it up.

Sincerely,

WriterDad

Replacing the Turd (or, A Story Breakthrough)

Tonight I had one of those moments that makes me so happy to be a writer.  As you might have read in yesterday’s post, I’ve been having trouble getting into the rewrite of the Domestic Comedy.  The script reads like I jammed it out in eleven days — which is only fair, since I DID jam it out in eleven days — but the haste in which it was written gives the rough draft a nice energy, a few scenes work pretty well and there are some nice moments that I came up with off the top of my head that I never even imagined during the plotting stage.  So there’s plenty to work with there in terms of raw material… or so I thought, until I actually tried to rewrite it.

After much headbanging (and not the fun kind), I zeroed in on my main problem: the third act is awful, centering around a would-be set piece that was intended to be a great trailer moment and instead just lies there like a giant, steaming turd.  But I had no idea what to replace the turd with.  For the better part of a week I’ve pondered this issue, to no avail.

Then, tonight, as I was sitting on the couch, bottle-feeding the Peanut in my lap with my left hand while attempting to scribble brainstorming notes onto a pad with my right, it hit me.  It was one of those lightning-to-the-head epiphanies, the kind that always brings to mind the image of John Belushi getting zapped by the ray of light in the church in THE BLUES BROTHERS.  I realized that my solution was this:

In coming up with the climax I wrote, I was working from the outside in.  Oh, sure, I’d set it up earlier in the story (albeit in a ham-fisted, amateurish manner, but what the hell, it’s a rough draft), but in practice it felt arbitrary.  It didn’t feel true to the characters; you can practically hear the gears of the malfunctioning plot grinding against one another while you read.  What I needed to do was work from the inside out — think about who the characters were, what they wanted, how they got in the way of each other in trying to attain their goal, and how it brought them to their respective low points at the end of Act II.  By establishing that, I could then figure out how they had to change during the climax.  And by establishing THAT, I could begin to work out a climax that felt more organic to the story and actually paid off the character arcs in an emotionally statisfying fashion.  As a bonus, I also suddenly had an idea of what the climactic set piece should actually be.  It was so perfect, yet so obvious, that I couldn’t believe I never thought of it earlier.

Moments like that feel so great; the whoosh of inspiration lasts only a few seconds but the warm and fuzzy afterglow can linger for hours.  I still have plenty of story details to work out and it all could still fall apart, but at least now I have a solid foundation, something to build on. 

(Of course, when I pitched this new climax to the Missus, she liked it but pointed out that it’s basically a thinly veiled fictionalization of her job situation in specific and our lives in general, albeit exaggerated to comic effect.  This, of course, never even occurred to me, once again proving that I’m possibly the least self-aware writer in the world, or at least my neighborhood.)

So anyway, why should you care about any of this, aside from the fact that I hope you think I seem like an okay guy and you’re rooting for me to succeed?  Well, if nothing else, it’s a good reminder of something to keep in mind with your own screenplays: when you hit a dead end, go back to your characters and rework from the inside out.  The people should drive the narrative, not the other way around, and more often than not, a story doesn’t work because the characters don’t work.

It’s a good thing I finally wrote that all down, ’cause god knows I forget it often enough.