Screenwriting 101

I know very little about screenwriting. I'm not letting it deter me, as I suspect that most people who try this game don't know shit about it. Or they know all the tricks and techniques that someone like Robert McKee sells them. I ain't exactly knocking the latter approach, but right now I'm working with the sort of hubris that comes from a person who has seen all the Coen Brothers and Tarantino films and also happens to have a masters degree in creative writing. I just gotta kill a character in a darkly comic way and I'm in, right?

Anyway, as I've experienced in my also-quite-brief time trying to write for theatre, it's tough to know exactly what direction the script is going to take once it gets into the hands of the folks I intend to collaborate with. I don't know what we'll have to work with in the way of location, actors, etc. So in one rare fit of "I must write a stage direction here" -- something I focus on with the same intensity I reserve for drinking Squirt (see previous post) -- I have written this stage direction based on my complete ignorance of just where this thing is going to be shot:

They continue to drink and finish their whiskies. Time passes. Joe plays pool (or darts, shuffleboard, touchscreen, sticks his dick in a hole in the wall -- whatever the location has to offer).

And that, my friends, is the kind of writing that tens of thousands of dollars worth of student loans and a small alcohol problem can buy you.

Epiphany

Is not precisely what I just experienced.

However, I did make a rational adjustment to my life-situation here. I was sitting down to write after a delicious meal at the MexiCuboRican restaurant down the street. I had a bistec encebollado sandwich with tostones and red beans. For whatever reason, I also purchased a 20 oz Squirt which I have been trying with limited success to suck down -- I tend to drink sugary sodas very rarely. And it occurred to me: Why the hell would I drink Squirt when I have half a bottle of Scotch here?

And so, with my Scotch and cigar, I am going to finish the first draft of this screenplay tonight.

After I watch/listen to this awesome video:



Fuck yeah.

Sausages for Ryan settlement

That's the beginning of the message on my Google Voice this morning.

I am starting a new program. A plan. A commitment, if you will. This is one of those obvious "I always said I ought to do it this way" things, where I never actually started to work that way. Starting last night and continuing from now on, every evening I'm blocking off a couple of hours purely for writing. Every single goddamn book, advice column, or pompous asshole who gets to read his or her work in front of an audience suggests working in such a way -- or at least to use a relatively similar method for organizing one's writing time. Nobody says "Just write whenever." Because that's just stupid.

It boils down to my asking, what is the difference between those people and me? They all have books, advice columns, and they get to pompously read their work in front of an audience, while lately I just sit around eating fried chicken and playing Xbox. I don't really ever want to write a book on method or style, and I definitely don't want to write advice columns, but I do want to get in front of an audience and pompously read my work. My published work, preferably. Yet in the past, I have mainly resorted to last-minute scrambles to produce writing, even for those pompous readings. And that worked for me to varying degrees while I was a student. But now that I am an "adult" who has to balance a career, family, mortgage, dead-end job, and strong desire to watch the MLB Network and The Daily Show, there's really not much of an excuse for me not to be writing every goddamn day.

For now, it's going to be fairly open -- I won't necessarily restrict myself to working on a single project at a time, though I think that if I begin to lose focus, I'll have to kick myself in the ass to pick things up. I'm getting back to work on the screenplay that I need to get written and hopefully shot this summer. And then the book. That seems to be a good way to comfortably ease my way back into the game. And if a blog post or some other kind of writing work has to enter into my block of writing time, then that's fine. As long as I am writing something, every day. Like I said at the beginning: obvious.

Time out for grammar

I don't do much work at work. But when I do it, I do it right. For instance, I have to send an email to our company's accountant. So I just spent an extra ten minutes reading up on mass nouns vs. count nouns (and from there, I moved on to splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, and possessives for words ending in S). I'm only doing this in order to decide whether to write "The data aren't in the spreadsheet" or "The data isn't in the spreadsheet," which at the end of the day, will turn out to be a completely trivial and meaningless decision. But I still haven't chosen. This may be a good time to get some coffee (mass noun). But first I have to wash my cup (count noun).

After a useless trip to an academic "career fair"

Perhaps I have the wrong view of my life. Lately (like, for the last two years) I've been really stressed about how ridiculously underemployed and impoverished I feel. I have tried with varying degrees of seriousness to get a better job, but it's not working out. And that whole depressing way of looking at myself is really bumming me out -- I feel like a loser for having an advanced degree and a shitty job. But there seem to be just too many barriers to the development of anything resembling a "career." So maybe the choice I need to make is to say "fuck it." I don't mean this in a suicidal way, but rather, a smoke lots of pot, write a shit-ton, and just relax about the various details grown ups generally worry about. Like repaying debt. Maybe I should be a slacker. A bohemian artsy wastoid. A hippy. A burnout.

It's not that I want to give up, or that I'm really even giving anything up. I'm simply adopting a new worldview. Today, I am anyway. I'll probably still apply for jobs here and there. But I think I might not stress about it so much.

I feel better already. And I've even done two hundred words worth of writing about it. All I need now is a reliable weed dealer.

Procrastination is...

I'll write more on this later.

Here's an honest assessment

I have never had a "real" job. Sure, I've worked in plenty of places. I was in the army for a bit. Bartended. Waited tables. Shelved books. Now I zap the zits off rich kids' digital faces in Adobe Photoshop. I don't get paid shit to do it. But I did go to grad school, so maybe I am a late bloomer. That big, bad-ass $28,000 a year and relatively affordable health insurance is just around the corner. I can feel it.

Today I read that some Chicago aldermen want to the city government to guarantee O'Hare foodservice workers an hourly wage of $11.03. I'm all for it, being a working man myself. I think everybody deserves a living wage. Of course, this is just a little bit more than I actually earn per hour. And by little bit, I'm talking about more than the three cents. So, any day now.

Because I earn such a small wage, I don't pay my creditors. See, it was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin on the porch with my family, singin and dancin down in Mississippi. I come from a low point in the middle class--or the "working class," really. My mom wasn't addicted to crack or anything, my parents are still married, and they even made me read books when I was growing up. And not just any books. I had to read Gulliver's Travels and shit like that. That's a real serious book, for those of you not in the know. I did not have a troubled or poverty-stricken childhood. But I did learn to do without.

Until... I got to college where I learned to use student loan money and credit cards to pay for rent, groceries, gas, beer, scotch, tattoos, and motorcycle shit, among other things. And forget about the army. My GI Bill cash went down the same hole.

I did this, like many, under the naive assumption that I would immediately enter the workforce after college and be blessed with a nice, comfortable $40,000 or so per year job. Even with my English degree from a mid-tier state school.

So I applied to graduate schools. And I got into one. A damn fine one, actually, with a name you'd recognize. My expectations grew, maybe I'd get a $60K job right after school. That's what everybody else does coming out of this place, right? Even with an MFA in creative writing? Still, I took on more debt.

And here I am: nearly two years out of graduate school and quickly approaching 30 years old. I make ten bucks an hour at a job I hate at a level inversely proportional to the level at which I feel underpaid and underemployed. And I get a dozen phone calls a day regarding my various defaults and past-dues and other nonsense. Naturally, I don't answer the phone if I don't have the number programmed in my contacts. And recently, I got the Google Voice. It's nice, I guess, though I don't make many calls with my computer. What I do use is the visual voicemail. And boy, does it produce some winners. Unfortunately, I don't save them.

Tonight's is the best I've ever seen though:

This message is for the call with Pioneer credit recovery and it's about your past due, Death

And really, that's all there is to it. This is the end, my friend. We've gone beyond debtor's prison. We're to the point of death squads marching down the street, taking out anyone in default. Which doesn't surprise me really. At any rate, I should probably seek out some parasitic credit consolidation company to help me out.

What harm could it do? After all, my death is past due.