You Call Yourself A Writer?

Hitting your forties isn’t all bad.  We’re conditioned to hate aging, but there are benefits gained along the way.  You stop giving a shit about two-thirds of everything, which is nice.  What’s left, if you’re sane, are the things you have some control over and a great deal of perspective.

It’s the perspective that keeps bringing back to blogging.  I use it to sort it all out.  For instance, even though I believed I began taking writing seriously about five or ten years ago, the truth is I’ve had the instincts and actions of a writer since I was a tiny little dude with a cowlick.  No one was paying any attention, and I certainly had no guidance of any kind, so it all went unnoticed.  I was raw and I didn’t recognize my love of writing, even though it was all there in front of me. 

It’s difficult to find a starting point, so I’ll just pick fifth grade. My friend Eric already was a reader and comic book collector.  He drew his own stick figure comics and I quickly joined in.  I loved to be funny, so mine were goofier as opposed to Eric’s adventure-style comics. I also remember recording cassette tapes of comedy bits and sketches that were ridiculous.  Maybe the goal was to get them on the radio?  I don’t know. I enjoyed my creative writing assignments at school, and I borrowed the occasional book from the library, but I wasn’t a big reader. We also were pretty broke, so I didn’t get into comics, either.

I fell in love with the 1980’s comedy boom and I started my own comedy notebook when I was around sixteen or so. It was all hacky shit, but I was consistent, and I dreamed of doing stand-up.  I expanded my creative writing journal into a daily journal with comedy writing, poetry, and lists of insane shit.   The reason I didn’t set off into the world of comedy is a large book in itself, but mixed in there were a few open mics and writing for a sketch comedy show for a little while.  Now, what I didn’t notice at the time was that I got a bigger charge coming up with ideas for jokes and sketches than I did performing.  So much so, that even though I intellectually knew that a comedy career was never going to happen, I still wrote material.  I still journaled.  I still scratched down ideas. 

I also learned three chords on a guitar and started a band with my friend Sam.  We played for ourselves and we knew we sucked.  It was for fun and to spend some time together as we dealt with fatherhood, work, and bills, plus I got to write lyrics. Lyrics to me were free verse poems that could be anything.  I may have learned two more chords, but I wrote a shitload of poetry. 

I was in college at the time taking writing classes and I began to learn that a lot of my stuff didn’t suck.  Some of it had promise.  I purposely took extra English and writing classes with six-thousand-word requirements to get more practice.  (Was I a writing major? No.  A history major.  Remember, understanding myself didn’t come to my late thirties.)  My poetry got a little better, but I switched to short stories.  I had great professors, and even a few of my upper-level history professors commented on my papers.  I was good.  I could organize on my feet and I knew how to communicate.

I was ready to…become a substitute teacher.

You can guess how that ended.  Pretty soon I had a weird job working from home that paid the bills and kept me around for when the kids got home from school.  It was right around then I started to understand the disaster I had wrought.  I didn’t want to perform.  I didn’t want to sing.  I didn’t want to teach.  I wanted attention, for damn sure, but the thing that kept me going was the writing.  I didn’t want to be a movie star, but I would write a movie. Better yet, I would like to write the book that was made into a movie.

Around 2003 or so, right before we uprooted our lived and moved to Oregon, I took a crack at writing my first book.  I set it in the hotel I worked at while I was in college and it was about a guy in my situation dealing with life’s bullshit.  It wasn’t good. But, it was 76,000 words and I put it together. I tried a movie script, too.  I found a copy of the Clerks script online to estimate length and the structure of a script. Scripts are pretty fucking boring to write. Finished it.  Put it in a drawer.

We moved out here in 2005 and I started writing a book by hand while I had a desk job.  We had nothing to do and I wasn’t allowed to use the computer to write anything, so I bought a pack of yellow legal pads and wrote by hand during the day and transcribed it onto my computer at night.  It also wasn’t good, but I tried switching back and forth between timelines, which is something I like in fiction.

When we moved into our new house, I looked through the box where I keep all my old writing shit.  Tattered journals and school notebooks with half-conceived premises and characters.  Binders with song lyrics and shitty poems and more story ideas I forgot about years ago.  The box weighs a ton. There is so much of me and my time in there.  Ninety percent of it has not been seen by anyone.  It took me so long to see that I’ve been trying to write and get it out there the whole time. The proof was sitting there for years. I had to go to therapy to see my own development as a writer.  I had to go to therapy to have the nerve to call myself a writer.

I’ve had about ten abandoned projects since then, and four completed books.  I write now because it’s who I am and who I was designed to be.  I’ve made about nineteen dollars as a writer.  Do I want to make more?  Hell yeah.  Do I want to do it for a living?  Absolutely.  Whether or not that ever happens is mostly out of my hands. All I can control is the work and the enjoyment I get from it.  Anonymity gives me the freedom to experiment and do whatever the hell I want.  There aren’t any expectations. 

It’s just me and my ideas. 

Just a writer.

Tell Me Of This Thing You Humans Call 'Fun'.

Daytona Beach is not logical.

Here’s a little tip about writing blog posts. Aside from the entire endeavor remaining an enormous waste of time that has no real benefits other than a little bit of writing practice, it helps to have an interesting take when you create one. Once you have your take, you have to judge whether or not the three or four people that might read it would care. Everyone has their own tastes, but no one really cares when the viewpoint is from that of a whiny little bitch. Struggles with mental illness, shyness, social anxiety…those are all worth detailing as long as it comes from a place of truth and not merely complaining. 

I’ve been trying to attack this subject for years and I have never been able to successfully crack it.  Every time I give it a go, it sounds whiny. Now, I think I’ve found my angle.  I’m not judging it; I’m simply admitting I am confused by the entire concept of fun.

Yes, fun.  That fun.  The fun we all crave in our lives and most of us have far too little of.  The thing kids can do at almost any time, but adults have to take steps to carve out time for.

I’ve been attempting to solve this riddle for about ten years now.  When my sons hit high school, I realized that daily parenting had loosened up a bit, and in a few short years, my kids were able to take care of their own business.  That left my wife and me with this thing called time to ourselves.  We still worked a lot and the kids weren’t all the way gone, but the time popped up every week.  It was now time to think about fun.

I can only speak for myself.  I suck at fun. I don’t know what I lacked as a child, but I wasn’t fun at all.  I went along with fun sometimes, but mostly I liked conversation and that’s about it.  I liked my free trips to Disney in Orlando, and I liked going to the park with my kids.  There.  There you go.  No parties or blowouts or raves.  No lost weekends or spring break bashes.  No trips round the world.  No fucked-up Friday nights and Saturday hangovers.  No skiing, boating, mountain climbing, hang-gliding, bungee jumping, softball, volleyball, or roller derby.

This is not me complaining.  This is me being truthful.  I sincerely didn’t give a shit at all.  I never felt the ‘fear of missing out’ that much, either. 

Here’s an example.  My mother secured a beach condo for a few days in the summer at New Smyrna Beach in Florida. She invited Amy, me and the kids, and my brother and his girlfriend for a few days of sun, surf, sand, and a big pool.  All I could remember is wanting to go back inside after an hour or so of bullshit beach stuff.  I wanted the air conditioning, shade, and a cool drink.  We talked about those trips recently and I said to my mother “Why can’t it just be that?  Why bother with all the hot sun and sand in your crotch?  Why not just hang out in the AC and chill?”

I imagine the same scenario with skiing here in Oregon.  I’d rather just curl up by the fire and read or something.  Maybe listen to music and watch the snow fall. 

I figured out why Amy and I don’t have fun. It’s a combination of time and money.  We’re still chasing after weekends off for both of us and having money at the same time is a rarity.  Now, those are actual reasons.  But truthfully, with those variables going our way, we still wouldn’t know what to do. We managed a trip last year to the San Francisco area and we basically slept in our Airbnb room and just went out to eat.  No Alcatraz, no Golden Gate Bridge.  We are so unaccustomed to fun that we don’t know what to do with it if fell in our laps. We also didn’t really care.  We had time together and caught up on sleep. Fun?  Didn’t really even think about it.

There is a pressure to have fun.  It’s in the culture, it’s in advertising, it’s all over social media.  I feel it and I do take it pretty hard.  I’m no spring chicken and I don’t have a lot of fun stories to share.  I also realize I’m taking cues from others on how to live my life and that always means trouble.  So, even at this age, I still don’t know what to do.

When I’m in my element, I seem fun and I have fun. I’m funny, I can relay a story and I like listening to others do the same.  That’s about it.  Most other fun makes me uncomfortable.  Mindless partying seems like it’s under the purview of the stupid. Sorry.  The run-of-the-mill having a drink with friends is nice, but I don’t drink and that’s a stickler for a lot of these situations.  If I wanted to go out and feel self-conscious about my choices in life…I wouldn’t.  I’d just stay the fuck home.  That leaves activities, which do pique my interest. A little more money and time and I think I can convince Amy to do a little hiking and camping, or a least a little glamping.

My confusion begins and ends in my brain.  This is something that I should have figured out thirty years ago, but it still feels foreign.  A combination of social anxiety, shyness, lack of experience…take your pick.  Once you hit your forties you should understand who you really are and what you really aren’t.  And I guess…I do not have a natural inclination to be fun.

And I’m not sure that I care.

Here’s How You Make Another Lost

Sniff. I miss it.

Ever since Lost became a hit on broadcast TV fifteen years ago, they’ve been trying to recreate the magic that kept people coming back.  They fail over and over again for a bunch of reasons, but it doesn’t keep them from trying.  I think I’ve developed a list of things that need to happen if you even want to have a shot at making something even close.

It was and remains my favorite show of all time. I loved it, I miss it, I’ll defend its flaws and praise its triumphs.  I’ve also watched enough episodic TV in my life to discern the important differences between Lost and any other show.

The first ingredient would be to have a collection of writers with a common love for science fiction and character-driven stories.  Remember when Lost came out.  It straddled the end of traditional TV and the beginning of what we have now.  The series was bisected by a writer’s strike and is split into two halves.  Seasons 1 – 3 and Seasons 4-6.  The first three seasons existed when a drama needed around 22 episodes to fill a season.  Lost had a hugely successful premiere on ABC, it got the buzz and everything it needed to be a show that stayed on the air.  But the story barely left the ground.  They opened up a bunch of mysteries, but the majority of the show was flashbacks to the characters’ lives before the island.  It set up the skeleton of the show an allowed us to know who all the major players were.  If we didn’t have the answers yet, we had the characters.

Season 2 was the addition of a few new characters and their interaction with our original bunch.  Still, we had time to see the dynamics and we got plenty of mysteries along the way.  By Season 3, they started up the same old machine again and fans were ready for something else.  They show had us, but now what?  The flashbacks were stale, and they seemed to be reaching for tidbits that would keep us interested.  But that time had passed.  The show had to change.  Then, it did.

The reason why all of this happened was that the show was left alone to find itself. Not just ratings, but what the show was going to be.  TV isn’t like a book or a movie.  For those, you need everything planned out before you roll camera or show anyone your finished story.  A show can go on for years.  It can change as it goes along, and Lost did just that.

Cast members get fired.  Characters get killed off.  Writer’s strike.

Do shows have the freedom to flounder a bit anymore?  I assume that some do because the threshold of success is so much lower, but they can’t possibly have that much time to figure it all out.  If you want a Lost, you gotta leave them alone for a while.

I’ve watched a good portion of the Lost wanna-be’s in the last decade or so and I can also say to any who try to emulate, make sure that the mystery isn’t dumb. So many of these premises are so uninteresting or one-note that you can’t possibly believe that you’ll get six seasons out of it.  You can’t have all the electricity disappear or a mystery plane and leave it at that.  You can’t have the mystery be “What caused this?”  Eventually, you’ll have to spill the beans, then what?  You need to establish a world where mysteries are normal and they keep happening.  The characters solve one riddle but two more pop up along the way.  One central conceit isn’t enough.  Remember, the Lost island was more than an island.

Oh my God, don’t be so damn serious.  A story with a big cast should have all kinds of people, not just stoic leaders and stoic troublemakers.  You need levity and development that is just…light.  Fun.  You can learn a lot from people at play and so many sci-fi characters are so serious and boring.  You need a Hurley.  It helps to have a dog, too.

Here is the big one.  The absolutely necessary ingredient that separates Lost from a moderately memorable sci-fi hit.  You can only put out one show a week. In between each week, you have time to digest and episode and wonder what would come next. No bingeing at all. Bingeing makes it a different show.  Some shows benefit, some don’t. I watched the series as it aired, and I would share theories between seasons of what happened and what was to come.  It’s also important to point out the relationship Lost had with its fans.  There was so much content between seasons for fans to eat up and keep the hungry for the upcoming premiere. Mini-sodes, scavenger hunts, fake documentaries, podcasts…all this was brand new stuff when this show was running.  The creators heard fans and reacted.  No one will know how much it affected the story, but I bet there were a few decisions made based on the fans’ opinions.

It’s easier said than done, of course.  Frankly, I think it’s foolish to try to make something like Lost.  So much of it was timing and TV was so shitty at the time.  I don’t know if those budgets exist anymore either.  Mr. Robot is a sort of Lost-type show.  The Good Place is a sitcom version.  Blindspot, The Blacklist, Scandal…those were all knock-off carbon copy Lost’s with different flavors.  The influence should be to create something cool and weird and unique and compelling that takes chances.  Take those swings to see what works and maybe you’ll set up your own island.  I’d watch.