The Page That Proves I Exist

oments after the Tigers eliminated the Yankees, I sat down to make progress on the Any Color You Want screenplay for the second time today. I wrote about eight lines all of which were about as good as the Yankees' swings at Fister, Sanchez, Verlander and Scherzer. I packed it in early, frustrated and without a good idea of what the next line would be, never mind the next 60 pages.

It's nights like these you'd think I'd consider hanging it up for good. Admittedly, I've been winging it lately with only vague prep done in advance, assuming it'll just come to me - if not in this draft, then in draft number nine. Creative writing, especially longer pieces (90+ pages), risks failure with every line. It is humbling. When done right, I'd argue, it's exhausting.

So why continue?

After watching a rather pale and very bearded dude for a year write from a distance, a beautiful woman once penned a poem that she handed over shortly before we parted ways. In it she included a question that has motivated me ever since. The question? "...and where's the page that proves you exist?" I'd like to think she was not referring to my long form birth certificate.

I write for a number of reasons. Writing allows me to flesh out my thoughts. It's cheaper than therapy. And novel ideas provide a fantastic high. I also write so that one day I can scribble, "The page that proves I exist," in her dedication.

The Hot Stove

etting definitive goals over a short period of time coupled with a healthy dose of self-bullying has worked well for my literary output historically. Which leads us to my latest challenge: 112 scenes by November 1st or the end of the World Series (whichever comes last), in other words, approximately five scenes a day.

Because I take literary criticism about as well as first time mothers take backhanded compliments about their newborns, sometimes it takes a while to admit the criticism is spot on and I need to change my baby, if you will.

And so I am. The first 14 pages of the screenplay for Any Color You Want (ACYW) stays; the next 88 go to the recycling bin along with a number of characters that I enjoyed creating, scenes I enjoyed writing and a story I enjoyed working on for a few years.

In comes the characters, scenes and story I should have written the first time around instead of taking a more round-about route. While the round-about route made for a good story, by avoiding the question I laid out early on ("How would locals react to foreigners setting up a Peace Corps office in the U.S.?" or, "Can we ever accept foreign help?") I also avoided the hallmark of good dramatic writing: vigorously rubbing conflicting characters and ideas directly against each other and enjoying the sparks.

If you groaned when you saw the ACYW acronym, thinking perhaps, perchance!, I'd finally laid it to rest, well, you're not alone. Part of me groaned too. But think about this: Knows all those bands that had killer first albums and dud sophomore efforts shortly thereafter? They just burst on the scene, right? Came out of nowhere with this great material, right? Nah. Chances are they'd been playing that first album for years before anyone knew who they were. That crappy second album? That's their record label rushing them to put something out to capitalize on their popularity.

Has ACYW been on the stove for a while? You bet it has. It just needs to reduce some more. You can't hurry a good stock.

Progress Report: Cookie-Wise Pablo is with the illustrator! The Boston Squeeze is on the back burner till I hit the depths of winter and get the itch to grab Bull Durham or The Bad News Bears  before pitchers and catchers report. The series of seven kids books I wrote a few weeks ago? Still on ice. And then there's another screenplay in the works that's either blasphemous or wicked awesome. Hopefully both. But that's for another time. As you can see, I take writing a lot like baking: One project in the oven, one on the rack cooling, one setting up in the fridge, another on the table waiting to be placed out while I nibble on the works of others keeping my taste buds sharp.

Seeing-Eye Single

ormer baseball commissioner and Yale professor Bart Giamatti once wrote in his essay, "The Green Fields of the Mind":

Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight.

The last couple seasons I've indulged in baseball the way some indulge in drink adopting the quotidian schedule of my team and its players in lieu of my own. This past summer, though, I started to chart a different course. No, I did not stop following or playing baseball. That's heresy. Rather, I started started writing a collection of baseball short stories.

Why spend the off-season doing what I did every off-season (Reading DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall, watching The Bad News Bears and waiting for pitchers and catchers to report) when I could create my own?

That's part of the reason for the collection. In truth, I find that I only write about something when I find there to be something seriously off-kilter about it. I wrote Any Color You Want in 2007-08 because I thought it priceless that the U.S. continued to send Peace Corps volunteers out into the world, but that we couldn't take care of ourselves (and wouldn't take help from others). I wrote Hooey Savvy because despite all the talk about the financial crises, people are still afraid or uncertain about how to talk about money, never mind teach kids about it.

So what's out of whack about baseball? Like any religion or family, baseball has its traditions. Whether we know the origins of those traditions is another matter. Whether we follow those traditions is yet another. Those are two angles I look at.

Otherwise, the language, history, and culture of baseball lends well to stretching out metaphors. Once upon a time writers used symbols and metaphors to avoid political persecution. Today, it seems, symbols and metaphors (indirect speech) are the spoonfuls of honey that we coat our crushed up pills in. I can rewrite E.B. White's essay Here Is New York and deride the quaint 18 inches of privacy of his extinct city (to a chorus of Bronx cheers) or I can write a comedy about a ten year-old blogger of a minor league team who is called out by the players (to a chuckle or two) and make the same point. I prefer the haha route.

Plus, I'd like to have the book have its own corresponding set of baseball cards for all the characters in it. If nothing else, that'll force me to focus on giving my characters detail.

In my previous work, I've swung for the fences with big ideas. This is more of a seeing-eye single before I go back to the home run derby later this year.

Progress Update: The fourth draft of my kids book on financial education, Hooey Savvy, is done. And yes, it is more memorable than it was a draft ago. 27 stories, 80 plus songs, 120 pages. I've passed it on to some teachers and folks who know far more about economics than I for their feedback. Now I need to read up on the competition. I'd also like to hit the road to conduct interviews in areas with average low credit scores to learn what failed and what education is or isn't doing to remedy the situation.

I Like Byron, I Give Him a 42...

This past summer I fumbled along as a pastry cook to my chef's irritation. In an attempt to improve my production, he asked me what the greatest American invention was. A rhetorical question, I allowed him to answer: The assembly line. "Set up your assembly line and let it work for you," he told me. I did it because if I didn't I was gone. With time I learned that it took the thinking out of cooking and whenever you can take thinking out of anything you gain in speed.

My last novel, Any Color You Want, took at least nine drafts and a few years. But, that's the way novel writing goes, right? It takes drafts, it takes years. It's not cooking. It's not something that comes out of the oven the same day ready. Right?

Or is it? In Michael Eldridge's screenwriting course he made us fill out character questionnaires. These questionnaires forced us to think long and hard about each character, major or minor, to the point where these characters themselves could have entire screenplays written about them.

In preparation for The Boston Squeeze, a book of baseball short stories that I started writing last summer, I dug up the seven questions Eldridge asked us to consider for each character. I then tweaked what he gave us and built my own assembly line.

But perhaps "assembly line" is not the appropriate phrase. It has a physical, orderly connotation to it. Let's call it mapping. I'll map out each character, story and location three times each because I find my first attempt typically errs on the side of cliché. It takes another two to break through that wall of stereotypes to find the individual.

Once these are ready I won't have to think about each character, story or location. I can just write.

For some, the idea of a literary assembly line is apostasy. Writing should flow, they argue. It should come from inspiration. I do not believe there is one approach to writing. I have yet to attend a reading where an attendee didn't ask the author about their "process" during the question and answer session. I have also yet to attend a reading where an author gave a good answer. By good, I mean a detailed, useful answer. Like Mr Keating in Dead Poets Society, I have no desire to Moneyball writing. But I believe that there are detailed processes available for writers that, if followed, will not only separate them from amateurs, but streamline the writing process.

Another benefit of this system, hopefully, is more consistency. A good writer will retain command over his characters from start to finish; a poor writer loses track of his characters' characteristics. This leads to the characters either saying or doing things you'd wouldn't expect them to or you get the feeling that they aren't characters at all, but rather personifications of whatever clever thought or idea the author just had and can't help but share the story (and character) be damned. Oh have I done that before.

I won't know the results of this experiment till the Squeeze is through, but I'm hopeful.

Progress Update: Sent in Hooey Savvy to the copyright office. Yeehaw.

The Incredible Shrinking Screenplay

elieve it or not, Any Color You Want has lost 47 pages since the last post without exercise, exorcise, diet or extreme surgical procedure. At 98 pages (approximately 1 hour 40 minutes of screen time), it's ready for the beach. Once I focused on some basic questions (is this scene/character/storyline really important to the major dramatic question? REALLY?) it became clear what could stay and what had to go.

Often I didn't cut characters; I just reassigned bits of dialogue between minor characters to major characters. By keeping my cast small I simultaneously kept conflict up whereas with a large cast conflict dissipated making for a longer and slower read. Now it's a quicker and edgier.

Banging it out

ith a little more time on my hands lately, I put it into adapting ACYW and on Monday morning I finished. Yeehaw! I can now put it aside for a spell, take a look at it before I start the screenwriting course later in September and for the time being move on to other projects.

I can think of three stories that have been on my mind of late; the story of a meal, a story about searching for one's lost sense of humor and a romantic comedy along financial-political lines. Each story challenges me in different ways and I believe each story holds a lesson for me to learn from simply taking the time to ruminate on the issues they explore.

On to the next...

Rehab

t the pace I'm on, I'll finish adapting ACYW in about a month; just in time to begin the Gotham Writers' Workshop screenwriting course at the end of September.

I'd like to write more, but to be honest I'm at the point where I feel that taking this course is like checking myself into rehab. I've overdosed on this project and now need to dry out, to see the essentials of it, to boil it down, to finish it up and to move on to other projects which I look forward to thinking about, exploring, developing, getting high on, riding that buzz and then moving on to the next hit.

My lack of productivity has also translated into a change of identity. I'm no longer seen by those who know me as a writer, but as a cook, as a baseball fan, as a softball player, as an alumni coordinator, not as a man of letters and that I miss. I've lost a step, I can feel it. I look forward to getting back in literary shape.

Given Lemons, I'll Make Sorbet

oly cow! It's been a month since I last wrote. No bueno. Sorry, folks. In general, progress on the screen adaptation of ACYW continues, but just not as fast as I'd like. I've been given a lot of lemons lately to deal with and just the other day figured out how to make lemon sorbet with them (which is particularly good with Prosecco). It's a new project I look forward to starting as it deals with the significant loss of my sense of humor lately. Hopefully in the process of writing, I'll get it back or at least find out where it's been hiding and try to coax it out with some other lemon-based good.

People, Events, Ideas - Screenplays?

few years ago I came across the following saying which one website attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." I'd tweak this a bit and say, "Great minds tend to discuss ideas. Average minds discuss tend to discuss events. Small minds tend to discuss people."

I mention this because the woman who just read ACYW and provided feedback essentially said all I cared about were the ideas driving the plot and not the characters. While I do not subsequently align myself with Roosevelt's "great minds", I do agree with the assessment. While I grew to enjoy my characters after a lot of work, they do come second, if that, to the ideas that drive my writing.

To this end, she recommended I make ACYW a screenplay. I have never read a screenplay, but I requested some from the library and will do my homework.

This brings up some questions. First, why can ACYW afford to be less character driven as a screenplay than as a book? Second, why is it necessary to be intimately familiar with characters to appreciate the ideas at hand? Third, if a majority of the world thinks about events and people how screwed is work driven by ideas? This also, of course, begs a more personal question.

Jinxing Myself

ork on The Beer Flower Limited (The Girl Who Cried L-v-) has temporarily stalled while I tend to other matters that require attention. Yeah, I'm not happy about it either, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

That being said, a writer/editor is taking a close look at Any Color You Want. We'll then consider how to pitch it to some of the agents and independent publishers that she knows. For as much as I'm trying not to get ahead of myself, it is fun to think about a possible book tour and how I would present myself and my work in an engaging manner. More on this later, like, when it gets closer to being a reality.

Mining the calendar

n Any Color You Want I used the lead-up to and the outcome of a kids' soccer tournament to build tension (along with a historic Election Day, a mammoth financial meltdown and other goodies). In The Beer Flower Limited (The Girl Who Cried L-v-), I have a rivalry between two individuals (Pijiu and Houston), two countries (China and the U.S.), (at least) two media outlets (East and West) and other factors to build tension, but it never hurts to consult the calendar.

In this case, I'm consulting the Chinese calendar, in particular, their calendar and history of cultural festivals as described in Traditional Chinese Festivals (2007) from the Spring Festival to the Harvest Festival. Until I actually get to make the trip to China, this book and others have greatly enlightened me as to Chinese traditions, history, culture and language - all bits that can only make my story richer and more poignant.

Working with a particular festival can also help me time my story as a community/country prepares for a festival, celebrates a festival and then recovers from it essentially providing its own arc which the rest of the story can run parallel to, if I so choose.

Lastly, thanks to Jessica Hische for the capital "I" that lead off this post. She has made such caps available for free through her Daily Drop Cap site.

Telephone poles, hedgehogs and rigor mortis

As I did for my African characters in Any Color You Want, I've done some research into Chinese proverbs and idioms for The Beer Flower Limited (The Girl Who Cried L-v-). Some that I've come across include:

Using telephone poles as chopsticks - putting much material to petty use.

A dog snapping at a hedgehog - having nowhere to bite.

A hand stretched from a coffin - asking for money even when dead.

A swarm of ants on a hot oven - milling around in a panic.

These come from 100 Chinese Two-Part Allegorical Sayings.

Of Beer Trucks, Bottle Labels and Chapstick

While I'm still working on the broad strokes of The Beer Flower Limited (The Girl Who Cried L-v-), I have already come up with two to three touches that I look forward to working into the greater picture. In Any Color You Want, it was the Car Alarm Symphony. This time I'm going to play with beer truck murals, beer bottle labels and chapstick.

And for those of you familiar with A Midas Spring, yes, that chapstick.

18 chapters in 18 days

That's the challenge I'm presenting myself. I'm already pissed off for not introducing myself to a girl tonight at Amy Bloom's reading so I'm going to take it out on The BFL. 18 2-4 page chapters in 18 days. Mark it down. February 27. It's on.

In other news, I submitted ACYW to a contest and started research on small presses.

Learning from the past

After a year and a half of writing Any Color You Want, friends suggested that I cut the first 70 pages and get to the action. Before doing so, I noted what bits from those first 70 pages I really needed and then found homes for them later in the book. Tonight I've taken pre-emptive steps to making the same mistake with The Beer Flower Limited.

Until tonight, my outline consisted of 7 chapters. Earlier this week I hit the point where the little engine ran out of track. Over the last few days I've gone back to flesh out the outline more. So far I've more than doubled the number of chapters, adding depth to the story and characters. I've also rejigged the order of things so that the reader hits the ground running instead of being hit over the head with slow moving background info upfront.

All this being said, I'm still not sure where the story will end up. Back to work on the outline...