The point of all this is that writing is hard, rewriting can be hell. We all have this moment of “Should I still be trying to do this?”
But, I think the key is if you have to do this to get you through the day, then you must do it. If you want to make a million bucks, there are
a million other ways to do it easier/faster.

I’ve been putting in 3-5 hours a day on this thing and I’ve barely scratched
the surface. But, in the process of slashing and burning, I’ve found serendipity
intercedes and the light bobble(My old landlord called lightbulbs
this term) goes off.

This rambling blog entry is just sitting out here to tell you
all to keep writing and don’t worry, we all have, as Blake Snyder puts it, “Dark night of the script.”

You have to power through if you need to, but if you can’t, either the idea
is not worth it, or you don’t really want to be a screenwriter.

Sure, the writing group came
up for a day or two, and Laura (the wife) came up for three days. I really
needed it. But, all told I’ve spent 6 of the last 9 days alone.

The good news is that in one week I wrote 75 pages of my next screenplay.
I actually wrote 55 new pages, but I ended up rewriting a whole lot of
the first 20 that I had. Plus, I had to restructure it, reorder scenes, reduce
the number of characters, and realize that I had written myself into a corner.

Sequestering myself (or growing the beard) was key to finishing pages. I’ll
admit that, but I still only wrote a max of six hours a day. What does this
mean? It means that I can go back to my regular life (sans mosquitoes and mean
rural dogs) and still get pages done within my cliched urban lifestyle: freelance
work, great coffee, dog-friendly stores, satellite TV, Indian food, and good
old fashioned human contact. I just have to be more protective of my creative
time, and I urge everyone else to make a date with yourself to write every
day, even if it’s just journaling.

Amazing! I must admit, I had taken about a month
off of writing, and like the trumpet (my ex-harsh mistress), a month
is just about enough time for your chops to atrophy. The first day of writing
felt like blowing on that mouthpiece and feeling the air escape from
the corners of my mouth. Of course, with writing, nobody
else has to suffer through horrible long tones, arpeggios, and lips slurs.
My brother-in-law/ex-roommate/ex-coworker/ex-bandmate still recoils at the
thought of hearing all that Allen Vizzutti stuff. With writing, others just
have to suffer through the 1st draft screaming fits, the 2nd draft blues, and
the third draft questioning of one’s talent.  Those later drafts
are just so much fun, aren’t they? Polish, polish, polish. OK, we know these
suckers are never done even if they’re D-O-N-E.

So, why bother anyone with this useless blog entry? Well, I think it’s important
that we remember to keep writing no matter what, every day, whether the muse
strikes or not. We have to make the time and if we write shit, so what, we’re
writing.  Thinking about writing isn’t writing. Talking about writing
isn’t writing. Writing is writing. We hear it all the time, but now I get it.
It’s not so scary to stare at the blank page once you realize that it is OK
to write crap, cause you’re gonna have to rewrite it anyway. That’s been my
problem all along. Just get it down–the mantra of every teacher/mentor I’ve
had. I have to lock that editor in the closet with his wee red pen and his
wee beady eyes and his wee beady thesaurus. I’ll let him out, but not until
we’re done with that first draft or maybe even the second. 

I also forgot that I love to write screenplays. I get so obsessed with research,
character bios, outlines, and beat sheets, that I forgot that I discover so
much while writing in Courier 12 point font and yelling at Final Draft for
adding spaces or forgetting scene headings.

We have a lot of power as writers. We have the ability to escape the doldrums
of a remote luxury cabin or the clamor of a tiny house near Aurora, without
physically going anywhere. For
hours a day, we get to forget the world around us, fall in love with or kill
off our characters, put in a fight or chase scene (at the beginning of the
second half of Act II, I promise), throw a few dogs (ruff ruff, not bang bang)
in there, blow up the car, make someone’s clothes fall off or see-through,
create secret societies, make people cry, and show people having a good time
even though they’ve fucked up their life or we’ve thrown down the gauntlet
before them. On top of all that, it’s legal, in this country.

That’s pretty cool in my book/screenplay. Off to bed. Gonna drive back to
Seattle in the morning and meet up with our guests for this weekend, Bill True
and Dean Hyers. I am stoked. That’s dude for elated.

INT. THE BAR – EVENING

Jeff, Steve and Patrick sit around their usual table.

JEFF

And what if Susan asks if you liked your best friend’s bottom?

STEVE

What if?

JEFF

Do you know what she’ll really be asking? Do you know what Captain Subtext
would say?"

*This is where I fell out of my couch, or however you say that.

STEVE

Captain Subtext?

JEFF

She’ll be saying "Do you fancy my best friend?"

STEVE

And who is…Captain…Subtext?

JEFF

So what will you tell her when she asks you that?

STEVE

The truth.

JEFF
But you do fancy her. Everybody fancies Sally.

STEVE

OK, I’ll tell her lies.

JEFF

She’ll know.

STEVE

Will Captain Subtext tell her?

JEFF
Captain Subtext isn’t a real person, Steve.

STEVE
Yes, I got that. So who will tell her?

JEFF

The prickles, the blurts, and the head laugh.

And are they real, or do they work with the Captain?

JEFF

Oh Steve, they’re real.

Now, you might be asking, what has that got to do with anything? Well, I’m
reading a small, but brilliant book by Charles Baxter called "The
Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot" which contains some astounding comments
about setting the stage to write subtextual dialogue. The first time I heard
about subtext was in Robert McKee’s "Story" Workshop.

The subtext (and this
is where the intrepid Captain comes in) is the unstated, unspoken, oblique
feelings the characters are having or implying.  As
Baxter puts it, "It is not that actions speak louder than words; they
speak instead of words."   He also says, "The story in
the foreground serves as what I call the "staging area," where we
witness the gradual uprising of what has gone unsaid. As a consequence, [Beaushean]
stories are almost ritually haunted by the inexpressible."I can’t wait
to get further in this book.

Basically, writing the subtext, or not writing it as it were, is the best
way to avoid on-the-nose (OTN) dialogue. In novice screenplays, we often
see characters thinking out loud to one another and inserting large bits of
backstory (exposition). The experts do a great job of expressing the unexpressed,
making their characters lie through their teeth while we know how they feel,
and learning about characters through their actions. Pretty cool.

There’s nothing like finishing a screenplay, right?
Whether anybody likes it, options it, produces it, or uses it for toilet paper
(card stock title pages hurt), it’s an accomplishment in its own right. I applaude
anyone who has finished a screenplay, whether it be a short, a TV teleplay,
or feature.

On a related note, now that it’s (nearly) done, we can apply to some upcoming
screenplay competitions, along with the rest of you. Good luck.

Based on the screenplays I’ve read recently from some of our members,
I think those judges will be pleasantly suprised by those scripts coming
from Washington State.

• April 1 – BlueCat
• April 11/May 1/May 8 – WA State Screenplay Competition
• Apr 15 – Scriptapalooza
• Mar 15/Apr 15 – PAGE
• May 1 – Script PIMP
• May 1 – Nicholl Fellowship

Writing (Original Screenplay):
Juno by Dibalo Cody
Lars and the Real Girl by Nancy Oliver
Michael Clayton by Tony Gilroy
Ratatouille by Brad Bird. Story by Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco, Brad Bird
The Savages by Tamara Jenkins

Writing (Adapted Screenplay):
Atonement by Christopher Hampton (based on Ian McEwan’s novel)
Away From Her by Sarah Polley (based on Alice Munro’s The Bear Came Over The Mountain)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Ronald Harwood (based on Jean-Dominique Bauby’s novel, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon)
No Country For Old Men by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel)
There Will Be Blood by Paul Thomas Anderson (baed on Upton Sinclair’s Oil)