A Year Since, Part II

Wave 4, Oil Pastels on Archival Paper 6" x 10"

As I was saying...recovery...

My right brain, it turns out, has a lot to express. Prolific is an understatement, especially as my energy reserves gained some momentum. At times I have been drawing four or five pieces of artwork a week! I went from drawing pictures of people, to drawing pictures of the dreams I was having about great waves that I would simply walk into. It was an “of course I walk into giant tsunami waves” moment. Then I began to combine the style of the waves to the faces I drew, and so on all year, just seeing what I could do with this wonderful, colorful, soft and tender medium, the oil pastel. Again, I received so much support for what I shared with the social web that it encouraged me to create more and more, to experiment with detail and ideas. It has become a possible pivot in my career goals...to be a professional artist. I am looking for some kind of viable confirmation that this is a sensible thing to do. Har. I have projects and ideas just growing all over the place and a need to set up some parameters and plans for them before the garden becomes an unmanageable jungle...

Dragon Wave, Oil Pastels on Black Archival Paper, 19" x 20"

My friend, Erika Napoletano, made a few  really viable suggestions in her blog about new beginnings earlier this week. She suggested looking at what was NOT next. Oy. That would mean a decision and while it was easy for me to quit some things along the way, it is not easy for me to quit the something that used to be my dream, but maybe isn't anymore, and maybe needs to be revisited before I really, really say NOT.

I am challenged by the thing I once dreamed of doing for my whole life, well since I was about 10 years old: writing. I was challenged for a while before I was diagnosed. I’d say I’ve been struggling for 7 years to stay with writing, for writing’s sake and for a career path. The left temporal lobe is important to the skills of writing, but not to the talent of it, I believe. Why do I feel this urge to write, and feel just as much, "oh no, really?"

So it is never a shortage of albeit rusty skills and opinions. This is a long, long blog, for instance, and I knew that much, so I divided it into three parts. It is a question of what is my point? What can I say that hasn't been said a million times better by a million other writers? I would love to be a writer who could write about adventures I haven't had because that is really what I dreamed of writing. Turns out I write about life as I live it, and I can't imagine that it would entertain anyone as much as it entertains me. This is a writer's conundrum, period, but it is a weird struggle now with added problem of the order of words being not normal and in need of practice.

Before I had the surgery I composed 100 poems, easily. They aren’t perfect. The grammar is a mess, but when I take a moment to fix that, to rearrange a few words, they’re not so bad. I really love some of them, especially my Tarot poems. I have always had a thing for poetry, but, truthfully, I wanted to be a screenwriter. Screenwriting is about setting up the visual of a hero's journey and that’s my thing. I wanted this for an awfully long time and made some good progress up until 7 years ago.  Ask any of my students and they can confirm I have a true passion for this craft. Perhaps, it is the divorce I went through from my co-producer that increased my trepidation of touching the craft and letting it grow, or perhaps it was the pressure, and release of pressure, on my left temporal lobe. At any rate, screenwriting has been put on a shelf, and now I’m at a stage where I am considering putting it into the storage unit for memorabilia. Leaving windows open for a lot of other ways to write, but still.

Here is an amazing little piece of irony. The book I was studying, "Story" by Robert McKee, a screenwriter's guru, was left behind at the hospital after surgery. I didn't miss it until two weeks later, and by then it was long gone. Hmmm.

The Composer, Jurica, Oil Pastels on Archival Paper, 9" x 12"

For this and so many reasons this has got to be a NOT. It is a young person's business. I know this. And, yet, I know writers older than me making great progress into it, and then I know I'm lying to myself, making excuses. If you’re too young to imagine this, imagine the fear of choosing the wrong passion. Essentially, a moment to admit defeat is not really a great feeling, but a 7-year moment of indecision is much worse. It is not that I don’t know what I know. It's that I know that I don't know what might happen if I threw myself full force into this thing that bugs me often if I'm not drawing. Ugh.

I value facing the truth, and it is coming to me that this may be the truth. In the long run, I never despair about truth.


2013 © Amanda Morris Johnson

Chapter Eleven - Part Two - Commercial Peach Growing

Lack of enthusiasm is what gets most commercial peach growers out of the business. I can really understand that. One crop in every six to seven crops fails. Boy, does that sound familiar, only the odds are even greater for failure in Hollywood. This is an old story already on my blog, and my last trip around this block, I promise. There are all sorts of factors to making a successful career in any business. In peach growing it comes down to proximity to the markets, and frost. In screenwriting it does matter a bit if you're inside Hollywood or out, wherever you live you need to work those connections you have to the business, and frost can be related to "dumb luck," which many credit with making, breaking, reviving and surviving a career as a screenwriter.

The reason you want to plant a private or commercial orchard on a hill is to reduce the frost factor. You see the cold air and water sink into a valley, and if your peaches sit in that cold air, and waterlogged soil they will not thrive. So, how can one increase the elevation of a writing career? I tell my students all the time that "credibility" is the key to life in Hollywood. Everyone you bring your script to must be convinced that you live to serve the writing craft. Writers with produced scripts proudly list their "credits" at the top of their resumes. This comes before their philosophy about the thing they've written or the hopes they have for future works. Credits speak for themselves.

Credits lacking in produced scripts, a writer can begin to point to other accomplishments in the written word: magazine articles, produced plays, published stories and books, and even blogs. The point is to boost oneself and one's writing above that soggy, frosty valley of "never done this before." But, for most new screenwriters "never done this before" is what they present to agents and managers. They cannot be surprised then when those agents and managers give them the thumbs down, the frosty letter of rejection, leaving the writer in a soggy bog of their own creation.

I've got some luck on my side. I've got some odd credits. I've got some people in the business. I cannot boo-hoo my way into that soggy bog without some great effort to fail at the first sign of success. It's that first thing, lack of enthusiasm, that gets me. Let me repeat, in peach growing success comes down to proximity to the markets, and frost. I've got the metaphor taken care of for scriptwriting then. I don't really understand it. I want to be enthusiastic about my most commercial concepts, but I have an internal hedging my bets feeling of "it isn't exactly right." Every script I've ever written has felt like a race to get it done. It's been like trying to force trees to produce fruit before they're mature, I suppose. I just couldn't conceive of doing it without some kind of pay off and reward because my survival felt like it depended on a sale.

Of course, I've managed to survive for years without too many sales, and so I have to look at that spuriousness finally and say, "Nope. It really doesn't matter if I sell this right away. I'll find a way to keep my head above water in the meantime." This is a matter of course for anyone planning to plant an orchard from seeds, from the pits, but a philosophy I have never before embraced for any of my writing. My writing has always seemed desperate in its clawing to success. This is the first time in my life that I feel like I can take a deep breath and consider what the hell I'm doing as a writer from the perspective of thriving rather than surviving because someone believes in me and understands that in the best of times the writer's career that has deep roots and succeeds five out of six times takes the passage of years and a narrow focus on the craft to mature. This may ultimately be the "dumb luck" I missed out on before, and much more important to me than all of the "credits" I've used to elevate my writing above the fog. It increases my enthusiasm for the inherent risks involved with such ventures, and allows me to consider seriously whether I shall go commercial or heirloom in my work.

Even commercial orchards, grown from saplings, sturdy stock, take three to four years to produce fruit. I've never before been able to have a stable enough personal life to think three to four years from a starting point. I tell you that I am in such a new world, I might as well be a Spanish conquistador with a pocket full of peach pits.

Chapter Three - Part One - Rocks in the Field

I'm sitting here looking at my resistance to screenwriting. It's such a big sucky clod in my pretty empty field. Is it a rock, I wonder, and not soil at all? Banging away at my resistance to screenwriting may at, age 45, not be the best use of my energy and skills. I hate giving up on things. I am still mad at myself for not making my marriage full of domestic violence and emotional abuse actually work out. No matter that it was clear it was never going to work out, I still hate feeling like a quitter. There are still remorseful moments even though my peace quotient is 100% better, and I love and am attracted to husband number two whole-heartedly. I just hate being a quitter. Though to be honest, I've also quit a number of occupations and friendships over the past year, that somehow, suddenly I realized were never going to be what I thought they should be, and so quitting and turning in a new direction IS AN OPTION TO CONSIDER.

I actually had to write an email to a good friend of mine who is a wonderful psychologist to ask him if he thought I was going crazy because I was rapidly dropping so many things out of my life. He assured me that this behavior was a normal part of the process of realizing my true self. And, I have a quote above my computer that says, "When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need." - The Tao.

I am beginning to be able to wrap my head around this notion. For so long I have invested more heavily in the past than in the present or future. I have hung onto things, people, and ways of being like a freak hoarder, so that I could barely walk into the present without dragging these things unconsciously on my shoulders and hips. I said I would do it, so I'm gonna do it is the motto I had even when I got signals (like having my head pounded against the floor -- hello?) that sticking to something bad was futile and degenerate in every way.

Why, I have wondered, would I do this to myself? I have been too afraid of change for some reason. And, yet I'm a natural risk-taker, too. I've moved across the country several times, I've tried new and challenging things, I've walked away from many things and towards many others. Yet, there are essential things that I've stood by, that turned out to be bad ass stupid. It seems I may be addicted to pain. I'll tell you this, that if I feel a requisite amount of pain then I tend to be bound to that pain in a way that is harder for me to break the bond to that than, say, if something is boring or annoying.

Is this too psychological? Let me say then that, metaphorically speaking, I've finally started throwing the rocks out of the field. That's what tilling and plowing are for, after all. The rocks are plentiful, and not bad in and of themselves, but they're doing nothing to make the soil better for tender, young seedlings. I haven't yet decided whether screenwriting is the rock itself, or if it is merely a clod that is around the rock of something else holding me back from finally planting a high yield crop.

Chapter Two - Part Three - Clod Building or Busting?

The resistance of this clod is indeed insanely stronger than I am, and I have considered many other options. I feel like David next to this Goliath clod of resistance. It is so outsized to my strength that I don't know that there is any way to bust it up, but dang it, I'm going to try. It isn't even like when I was a kid I would lay on the lawn dreaming of one day being a screenwriter. I stumbled into screenwriting because my ex-husband wanted to direct movies, and I thought it would be neat to be partners at some level (the fact that we're divorced ought to be a clue about that logic).

I have always wanted to write. Why? Because I like to read, of course. I love to read stories that transport me to other worlds. I love plays that bring to life episodes of change in a few lives. I love to read essays and articles that make me think. I love to read poems that make me see this world in a new way. Loving to read, led me to want to write. Lots of people love to read and don't want to write, and so I can't really explain why I thought to make the leap, but I remember reading some books when I was my son's age, or my daughter's age and praying that someday I could write that way. That way was for me defined by one thing: the story changed and deepened the way I thought and felt about the world.

A great movie can do that for me, too. Can't it do that for you?

In fact, my other childhood dream was to act in movies because I felt like a great performance did that one thing: changed and deepened the way I thought and felt about the world. My father convinced me that it was the writing, not the acting that did that for me, but I didn't completely believe him until I met up with my ex-husband and stumbled into screenwriting. Once I had just the slightest understanding of the screenwriting craft, I was hooked by the notion that a great script could do that one thing: change and deepen the way people thought and felt about the world. I've never been about subtlety. I had stars in my eyes because I also saw a world that was becoming less and less literate, and thought to write screenplays would be to reach the most people. Har.

Back to reality. Hardly anyone reads a screenplay even if it is an Oscar-winning screenplay. As I worked in the industry longer, I understood that the screenwriter is the low-man on the totem pole, because literally, no one but the cast and crew reads the work. Maybe other screenwriters will read a successfully produced script because they want to see how a writer did it, but your average kid in the library is not going to pick up a screenplay, or now, rent it for their Kendal. Screenwriting is the first basic part of a huge collaboration with dozens, if not hundreds of collaborators. Just like most people who admire a building never look at its blueprint, so is it that most people who watch and love a movie never read the screenplay. The best a screenwriter can hope for is 1.) They'll direct their own scripts, or 2.) Their screenplay will attract top-notch talent and 3.) That top-notch talent will interpret the screenplay as it was intended.

Argh. It feels like the clod is growing in resistance as fast as I bust it up. Where are those inevitable points of weakness in this clod? Can it be that even after 20 years of consideration I haven't yet found out how to make this clod into fertile soil I can plant a seed idea into? It is possible that I am finally reaching a turning point in my life where I look at this clod and toss it out of the field instead of breaking it up because, God, I am sick and tired of pounding away at its resistance. Of course, I understand that the resistance, the clod, is in my heart not out there somewhere. So, now, I believe I will simply sit down and contemplate this clod and wonder for a while.

Chapter Two - Part Two - The Heart of the Clod

This part of the clod is so hardened and big to me that I don't think one blog entry is going to even make a dent on it, but here goes.

Choosing to write screenplays is a ridiculous proposition at any time in life, but particularly in middle age. The entertainment industry is very young or very old. Middle agers who haven't made it have moved into other industries. Middle agers who have made it tend to orient themselves young and not really acknowledge that they are, in fact, half-way through their blessed lives. So, when confronted by a middle-aged writer, telling a middle-aged story, they cringe. I know middle-aged screenwriters who go to great lengths to look 20 years younger than they are, and sometimes they really succeed. It's not pure vanity. It's survival.

So we're left with the older and the younger majority of Hollywood. The older Hollywood moguls understand that they just want to hang out with their friends. They've paid their dues. They don't have anything to prove. They just want to have fun finally, and working with hungry middle-agers holds zero appeal. The younger Hollywood has everything to prove. They want to make the big discoveries, create their teams, be the edgiest and most commercial creators in THE UNIVERSE. Being around writers who are their parents' age gives them the creeps.

Every year there are tens of thousands of screenplays written. How many movies do you see per year? Yeah. The ratio is pretty bad for screenplay to movie. And, STILL, there are bad movies made and distributed. It's not fair or pretty. There is nepotism and pure dumb luck at work in screenwriting. On average about 400 scripts get bought per year. Okay? Do you see how ridiculous it is? Each studio actually has a roster of screenplays that are already in line to be developed, and they're looking for specific ideas to fill in the few blank spots they have, and they don't advertise what those items are in any organized fashion. If you're lucky enough to have an agent or manager, they might hear a clue over a lunch conversation, but that's about as much information as you're going to get as a writer, and most writers don't have agents.

The sobering reality is this: screenwriting is a shitty career until you make it. I haven't really made it yet, though by the standards above at least I've worked for pay here and there along the way which in any other industry would look like failure, but in the screenwriting trade makes me nearly a star. I can't be sure that it isn't my own fault that I haven't hit the mark. Frankly, I've been distracted. It's taken me years to understand screenwriting's nuts and bolts. I started off backwards, ready with the writerly style but no nuts and bolts. And, I resisted those nuts and bolts. I resented them. Part of my delight in writing has been the act of discovery, but honestly it just doesn't work in screenwriting very well.

So, what this has to do with the heart of the clod is that mostly while I've pursued screenwriting I've had to work other jobs to survive. I feel like this split in my focus has been my excuse for not making a real go at it for years. I literally have had the fantasy that somehow I would get a whole year sometime to do nothing but write screenplays. OMG. When will I grow up?

You hear of actors who have gotten down to selling their furniture in order to eat ramen on the floor while they wait for the audition that will finally prove them a star. Well, I understand this, but I have two kids, a mortgage, and I'd like to be doing something for the world I live in. I am down to my bills and I can't cut anything else out without switching our diet to ramen. I have to earn a nut, a pittance really, to cover our bills. When I worked in Hollywood I could have earned this small amount of money in three days a month. But, now out here in the hinterlands it looks like I have to earn a million dollars! The pay scale is so bad here for Colorado writers that working at Starbucks looks like a better option.

So, why continue to pursue this insane dream?