On imaginary dogs.

"The yellow dog runs across a sunny park."

That's true. You just read it. And yet there is not dog, no park, nothing to run or be ran upon, nothing to catch the ray s of an imagined sun. And yet, in the imagined world, the world of writing, that goddamn dog goddamn well ran.

Such is the magic and mystery of the written word.

We can augment the words, the dog can be strong, the park can be lovely, we can tie the dog to my childhood (he's a yellow lab named Buddy, the first animal I ever really loved), but no matter what, there is no dog. He's just a notion brought to mind by the process of reading, a phantasm conjured by the flicker of eyes across a page of static text.

And that's the magic of writing. It's frankly astonishing that a few short words casn create such a vivid reaction in the imagination. And it's the awareness of this fact that makes writing so difficult for me. There are so many words, so many combinations, so many ways for the words to be read, and so many ways for the well-intentioned story to go horribly off track in the imagination of the reader.

And now the yellow dog shimmers, not unlike an effect from an MTV video, and now it transmutes itself into a blue cat, which still runs across the rose-strewn, gated park. And now he's on an epic quest, out for vengeance, or to find a missing love. The blue cat will strive and suffer and grow, fight monsters more bizarre than anything dreamed of by Tolkein, and in the end learn a valuable lesson, the kind worth teaching.

Or maybe he'll fuck off and have a beer. Or go to Disneyland. Or win the superbowl. Or travel through time to kill Hitler. It doesn't really matter. It's your yellow dog now (or blue cat, or whatever you want him to be). Please take good care of him.

All concepts should have an exclamation point and be awesome!

This is more of a personal belief than a universal idea, but I like my concepts to really pop. The best concepts actually spark some else's imagination: they make the average person say "Yeah, I can see that." The hallmark of a good concept is when a layperson hears it and begins pitching ideas off of it. For instance:

ME: "He goes back to 1969..."

OTHER GUY: "Oh wow! He could watch Superbowl III!"

In my life I've sold two projects:

1. Taliban vs. Marines vs. Zombies!

2. Kung Fu High School!

Right now I'm working on a project called HOT ALIEN CHICK! Hopefully this will be the project that CHANGES MY LIFE FOREVER!

Indian Sprints - A hack for rewriting

Writing is rewriting. I think everyone has heard that chestnut by now, but it's 100% true. You start with a crappy first draft and rewrite it, and, in doing so, trim unnecessary sentences and enhance the odd little connections between thoughts that really get the imagination percolating.

If you're anything like me (and I hope you are, because I'm a narcissist), you may have a tendency to over-invest the words with a sentimental value that clouds objective analysis.

Many experts offer this advice: put the work away until the thrill of creativity wears off, and the first draft can be read as the stinking pile of waste it most likely is (I like to store first drafts in plastic bags for this very reason. But time doesn't always permit this, so I'll use a trick I've come to call Indian Sprints, named after an unpleasant exercise I had to do, years ago, when I was on the middle school Cross Country team.

To "Indian Sprint" your rewrite, you must identify your absolute worst scene, the one that's utter crap, pure filler, and that's totally boring. This is usually findable, no matter how enamored we are of our own work, there's always something we can identify as bad. Once this has been identified, you must rewrite that scene (and only that scene) until it's one of your favorite things in the script.

I recommend this for a multitude of reasons. Many scripts have awkward bits of connective tissue where information is exposited, cars are parked, or unnecessary characters conveniently shoved off into the rest room. By hyper-focusing on this stuff, it either gets cut, or it gets more organically integrated into the more fun, visual and dynamic sections of your script. Because you're focusing on the worst of an otherwise "good" script, you can find the part that's easiest to change, because it's the part that's least under the sway of counterproductive emotional investment and defensiveness.

Most importantly, the creativity and fresh eyes that rewriting the scenes sparks causes a global reevaluation of the draft at large. Once the "Bob explains the legalese" scene has been rewritten to a sparkle, suddenly the other Bob scenes seem lackluster. Once boring lawyer Bob has been given Oscar worthy dialogue, suddenly the protagonist starts to feel boring. Once the protagonist is brilliant and clever, suddenly the car chase, the one you worked so hard to plan out and execute, begins to look a little stale. And so on and so on, until your script is perfect (unlikely) or you hit your deadline.

I hope you find this trick useful and add it to your toolbox/arsenal. I know that I use it a lot, and when I don't (usually out of laziness) it always comes back to bite me.

Writers Are Shitty Time Travelers

There's a great scene in BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE where time travelling Bill S. Preston is trapped in a police station. He's up a creek without a paddle, but then he reminds himself to go back in time and leave a garbage can for himself to use as a means of escape and said can suddenly appears, as if dropped by magic. It's very stupid and very funny, and it's incredibly illustrative of the point I'm trying to make.

When I write a piece, I the writer lay out a series of things for you the reader to encounter. As we travel down the primrose path of perfect prose, we encounter things... I, the writer lay them out, and you the reader have a reaction to them. This is how the reading process works.

Except I'm not all that bright... despite my high-falutin' philosophies and admirable vocabulary, it's very hard for me (or anyone) to string together the exact right combination of words, to craft the sentences that have the best shot of delivering the concepts in my head from my imagination to yours.

Fortunately, I have my time machine, or, more accurately, the rewrite process.

Here's an example.

I want to write this scene: Hero Alice and villain Bob have a gunfight. I want Alice to kill Bob with a hairpin. The irony is that Bob gave Alice this hairpin when they were married.

Except in order to make this work, I have to "time travel" back and set this information up, so the later scenes seem to flow organically from what came before. So I time travel back, insert the relevant information and come up with:

Bob and Alice are happily married. Bob gives Alice an antique hairpin. "For luck," he says...

CUT TO: TEN YEARS LATER. Bob and Alice shoot at each other in a warehouse. Alice runs out of bullets, so she backflips over to Bob and stabs him to death with the pin...

Except that's not so good either. Alice is supposed to be the hero, for god's sake. We just saw her kill a man in cold blood. So to make Alice's actions "relatable" we need to travel back and insert more information:

Bob and Alice are happily married. Bob gives Alice an antique hairpin. "For luck he says..." Except all is not well. When Alice inherits a fortune from her Aunt, she comes home and finds Bob screwing the maid. Bob poisons Alice before she can divorce him, but Alice crawls away and survives by hiding in the sewers...

Except we still need to account for the ten years that pass between Bob's abortive homicide and Alice's well-deserved vengeance. We have to travel back again... maybe Alice kills Bob after two weeks... but how does mild-mannered Alice gain her ninja-like killing skills? So we travel back again, and again, and again, until we're so goddamned burned out on time traveling that we want to smash the machine to smithereens with a crowbar... but, the resulting story unfolds like a seamless, elegant chain of events to the ordinary reader, who reads the tale with virgin eyes, blissfully unaware of all the work it took to bang the story out.

Perhaps there are savants who can create brilliantly causal narratives with effortless ease, but the sad truth is that most writers just aren't that good. So we have to write out clumsy sentences and continually travel back in time to make sure that the events unfold in a graceful, unbroken chain.

My Process

I write ten pages a day, each day, every day, come hell or high water. I started in August, 2008, and since then I’ve written ten pages a day, long hand, in a composition book, day in, day out, 300 pages a month, 3650 pages a year.

It is really good practice. But there’s also a downside.

I emotionally invest in every world I write. Not much, just the scantest, tiniest amount. But as the pages stack up, eventually the investment stacks up, and I’ve realized that the sheer weight of all that effort renders me paralyzed. I have so many ideas, and each one is like a little promise made to my subconscious and it’s all too goddamn much. And so they sit, growing stale on a shelf full of books. The books are too charged with meaning for me to ever really look through them, so instead of generating money-making projects, they gather dust. Enough is enough.

I read a quote in a productivity book that really inspired me: Don’t save creative thinking, save the structures that creative thinking generates. So I’ve started this blog. It’s an idea garden, my forty acres and a mule. It’s a place to shape and cultivate the various, scattered scrawled ideas and enshrine them in actual, readable pieces. I like the garden metaphor, because it encapsulates what writing is: a field of bullshit that, when carefully cultivated, produces new structures of astounding design and beauty.

I hope to use this to transform my scattered, random thinking into something that’s dynamic, fluid and searchable, a system to generate ideas that are elegant, sophisticated, and pray god, useful. I'll also stud this blog with some articles on the craft of writing, in the hopes of appealing to the broad segment of the online audience that isn't, y'know, me.