Old Stuff 2

Skill Set
I don’t remember what I ultimately wrote it on. My family didn’t have a computer. We were always a little behind when it came to technology. In the late ‘80s, my siblings and I had an Atari 2600 when Nintendo games were all the rage. We didn’t have VCRs or CD players until well after they were commonplace in seemingly everyone else’s home. So I remember sitting down at home in our family room to write a story for school with a pad of paper: my first assignment. I’m going out on a limb and saying that I was in the fourth grade. Our assignment was to write a story that would be turned into our teacher and then bound at a print shop so that we could fully experience and touch the fruits of our labors. I was pretty excited as a bright=eyed young lad, with a father who was, and is still, an English teacher to be cut loose, on my own, and try my knack at storytelling.
I knew that the enthusiasm was there. My brother, sister, and I were veterans of numerous audio dramas, written and performed on our own and recorded on the family tape player. Time travel stories were our forte’. We had about a dozen episodes of our “Hasty Gourmet” program in the can. The Hasty Gourmet was a brilliant chef, with a time machine, who traveled all over the chronological map. Wherever he went, he would have to get in a fight. Had we been professionals, I’m sure this stipulation would have been part of a contract but, as it was, it was only a creative niche. Fights with rival time-travelers, super-intelligent dinosaurs; it didn’t matter. The fights were made visceral with siblings and I grunting and hitting props against shelves and walls in my bedroom, which served as our studio. The time machine effects were nothing more than the three of us making “WHOOOSH!” sounds, right against the tape player’s speakers as we liked the other-worldly havoc this created with the tiny speakers’ sibilance. We were the kind of charmingly quirky children that put on shows for our babysitters. Lip-synching to Whitney Houston tapes, the “Ghostbusters” and “Top Gun” soundtracks, with full choreography and backdrops, were currently part of the repertoire. So I sat there, pencil at the ready, and started writing.
The end result was a mixed bag. It was really my version of a movie I’d been watching a lot, lately, on the Disney Channel, “Return to Snowy River.” Lost cattle, cowboys, cowgirls, and black-hatted villains that rode horses and swung swords, all speaking with Australian accents; this one had it all. My story was different versions of all my favorite scenes in that movie, with an underwater adventure chapter (the story’s only truly original segment) that Jacques Cousteau might have liked. A friend of mine at school tried to call me on my story’s, ahem, connection to the “Snowy River” flick and I hurriedly feigned ignorance and suggested a kickball game at recess. Diversion: successful! The point is that the newness of creating and sustaining a story and not a five minute radio adventure segment proved a little harder than I thought it would be. It would also be many, many years before I was writing on a regular basis and I wish I could say that I shrugged it all off and jumped right back into the writing fray but, aside from my version of “Jack in the Beanstalk” with echoes of the first “Die Hard” movie in sixth grade, that didn’t really happen.
Before I know it, I’m in seventh grade. The awkward throes of puberty have accepted me with deceptively warm arms that might go icy cold and stab me in the back at any moment. I’m writing and drawing my own comic books. My readership is small: my brother and sister, four neighbor kids from our Anchorage, Alaska neighborhood and my camp counselor at the local Boys and Girls Club. The stories, themselves, remain part of the pulpy tradition where so many private eyes, flying aces, and writers’ pseudonyms have hung their hats. My comic was called “The Destroyer.” The main character was an ex-movie stuntman with an array of gadgets he used to avenge himself on the forces of evil after his family is tragically killed in a drug dealer’s bomb blast.
I got the comic out on notebook paper with help from copy machines at my mom’s office, on a semi-regular basis, for about a year. The universe expanded and came to include characters like “Bikeman” and “Shockman” but I lost interest when marching band and dates came calling in high school. The characters were last seen defending Earth from an intergalactic conqueror with a comet for a head, and losing badly, in 1994. Their story is unfinished, but I’m no Chaucer and this wasn’t “The Canterbury Tales.” I did learn this time around, though. I picked up on an audience principle that I’ve probably never really abandoned. The one that says it’s impossible to please everyone. If you make a story that you like and hope that there are other people in the world with similar taste, you might get lucky and snag a few of them as readers. In Alaska, I also saw something beautiful that formed the beginnings of my struggle with detail and description but more on that in a bit.
College and scripting for movies came around at the same time and writing was the hobby of mine that had lasted the longest. It beat out music and theater when it came time to choose a major and I haven’t regretted the decision. Writing gives me a great excuse to explore a lot of different disciplines because you don’t have to pick just one. As a writer, I can work in music, novels, poetry, movies, theater, children’s books, technical manuals, and as an editor. With my interest in stories being what it is, though, the interesting thing has always been the way that the bar is not set very high as far as writing the great American novel is concerned. I like working in genres that are, well, looked down on and laboring to put something on the page or on the screen that will surprise people with a little heart and resonance.
In 1997, I sat down at a friend’s keyboard, as I still didn’t have one of my own, and started writing “Being There and Gone,” my first movie script. I had seen “Titanic” a few days before and, even though I can make fun of the film now with the comfortable distance of time and irony, that movie wrecked me. I cried like a little baby when Mr. DiCaprio sank into that cold water and it seemed like everyone else in the packed theater at the then-new Edwards Stadium 21 was doing the same thing. I was interested in creating a couple of characters and putting an audience through the emotional wringer that the doomed cruise liner had done so well. The task I was taking on ended up being really difficult. The completed movie came out in the summer of 2004 (to give you an idea of how long this creative stuff can take when it’s not the job you get paid for) ad I view it as a success. The script, itself, was not revised much until we were actually shooting the movie. As a writer, I was just floored with this work being the first time something I wrote had crossed the one hundred-page mark (on the Final Draft screenwriting program; the page count was more like 62, double-spaced, on Microsoft Word). We made some on-set revisions of the things I had missed or drew out emotional beats with the timing of the camera to take into consideration. We also had to shoot the movie twice when we had to replace a lead actress when the first bout of shooting was nearly complete. The film is 85 minutes and concerns a young couple that used to date re-uniting when the woman is diagnosed with inoperable cancer. It’s a lot more serious than I intended, but it did end up with the gut-wrencher of an ending that I wanted. The couple, despite new understanding and closeness, does not end up together; the woman is with a nice guy that has become friends with the male protagonist and the cancer does end up claiming the woman.
“Between There and Gone” (re-titled after “Being There and Gone’s” closeness in title to “Being There,” a comedy-drama from 1979 with Shirley MacLaine and Peter Sellers) played twice at two Boise theaters and now exists on a DVD that my friend Joe produced for me after I babysat his kids so he and his wife could go to a concert. It was nice, though, sitting in the back of those theaters and hearing the sniffling that many audience members get so self-conscious about when a truly sad scene comes up. I still wonder what would happen if people just let go and sobbed loudly in the midst of these scenes. Would filmgoers be annoyed by it, or would these uncensored emotional outbursts get everyone else nice and teary-eyed all the quicker? It’s tough to say, but this time, I stayed hooked.
So, a while back, I promised to tell you what I saw in Alaska that was the first thing I wanted to be able to describe in detail like a real novelist.
I was fourteen years old and came out of my house to see neighbors knocking snow out of their trees. It was nighttime and, despite this, the sky was as bright as day. Light from all over the city, from streetlights, cars, and gaudy chain stores reflected through a complete blanket of frozen moisture in the air. My neighbors knocked snow out of their trees and it shone, cascaded, and billowed, floating this way and that, despite the lack of wind. A myriad colors came from the most miniscule of points as these tiny snow flakes caught and reflected the light of a porch, or a blue Christmas light. My nose was running, now past the point of my bottom lip, and I didn’t need to wipe it. I was warm. Now, I don’t know what justice I’ve done this experience of mine, but the enthusiasm that had always been there before was now with me in a different way. I knew in this moment that, while I might not ever actually work as a writer, scenes like this made me want to try. Some people don’t get to see things like this and, if it’s up to people like me to describe them, I sincerely do not mind taking the time to learn some fancy words and work at improving my sentence construction.
Now, I’m due to graduate college in May and have plans to shoot my second movie, “The Alpha Test,” in the summer. This is the story of a pharmaceutical company that produces a mood enhancer designed so people can make emotional breakthroughs in therapy. Some shady types that hope to market the drug to interested saboteurs around the world tamper with the drug, causing chaos with the patients.
I do write on a computer, now. It teaches me patience and humility because it breaks a lot and rarely executes the commands I give it, but there’s been that progression, at least. I’m writing this essay for a class where the process of writing is at the forefront of thought and discussion. I never really considered myself a serious writer because I wasn’t a poet or a literary novelist, but I go through the same headaches, heartbreaks, compromises, and triumphs that my peers go through so, maybe, it’s time for some reconsideration. At a time when I’m asked constantly about “what I’m doing next” while eating dinner with friends and relatives, it’s nice to have a general set of tools that I can use to forge the beginnings of whatever that next thing might be.