Thought-provoking writing advice from Go Into the Story

A couple of great articles from Go Into the Story (The Official Screenwriting Blog of The Black List) popped up on my Twitter feed this morning and were so good I felt compelled to share them here. These articles and the blog as a whole focus on screenwriting, but I think the advice pertains to story regardless of in what format it's being told.

The Theology of Cinema: Forgiveness.
First of all, when you headline your story with a picture of Lieutenant Dan I'm in. Because it's an instantly recognizable example of a great moment in cinema when Lieutenant Dan thanks Forrest for saving his life back in Vietnam, and perfectly demonstrates the point author Scott Myers is making here.

Even the greenest screenwriter knows that a film is about the hero's journey. Forrest may be the main character, but he isn't the only one who will go through a tumultuous journey. Jenny's is one, Lieutenant Dan's is another. He goes from being confidently secure in his place in the world and in his life's meaning, to having that sense of security and control ripped from him, to hitting rock bottom, and finally constructive acceptance of his situation, which leads him to personal and spiritual peace and happiness. And audiences respond to that.

Lindsay Doran (known as The Script Whisperer) on The Psychology of Storytelling.
This article is from 2014, but it popped up on my Twitter feed today. Doran gave a talk with a lot of valuable information on what audiences want to see in films/stories and why. It has a lot to do with the character's relationships and resilience. A perfect example given is the first Rocky movie - a lot of people (me included) don't remember that Rocky actually loses the fight against Apollo Creed. It's the fact that he was an underdog who rose to the challenge and gave Creed his toughest fight ever, plus the evolution of Rocky's relationship with Adrian and its culmination after the fight that audiences responded to and remember.

These are both great articles. Do check them out when you have the chance.

Mom's Birthday, and the beauty of this world even in death

My Mom would have been 78 years old today.

The Brother and I aren't big on visiting grave sites. On my side of the family (he's my half-brother from Mom's marriage to my Stepdad) nobody is buried. Everyone is cremated with their ashes spread, so there were never any graves to visit. In fact, when it's my time I want my ashes spread in the ocean. We spread my Dad's ashes in the sea off his beloved Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. For me, anywhere there is sea, sand, and seashells will do.

On The Brother's side, everyone gets buried. But that doesn't seem to translate into a lot of visits to the grave sites. It's just important that they're buried.

When Mom died I had a pretty good idea of what she would want: cremation, no burial, not a lot of fuss, and not a lot of money spent. But since I assumed that like most of the women in our family she would live into her 90's, we never discussed it. So no plans were ever made, although she would joke about me sneaky-spreading her ashes around The Arboretum. Spoiler alert: I failed to do that.

Which meant that when The Brother and I suddenly had to figure out what to do when Mom died unexpectedly in March 2018, we kind of met in the middle. She would be cremated, but she would also be buried. The fact that we fortuitously ended up at the same place where my Godfather Jack - a friend of my parents since high school who was like a brother to Mom - was also buried, helped make the decision easier, especially when they were able to give us a plot for her within eyesight of Uncle Jack.

This year Mom's birthday fell on a Friday and since the cemetery picks up flowers on Thursday, we thought this would be a great day to visit her grave and leave her some flowers that would be there for a while.

There were two other things that blew us away today at the cemetery. The first was the Christmas decorations. Apparently the cemetery suspends cleanups during the holiday season, so the place was like a Christmas wonderland. I had no idea they leave the decorations up, but I'm glad they do because it's just gorgeous!

The pictures don't do it justice. It was just dazzling. Some of the grave sites had decorated trees! Seeing it, you would never see this graveyard as a place of death, but as a place of life, celebration, and joy.

On top of that, as we were leaving, we were caught up in traffic for a funeral that was breaking up with a huge number of attendees. The Brother and I were fascinated by the idea of someone who brought out a crowd like that. A sign we passed on the way out identified the deceased as Ruby Jewel Ball. I'm thinking family matriarch. There were so many families - I spotted at least two with little girls in matching dresses, like Mom used to do with my sister and I back in the day - and lots of what looked like happiness and fellowship. No one was crying, but there was a lot of interaction, love, and comforting each other. Ruby must have been something.

It's crazy how fast the time has gone by. In just a couple months it will be the second anniversary of Mom's death. It will be nine years in May for my Dad, which is even crazier. There are so many things I wish for in this life, and often one of them is that time would just slow down.

Earlier today I was wondering how long I'll feel compelled to recognize the anniversaries on the blog. Part of me would kind of like to let it go and stop obsessing over it, part of me feels it would be disrespectful. I guess I'll find out in early March.

The future is now

You guys, it's now the year 2020. JAYSUS!!! It's so futuristic!

Let's hope it's a good one for everyone out there.

Pic snicked from the internets. If it's yours let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.

Another decade in the books

Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to the Roaring Twenties redux!

Pic snicked from the internets. If it's yours let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.

December Words of Wisdom

It's okay if the most noteworthy thing you accomplished this year was making it to December. There''s nothing small or insignificant about survival. Your resilience - your ability to continue to show up every day, even when the weight you're carrying is so heavy; even when it would be easy to give up - is never anything but a strength. --Daniell Koepka

Show me a man who gets rich by being a politician and I'll show you a crook.
--President Harry S. Truman

I don't care how attractive you think you look. If you have an ugly heart you are ugly. --Karen Salmansohn

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. --Confucius

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left. --Oscar Levant

The world belongs to those who have mastered their internal world. --Brendon Burchard

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. --Albert Einstein

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. --John F. Kennedy

If no one has said, "Who do you think you are? What are you, crazy? Are you sure this is a good idea?" Then perhaps you're not thinking boldly enough. --Brendon Burchard

Hedwig Raskob is the new Nigerian prince

I can't believe my Yahoo mail spam filter let this one through.

I also can't believe people actually think this will work. Who actually falls for this?

Dealing with this year's writing drought and moving forward

This past year was one big writer's block, so I've been going over ideas to move past it. One thing I've decided to try again is submitting as much as possible.

In 2018 my goal was at least two submissions per month. I submitted two each in January and February of that year, but then my Mom died unexpectedly in early March 2018, so March and April were total busts - nothing submitted in those months, which was understandable. There was a lot to deal with suddenly that I was completely unprepared for.

I also moved in July 2018, which was rough for a number of reasons, but I did pretty well with submissions May through September. Then the block seemed to settle in - there were no more submissions for the rest of the year. Still, I had fifteen submissions for the whole year, including five that placed in contests and one that was a winner. On the other hand I didn't get published, so I wasn't thrilled with that. But overall, for a year that was tough I felt okay with my progress.

Although I didn't put a number on submissions for 2019, the year started out with a bang. I had eight submissions in the first three months of the year, then... nothing. April through the rest of the year was pretty much a drought and not only was I not submitting, I wasn't writing much either. The good news was that I did have a story accepted for an anthology, but "Like Deja vu All Over Again", the story that's getting published in Crossing Borders in March 2020, is an old story I had kicking around that just happened to fit the theme for that anthology. I did submit to a short story competition in October that I don't think will place, but the entry fee was minimal and it made me feel like I at least did something, even if it was kind of pointless.

Late October into early November I attended both the Writer's Digest Novel Writing Conference in Pasadena and Bouchercon in Dallas and in addition to being exhausted by the time I got home, it did light a fire under me, both in terms of writing and finally tackling some personal stuff that's been lingering since Mom's death and the move away from the beach.

So the new plan is not to have a particular number of submissions per month, but to really examine the markets and opportunities and try to submit to as many as possible. There are a lot of anthologies coming up as well as other short story markets that I want to be more aggressive about submitting to, and I think that's my best shot at getting published again and seeing some progress in my writing career. I really don't want to have to wait another three years to be published again.

I've also got two other longer projects to work on that will be my A/B projects when I'm not working on short stories. One is a play and the other is one of my ideas for a novel. I've had multiple ideas for novels over the past few years and the difficulty has been focusing on just one while setting the others aside. The play is the A project because it will be quicker to complete, while the novel will be the B project with the goal of at least having a first draft by the end of the year.

Yep, that's the plan. We'll see how it rolls out, but for the first time in a long time I actually feel positive not only about writing, but about a lot of personal things as well. The Brother and I have been discussing this lately and he feels the same way - 2019 was rough for a number of reasons, but we're feeling really positive about 2020's potential.

I hope anyone who is reading this is feeling great about the new year and new decade. May the new 20's roar! And may I also take this opportunity to wish you a wonderful, creative, and productive 2020! Let's succeed together!

It's the most wonderful time of the year!!!

Christmas on!!!

Recent reading: "The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett"

The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett by Nathan Ward

Before reading this Edgar-Award nominated book I was unaware that Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man (which became one of my all-time favorite movies), had once been a Pinkerton detective.

Tuberculosis kept Hammett from making Pinkerton a lifelong career, but when he finally had to give up the work due to his poor health, he used his sleuthing experiences to embark on a second career as a writer. He held most pulp stories and fictional detectives and private eyes in disdain because he found them so unrealistic, and set out to create more realistic characters.

This book is not an autobiography - I had to get online to find out that Hammett and his wife did eventually divorce, that he joined the Communist Party and eventually ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and even served time in prison due to his Communist involvement. Ward's focus is how Hammett's time with Pinkerton informed the great novels he went on to write, how his writing career developed and into the early years of his relationship with the writer Lillian Hellman, with whom he spent the last thirty years of his life. It's also a fascinating look at Pinkerton exploits and how real life sleuthing works.

By comparison, Hammett's Op had wrung some handy knowledge from his rough life of sleuthing: Abductions rarely occur at night or in cities, and those that do more likely are staged by the victim for ransom; no one can strangle your from the front if your arms are free to reach up and snap his pinkies; when a "Chinese" starts shooting, he always empties his gun; you can shadow anyone pretty naturally if you don't meet the subject's eye; it's best to stand aside of the door during "unannounced" visits in case bullets burst through it; even a light tap on the head with a metal revolver has a surprisingly concussive effect; you can often draw good information or even a confession "out of a feeble nature" by putting your face close to the subject's and talking loudly; people talk more freely in a room with a closed door; and any hop head who tells you his name is "John Ryan" is not to be trusted ("it's the John Smith of yeggdom").

Christmas post: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer/Full Metal Jacket mashup

Yeah, I know I've posted this before, but I had to do it again. Tis the season! Merry Christmas!

Christmas post: Another Far Side cartoon

Rumor has it The Far Side may be coming back. How freaking awesome would that be?