writer. screenwriter. learning person. loves being human.
I’m delighted to announce the shiny new redesign of @U2, always the best damn U2 fan website on the planet and now also the prettiest, user-friendliest and basically bestest evah.
I’ve always been proud of the work I do for @U2, and equally proud to be associated with the great staff and all the fans who have made @U2 the most popular U2 fan site in the world. We hope you like our new look!
President Obama has named 16 people to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the USA’s highest civilian honor, specifically naming them as “agents of change.”
I like having a smart president. I like having people in power who, whatever they may do that pisses me off, come from the same basic perspective that I do: freedom is a verb. We aren’t “free to do” or “free to be” (fill in the blank) because god or our daddy says so, or because a judge bangs her gavel, or because we’re just entitled to it as human beings. We are free to do or be because we get in there and change things; laws, attitudes, social mores, art, pop culture. We have thoughtful conversations, and we stand with ten thousand others and yell as loud as we can. We blog, we write songs, we make videos, we donate our time or our money to an organization that is making space for something we care about. Space for new ways of seeing, of hearing, of being.
Space for more people to have the same choices we do, or even more choices.
Some people get their freedom — their choices, their space — and want to close the gates against any more change. But we don’t get to be free of change: we only get to be free, and stay free, through it. When we make more space for others, there’s more for us too, regardless of what the fearful will tell you. That’s freedom.
The Medal of Freedom Honorees (see the article for short bios of each)
Nancy Goodman Brinker
Pedro José Greer, Jr.
Stephen Hawking
Jack Kemp
Sen. Edward Kennedy
Billie Jean King
Rev. Joseph Lowery
Joe Medicine Crow — High Bird
Harvey Milk
Sandra Day O’Connor
Sidney Poitier
Chita Rivera
Mary Robinson
Janet Davison Rowley
Desmond Tutu
Muhammad Yunus
In the time I’ve been working on my screenplay, I’ve written — well, it depends on how you count it. I’ve written at least 35 “official” 100-110 page drafts, meaning that they are considered “finished” enough to send to a wide circle of readers for comments, or to submit to the co-producers, agencies, directors, etc. I’ve probably written another 7 million couple thousand pages of script either as part of my private writing process (get something down on paper, hate it, delete it, write something else…) or as part of my collaborative process with my executive producer: we often like to work out ideas together, so there’s a lot of trading pages/ideas/notes back and forth as a scene or a sequence takes shape. This approach can/does drive many people straight over the edge (waves through the internet to the director, the executive producer’s girlfriend, and the world’s most patient sweetie). But it works for us; and more importantly, it works for the script.
However, I’ve got to also learn to work in a more traditional Hollywood model: the spec script, and the assignment. In an assignment, execs throw a bunch of story requests/ideas/notions at the writer; the writer goes off in a room and writes the requested movie; she sends it to the execs, who love it except can the protagonist be a man instead, or if she has to be a woman can she just be a little more likable, and oh by the way can we change the setting from a space station to an ancient Mayan temple, that won’t be hard, right? The writer blinks and argues and tries to accommodate, and at the next draft the execs decide the writer Just Doesn’t Get It At All, fire her, and get some “fresh eyes” (another writer) on her movie.
Okay, it doesn’t always happen this way every time, but it does happen to everyone — as far as I can tell, there is no career screenwriter who has escaped it. I’ve already been through it once in a minor key, and it was no fucking fun; as you may imagine, I’m not so much looking forward to the full orchestra version.
So how do screenwriters keep from going full-on fruit bat crazy? They write spec scripts — their own stories, characters, settings, plot, etc. Spec scripts are also the way that most new writers break into the system: an agent or manager or producer sees promise and talent in a script they’ve written. Sometimes that spec script will get optioned; sometimes it will simply be a writer’s ticket into one of those assignment meetings. So no matter how you slice the pie, spec scripts are part of the mix.
It’s very much like me to learn by jumping in the deep end. Did you learn to swim as a kid? Remember the instructor giving you his most trustworthy smile and holding out his arms and saying Swim to me, just swim to me!, and then once you committed yourself, he just kept stepping backwards? Yep, that’s my life. I’ve spent three years screenwriting under a particular set of professional circumstances — an assignment structure, a writing contract, an intensive collaborative relationship with an executive, constant notes, agency coverage, studio interest, studio rejection, casting submissions, refocusing the script through the lens of a director’s vision, yadda yadda. It’s been exactly the right way for me to learn. It’s been amazing. But now it’s time for adult swim: see the pool, decide where to enter, decide where to swim to. See my own movie as opposed to paddling enthusiastically toward someone else’s vision.
This post is much longer than I intended, which is also very much like me, and I am always grateful for the patience of any readers who follow these long, wandering trails of words to their originally-scheduled destination. Which in this case is to report that I’ve started learning how to write screenplays a little more formally (grin): I am reading a book. Actually, I’ve read a long list of books these last years, but my hands-down favorite right now is Save The Cat! by Blake Snyder. I’m finding it enormously useful as a doorway into this next part of my screenwriting adventure: Kelley writes a spec script.
Snyder’s first step in his recommended writing process is the (dreaded) logline — the one-sentence precis of the film that makes everyone want to hear your pitch/read your script/see the movie. This is million-dollar advice for someone like me, who is more temperamentally inclined to write a whole script and then try to puzzle out the logline, as if it were a marketing tagline. But Snyder’s point, and he’s right, is that figuring out the logline first, and really nailing it, helps your script be better from word one: spend the time to get the logline right, and as a writer you can unpack the structure, key characters, tone and setting of the script in a way that keeps everything consistent and integrated. I’ve heard so many stories of screenwriters pouring their hearts into a script, and then being unable to frame an interesting or cogent logline from the result; and discovering that in fact, it’s because the script wasn’t coherent enough to hang off of a single sentence.
So here’s what I did yesterday. I took myself off to Beth’s Cafe, my favorite Seattle diner and the spiritual home of Noir, for my own private Logfest. It was hot and the air conditioning was broken, so the front and back doors were open. The place was packed. I got lucky — people eating alone have to sit at the counter when the rush is on, but the little table-for-one (which is really half a booth right next to the cash register) had just opened up, so I had space to spread out. I had coffee (it’s a diner, dude, gotta have coffee!) and a patty melt and fries and lots of water, and I wrote loglines. A lot of them. Instead of wandering around in the depths of emotional moments of cool characters, I tried to see the spine of a movie in my head and write it down in the most specific and interesting way I could. The goal was to have lots of ideas, not to write the perfect logline (that’s real work), and to see if I could in fact make a leap from “having random ideas” to seeing the skeleton of a possible movie.
Beth’s was full of all the people of the world: employees from the local gun shop and auto repair place and hair salon; dewy-faced college girls wearing sundresses and the excited air of living dangerously (I am not at all sure why Beth’s should feel dangerous, but you can always tell that vibe when it walks in the door…); a couple of guys who had clearly been up all night drinking; a traveling businessman whose now-40-year-old daughter worked at Beth’s back in the day. A family in the booth behind me had one of Beth’s infamous 12-egg omelettes, which are served on a giant pizza pan. There was much chatter-banter between the cook and the servers and the guy who was trying to keep the ice machine working (Hey, the bread is melting! Honey, you take a counter seat, we only let the best people sit there. Oh, don’t listen to him, he likes Madonna!)
After my food, I ordered a chocolate milkshake and ate it with a spoon while the grill sizzled and the cook called Order up! and the speakers played Creedence and Jimi and Van Halen: and I believe there is no other restaurant in Seattle where I can dance in my seat with a chocolate milkshake and a faraway look in my eye without drawing a single second of notice.
I sat for two hours, ate about two thousand calories, had twenty ideas and a really, really good time. And came away feeling focused for the first time in ages: as if I’ve been knocking around in a huge dark room and finally found a slightly open door. So Logfest was a success. One of these ideas will become my first spec script: several of the rest will become alternate pitches, things that I could write with a few weeks’ prep work. There’s still a ton of work to do, but I no longer feel as though there’s only the old way to do it.
Beth’s Cafe and Save The Cat may have saved my ass yesterday. It was a good day.
I hope everyone with a TV will watch tonight’s episode of The Closer on TNT (9 pm Eastern/8 pm Central). It’s directed by the awesome Nicole Kassell, who is the director of my movie.
Nicky directed The Woodsman with Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, so I’m especially interested to see her work with Sedgwick in a completely different role. Have you seen The Woodsman? I highly recommend it. It’s a difficult subject beautifully handled — totally non-gratuitous, totally unsentimental, a very light touch on what in other hands would be material so heavy that it would be unbearable. It’s a tough movie that doesn’t flinch, doesn’t tolerate cliches, doesn’t tell you what to think about any of the characters, and includes moments of joy, hope, recognition, the world turned upside down and then beginning to come together again… I am excited that Nicky’s sensibility, control and obvious love of character is part of my first screenwriting experience.
So go watch some TV. Enjoy Kyra Sedgwick and the always-cool Tom Skerritt (guest-starring), and raise a glass to the minds and hearts behind these stories — the director, the writer, the producer, the crew who help bring it all to life. They’re just as invested, just as stone in love with story, and just as jazzed to see it on screen as any of us who look forward every week to watching our favorite shows.
My sweetie just opened her mail and found a lovely letter from the Society of Authors informing her that the Authors’ Foundation have awarded her a grant to further her work on her current novel. And they sent a check (hmm, they are English, so actually they sent a cheque).
Many (zillions) apply for these grants, and few are chosen; and I have been yearning for her to get some love from the English Literary Establishment. In that world, there is no greater love than a) money and b) Big Awards with Fancy Dinners, which I fully expect to materialize as soon as this book — this lovely, granted book — is published.
I’m so proud of her I could burst. In anticipation of all those BAwFD’s-to-come, we are taking ourselves out to our neighborhood place for a proper dinner to celebrate our day of Irish radio and English literary love.
Updated with direct links and info.
U2 is home in Dublin for three shows, and you know I’d love to be there in person. But I’m not — so many thanks to Pat McGrath of RTÉ (Raidió TeilifÃs Éireann — Radio Television of Ireland) for letting me be there in voice and in spirit, by including me in a segment about U2 on the Morning Ireland radio show aired Friday morning, July 24. The focus of the segment is joy in U2’s music, and Pat found me through this essay on the joy in U2’s live performance of the song “Elevation” at Slane Castle in 2001.
The segment includes excerpts of my interview as well as interview/music clips from U2. It’s a little over 5 minutes. Give it a listen here, or at the Morning Ireland archives.
If you’re at a U2 show this weekend — or wherever you are — I wish you joy. Ná bog ar an gcaoi a bhfuil eagla ort; bog faoi anáil an ghrá, bog faoi anáil an lúcháir. (Do not move the way fear makes you move; move the way love makes you move, move the way joy makes you move.)
My mom was telling me yesterday that as she gets older, she has begun having amazing dreams — not the usual your-car-turns-into-a-coffee-cup fare, but coherent linear experiences of beautiful places and great conversations with people she loves (dead or alive). All of it vivid. All of it feeling completely real, without that sense of wacky slow-time or quick-time that so often comes with the dreamscape. And she says that even frightening moments aren’t scary anymore: they’re just… interesting.
She tells me that going to sleep these days is like going to the movies. Although to me it sounds like more than that — it sounds like living another layer of life.
How cool is that?
I love the few dreams I’ve had with clarity and heft beyond the usual vapor of random brain-sparks. With conversations that felt real even after I woke; with feelings that carried me smiling or wondering through my day. I’ve tried to learn lucid dreaming without much success so far. I’d love to learn to fly in dreams, or to recognize when something scary is happening and change it for the better — but really what I want more than anything is to have experiences in dreams that are as meaningful and real to me as the waking moments of my “real” life. I think it would be astonishing to have those wandering, wondering conversations with people I miss because they are dead, or on the other side of the world, or because I never met them. I might learn so much. I might mend so many fences, or build so many bridges, or discover new territory inside another person to explore. I might see beautiful things. I might return to the Grand Canyon or walk the beaches of Musha Cay, dance at Burning Man, talk with my great-grandmother again, check in on my best friend Shirley from 8th grade whom I still miss, make movies with all my favorite actors and have those late-night dinners on set where people show themselves in ways the camera never sees. I might stand in the front row of the best U2 concert ever, in the intimacy of a venue of 300 people where the band plays all night and none of us ever gets tired. I’d start all those conversations I was too shy or scared or polite to ever begin. I’d finish some conversations differently…
I suppose it all sounds like a great big Wish List, but somehow it feels like more. It feels as though there’s another layer of life waiting — wanting — to be lived. If I wake with the feeling of someone’s hand on my arm or the smell of the sea still strong in my nose, if it feels that real to the brain — if it feels lived — then you know, for me, that’s real enough. I don’t need to be able to touch it with my eyes open if I can feel it so strongly with my eyes closed.
I told my mum that although I’m a fairly reasonable person (especially for an artist), I’m definitely not most “adult” people’s idea of “rational” (wow, my “quote” key is getting worn out…). Mum, this is part of what I meant. My reality is relative. If it’s real to me, that’s “real” enough. I’ve found some of my strongest and most unexpected disagreements with people spring from their assertion that if something’s not real for them, it can’t be real for me either. But, you know, that’s their reality. It seems limiting to me.
I really do not want to hear the details of dreams other people have had. Blanket exception for Nicola and my parents — it was especially cool to hear my mum talk about her conversation with my Nana and my Aunt Mae. But in general I’m with Nicola on this one; dreams aren’t as interesting to hear about as they are to experience (they work much better in the movies, or in fiction, than over coffee the next morning).
But I’d love to hear what you would choose in the dreamscape if you could. What would you do, feel, be in the privacy of your mind if it could be as real as — even if not real in — your waking world?
I’ve been asking why. These are some of the answers. And that’s all the analysis I’m doing today: this is music, it can’t always be etherized and spread out upon the table. Draw your own conclusions if you like, or just enjoy.
“Hypnotized”
Because there’s no explaining what your imagination can make you see and feel.
“The Unforgettable Fire”
I am only asking, but I think you know.
Come on, take me away.
Come on, take me away.
Come on, take me home.
“Spaced”
And I’m never, never, never, never ever going back.
I’m off the track.
“Shoot High, Aim Low”
Shall we lose ourselves for a reason?
Shall we burn ourselves for the answer?
Have we found the place we’re looking for?
Someone shouted “Open the door!”
Look out!
“Shine It All Around”
These are the times of my life, bright and strong and golden.
This is the way that I choose when the deal goes down.
A handful of books by Barbara Hambly — the first three books of The Darwath Series and the first two Sun Wolf/Starhawk books — are on my shelf of old friends, full of people I’ve traveled with often in my head and still find good company. One reason I go back to any book repeatedly is that if I’ve changed in some way, my experience of the book changes too. I see new things; I feel old things differently; in an utterly familiar landscape, I suddenly find myself in a place I’ve never been.
I love those moments. I love that stories can be elastic, can stretch or reach or go deeper with us. I suppose this is why I shake my head at the academic approach to fiction, the focus on nailing down what a story means. Well, who are you when you read/see/hear it? Meaning is participatory.
And so, several weeks ago, a passage I’ve read at least 20 times in the last 25 years suddenly seemed printed in neon, as if a hand reached up from deep inside me, flicked my brain hard, and said Pay attention, this one’s for you:
“Success in war,” he went on, “is measured by whether or not you do what you aim to — not by whether you yourself live or die. The success of a war is not measured in the same terms as the success of a fight. Succeeding in a war is getting what you want, whether you yourself live or die. Now, it’s sometimes nicer to be alive afterward and enjoy what you’ve fought for — provided what you’ve fought for is enjoyable. But if you want it badly enough — want others to have it — even that isn’t necessary. And it sure as hell doesn’t matter how nobly or how crudely you pursue your goal, or who makes allowances or who condescends to you in the process. If you know what you want, and you want it badly enough to do whatever you have to, then do it. If you don’t — forget it.”
The silence in that single corner of the half-ruined tower was palpable, the shrill grunts and barked commands in the hall beyond them seeming to grow as faint and distant as the keening of the wind across the moors beyond the walls. It was the first time that he had spoken of war to them, and he felt all the eyes of this small group of tiny women on him.
“It’s the halfway that eats you,” he said softly. “The trying to do what you’re not certain that you want to do; the wanting to do what you haven’t the go-to-hell courage — or selfishness — to carry through. If what you think you want can only be got with injustice and getting your hands dirty and trampling over friends and strangers — then understand what it will do to others, what it will do to you, and either fish or cut bait. If what you think you want can only be got with your own death or your own lifelong utter misery — understand that, too.
“I fight for money. If I don’t win, I don’t get paid. That makes everything real clear for me. You — you’re fighting for other things. Maybe for an idea. Maybe for what you think you ought to believe in, because people you consider better than you believe in it, or say they do. Maybe to save someone who fed and clothed and loved you, the father of your children — maybe out of love and maybe out of gratitude. Maybe you’re fighting because somebody else’s will has drawn you into this, and you’d rather die yourself than tell her you have other goals than hers. I don’t know that. But I think you’d better know it — and know it real clearly, before any of you faces an armed enemy.”
— from The Ladies of Mandrigyn by Barbara Hambly.
When the student is ready, the teacher appears. Sometimes sideways — because suddenly for me this passage is not about war, it’s about essential clarity. It’s about the fact that all the guts, risk and insane persistence I can muster is not enough if I am not clear why I’m spending them: why I’m spending myself — my time, my fierce but not boundless energy, my attention, imagination, love, fear, capacity for joy, my hunger for growth. All my life I have seen something I want and literally thrown myself at it. And I am only understanding now (and the smack smack smack you hear is my hand against my head) that the times it works best — St. Paul’s, Clarion, Nicola, Solitaire, Dangerous Space, screenwriting — are the times when I am crystal clear about not just what I want, but why.
I value clarity: specificity in writing, goals that are definite and delineated, an understanding of my options. I work especially hard to be clear about my values; it’s important to me to know why I do things. That been part of my puzzlement these last weeks, trying to understand why this small part of a story is suddenly making me scratch my head (which often comes before the smacking, it turns out). I’ve been telling myself, I get the importance of clarity, so what’s the deal here?
And here’s the deal. I know I’m a writer — real clear about that — but I’m at a crossroads. I have to decide on my next project, and I find it is no longer simply a question of what, but why?
Three years ago, I threw myself into revising the screenplay that is based on my novel. If it’s true that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become expert, then I’ve easily got 4,000 already, and I got it in six- or eight- or ten-week-long marathons of 12 to 14 hours a day, with all the fatigue, fear, frustration, hope, hopelessness, exultation, and sheer bloody suck-it-up-and-start-again that important struggles bring with them. It wasn’t a war, at all, but it was just like one: it required that I test Nicola’s patience, sacrifice things I wanted, make myself utterly vulnerable, fail in public, and learn some things that please me and others I really would rather not have known. And it required me to endure. I got so fucking tired; but I am crystal clear on why I did it, and regardless of whether it ever gets on screen, it’s one of the best choices I’ve ever made.
And now we have a script that genuinely rocks, and although I will continue to work on it — there are always more changes, more improvements, more sandpapering to do — it’s also time for me to move on. I have to find the next thing to fall in love with, to begin spending myself on. And what I’m understanding now (hah, and you thought I’d left my point in the dust) is that I have to find a different why.
I have at least two novels and three screenplays coming to life in me right now. It’s no longer a question of which of these stories am I burning to tell — these days, if they don’t burn, they don’t stay with me long. Life is too short not to be on fire for my work. But I must choose. So if a novel, why? If a screenplay, why?
Part of the reason that why is so important is that I am finally understanding I can no longer cling to the strategies that have worked so well for me. In the words of the passage above, a war isn’t the same as a fight. I can’t just throw myself at something and hope it’ll all work out. If the project is fiction, well, I’ve got way beyond my 10,000 hours there: I’m an expert, and I don’t have to run into a wall at 100 mph over and over and over to make it happen. If the project is screenplay, then I’m no longer the beginner who needs to do twice as much work as someone else in order to simply keep up: and, as necessary as that constant 100 mph crash was to my beginning, it won’t help my learning in this intermediate stage.
I’m comfortable with the crash. I did it with the screenplay, I did it with “Dangerous Space,” and it worked. And therein lies the trap: because I’ve been trying to decide what to write next as if I would automatically write it the same way, but you know, that won’t work anymore. It’s a beginner’s approach. If I keep using it, it will simply ensure that I don’t learn how to be an expert — how to be conscious, efficient, aware, intentional — no matter how many hours I practice or how fast I run at the wall.
I have been stuck halfway between what and why.
This isn’t a war, but it’s just like one. Swinging around a sword with my eyes closed will get me exactly nowhere. I’m going to have to be just as clear about what I want next, and just as bloody-minded about getting it. But I have to find a new path. It’s no longer enough to just do, do, do, because although I’m good at that, I also see that it will not get me where I want to go.
When I was younger, I found my essential self through doing. Now I have to find it through the why.