The Audience for This Blog of Mine
My audience is my younger self.
I’m teaching now what I was eager to learn then.
Give me your ignorant, your passionate, your desperate to learn.
That was me . . . and still is.
Who’s my blog for?
It’s not for movie critics or writers of literary essays. That’s a different way of thinking. They think about finished products: released movies, published novels.
I’m writing this for writers who want to write stories, novels, scripts, and screenplays.
It’s for me, for who I am and who I was.
I’m basically writing to myself when I was younger and wanted desperately to be a writer but didn’t know how.
I wanted to write novels. I didn’t know how. It took me decades to get on track.
I’m hoping it won’t take you decades. If it does, join the club.
You can be a writer at eight or eighteen, twenty-eight or eighty-eight. You just need words . . . guidance . . . practice . . . desire . . . patience . . . energy . . . humility . . . grace . . . self-esteem . . . time . . . curiosity . . . solitude . . . friends . . . luck . . . mentors . . . practice . . . desire. . . .
Why didn’t I know how to write a novel?
I guess I didn’t try hard enough to find the resources, the books, the mentors.
There wasn’t William Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey until 1992. That could’ve helped me a lot if I’d known about it. I started law school that year, which is painfully ironic. It’s also ironic that my mom had a giant hardcover copy of an illustrated The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell which I never, during my whole childhood, opened even once.
I didn’t know about Save the Cat (2005) until May of 2011 when Christopher John Karr told me about the book. I was 41 years old and didn’t know anything, wasn’t even trying that hard anymore. Jesus.
Chris told me to read it. I did. It changed everything for me.
I also remind Chris of that every year, especially after every novel manuscript I complete. I’m grateful to those who set me on this path, including all my past writing teachers, like John Rubadeau and Frithjof Bergmann.
And what I mean when I say that Save the Cat changed everything for me is that it demystified the world of movies as well as my world of fiction writing. He filled in many of the blanks of story structure that I never understood but wanted to understand. I finally felt like I could wrap my mind around writing novels. I wasn’t really thinking about screenplays, but Blake Snyder (1957–2009) made me feel like I could dare to imagine writing even a script one day.
He was not a gatekeeper.
He was a cheerleader.
Everyone needs that.
I devoured books on writing, screenwriting, myth, and archetypes, and I still do today.
I read as many as I can:
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft (2015);
Jill Chamberlain’s The Nutshell Technique (2016);
Walter Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye (1992);
Stephen King’s On Writing (2000);
John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story (2008);
William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983);
David Mamet’s On Directing Film (1991);
Alan Watt’s The 90-day Screenplay (2014);
and Kevin Goetz’ Audience-ology (2021).
I’ll make a better, more organized list later, but just know I read books like these constantly.
I’m always looking for something new to learn.
And I always incorporate some new tip, trick, tool, or template into my own system.
I don’t adopt someone else’s system wholesale. I don’t expect someone to tell me everything or make my life easy. I once wrote 30,000 words of exploratory prose before I started the first chapter of a novel. So, yeah, I have forms and templates, beat sheets and act diagrams, but those don’t write the story. That’s just scaffolding. I love that scaffolding and need it, but I don’t expect scaffolding to be the story.
And I also don’t want to let another decade go by before I discover that wonderful way of thinking that someone else has already discovered. So I read, learn, take what I need, and make it my own.
Read. Learn. Take what you need. Make it your own.
So if any of this strikes a chord in your soul, then this blog is for you. Hang with me, and I’ll tell you everything I can. I know I can at least save you some time.
I’ve written eight novels since first reading Save the Cat, and I’m very proud of them. I’ve also taught story writing to students in middle and high school for nearly a decade. And like I say, you don’t really know something until you can teach it to a seventh-grader.
In future posts, I’ll go over all my charts and graphs and templates. They’re what keep my overheated imagination grounded and on track.
In the next several posts, I’ll be getting into loglines and the acts of a story.
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PHOTO: A park bench, for some reason, facing an audience of foliage.
