What the Effingham, Illinois I am working on

I got to catch up with a friend last night at the Three Clubs in H'wood (my world got ROCKED yesterday when I tried to Google Three of Clubs and found out it isn't called that... WHAT. But it's only ONE club, I don't get it), and as I plopped down for what turned out to be a pretty impressive improv-ed play, she asked how I was doing. I surprised myself by answering, "Amazing!"

I am broke. BROKE. But as we speak, the ideas cooking in my head are smelling pretty tasty and promising. Yes, I am amazing. But the crazy part is that it will be a while from now or it will be never that you, dear ones, will get to read or see what I've got simmering on my brain stove. My friend asked why I was doing so well, and dutifully I tried to launch into an explanation of my projects... have you ever tried to talk to someone about what you're writing? No?

Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.

Yeah. It's not a thing I would recommend doing in public. I don't know how much "writer mumbo-jumbo" I actually believe... are the stories already out there, like radio waves, and we just tell them? Do you invent characters or do they find you? How concrete is this other world where writers go when they write? Clearly it's potent enough to drive most of us batshit...

But I also know that screenwriting is a particular brand of this madness, because IT'S NOT LITERATURE. Think about it. If you are literally any other kind of writer -- poet, essayist, novelist, short fiction writer, journalist, biographer, etc. etc. -- then your writing ITSELF is the end goal. Your writing ITSELF has value. Even a playwright gets respect for the text of the play itself; you can go to the library and check out a play, you can win a Pulitzer for a play -- hell, you can win a Pulitzer for MUSIC -- but you can't win one for screenwriting. It's true. Look it up.

Asshole.

And, yeah, I get it. By the time a screenplay makes it to you, the viewer, it's not a screenplay anymore. By then, it's a movie, and hundreds maybe thousands of people have worked on it and you can hardly be said to be its author anymore, at least not in any sense that matters. But without the screenwriter, there is no such thing as a movie. The screenwriter is the spark, the ignition point -- ain't no fire without us, baby. And that -- the very ugly nature of this beast called filmmaking -- is what shunts screenwriters to the side and invalidates them as WRITERS, worthy on the fact that they access the same magic and practice the same sorcery as other writers and walk the same road -- a road paved with, I don't know, unicorn horns and hot lava.

...and they're still all one person, right?

Anyway, the whole thing goes back to my post about processing work and the nature of creation. S was talking to me last night after the play, and he mentioned that, because he has been working with a writer on developing/writing a screenplay, he has been starting to get a taste of what my life is like in terms of the pleasure of creation. My friends, creation is pleasure.

When S gets behind a camera and starts shooting, then there's pressure. Then there are high stakes, because there is money involved, and you're getting to the step where people might actually see what you're doing. But when you sit in your office/living room/coffee shop and you put words on paper, then you're free again to explore and create untethered. To be honest, there isn't a lot of pressure -- especially when you're broke, like me, and only writing on spec at the moment, like me, so there isn't money and there's virtually no chance of ANYBODY ever seeing what you're working on -- because being a screenwriter means you're operating on the very fringes of what people consider to be art/literature, so CREATE AWAY.

And be amazing. It's not a fair world, the world of the screenwriter. My mentor and friend, let's call him J, constantly writes, spending years developing scripts, doing drafts, making compromises, fighting with actors, fighting with producers, fighting with his own writing partner, and then he pushes his projects out of the nest and he gets to watch most of them go KERSPLAT on the pavement 90% of the time. The ones that do find their wings half the time don't remember who their mommy is, or they have had just too many mommies, so J then loses his credits in arbitration, so even if you have seen one of his movies, you probably don't even know it. This is a dude who was nominated for TWO OSCARS -- and that's the highest award we give, no Pulitzers for you, puny mortal screenwriters -- because somehow enough of his words made it into the mouths of Anthony Hopkins and Will Smith, and even if you've seen his movies, which you probably haven't, you STILL don't know who he is. And that's pretty much the best future I can hope for.

I still want it. This is the life I picked. It's pretty fun! If you think about it. Or don't. Just don't think about it. I may have made a wrong turn back there somewhere.