Surviving the writing

Yesterday was a long day at my desk. And around the house. Peeping in the fridge, checking on the laundry, looking out the window, messing with the curtains, shaving my legs and moisturizing them, thinking about how my hair would look short, wondering what it says about me that I was blasting Eminem when my neighbors were blasting piano music, not caring about what it says about me, thinking about the kettle balls gathering dust by the TV, wondering if they're kettle bells or kettle balls, then checking the Internet to find out (they're bells), then getting sucked into some baseball stories on said Internet, then reading about Detroit because well, my sitcom's set there, then finding a piece of pizza in the fridge and wondering if I should eat it, debating calling my mom about said pizza and then realizing I probably should just eat the freaking pizza, then eating it and wondering if I'd die what would happen to my stuff, like my journals and my computer files and my scripts and...

And that was just probably forty-five minutes before noon. So for anyone who ever wondered what it was like to be a writer, well, that's just a taste. A very small taste.

Yesterday I did write. A lot. I finished eight or more pages of the eleven-page final outline I'd been working on for the sitcom I'm writing. And I started the first draft of the actual script. I think a lot of people have this misconception that screenwriters just jump into dialogue and those crisp script pages we all have seen. But that's not how it works (at least, how it works best).

It starts with ideas and scribbles and lots of thinking. Thinking that for me seems to happen most often when I'm driving or showering or sleeping. Then it gets interesting. There are cards and circles and charts and pictures and yes, more scribbles. Eventually there's a page-long outline, then a beat sheet, then a full outline which became eleven pages yesterday (a half-hour comedy script usually runs thirty to fifty pages).

And yesterday as I looked back over the outline, I started to think about my other scripts and how this one fits into my portfolio, if at all. I thought about the story and the genre and the themes and the characters and I realized that this is exactly the type of story I tell. Somehow, my writing has found a voice. And that voice is mine.

Over the past few years I've worked with managers and teachers and crafted my little bio and pitch to tell when I meet people in the industry. I'd finally distilled it down last year to this:

The heart of my stories focuses on people who wake up one day and finally realize they’ve been stuck: in their jobs, in their relationships, just in their every day lives. And this forces them to make a change or face the consequences: never having the lives they wanted, never realizing their dreams.

What I write about is me, my life, my experience, my epiphany. I woke up one day and realized I was just getting through each day; I wasn’t living the life I wanted. And in order to live that life I needed to make a change. So I did. I made the choice to leave a stable, career-focused job to enroll in film school at UCLA. I took control of my life in order to realize my dreams. And that's what I'm doing.

And as I reread that yesterday I realized that my new sitcom script, which is in my mind a funny slice of life comedy, aligns exactly with my voice and my stories. And I wondered, how did this happen?

Then I thought about it. It happened from five plus years of intense work. Thousands of hours sitting behind this screen, staring at this blinking cursor, wondering how to say what was in my heart and my imagination. My blog is my brain with a little bit of a censor. So are my scripts. So is my novel. I love that I've finally gotten to the point where my voice, my point of view, is evident in my stories.

That didn't happen by accident but by specific design. By study. By hard work. By wanting to affect the world in some tiny way. To be heard. And that is why today, I sit down, open the Final Draft file on my desktop, stare at the file, and begin to wonder what I should order for dinner, how can I finish all of the episodes of the old seasons of Arrested Development and the new season before next Wednesday and keep up with my Tigers, should I take jeans to Michigan or just buy new ones, and why are those birds so obnoxiously loud?

Writing. Anyone who didn't love it wouldn't survive it.