Two Reboot Finalists

This is part of my blog reboot process. For the origin of the thought of the motivation of the why and the why now, please click back here.

I've said before that there are a handful of reasons why I'm rebooting and refocusing this blog:

Increase Exposure
Creative Challenge
Showcase My Writing
More Fun for Me, More Entertaining for You

I freely admit that this is all about furthering my career as a professional writer. I would very much like for there to be dollars at the end of this rainbow. It feels important for me to say this up front, as I don't want to be the guy who pretends he's doing something strictly for the art. The art is very important, but I've come to learn that money is also very important too.

Hopefully, art and commerce can co-exist in some meaningful way for me. I know that is a lot to ask of myself, but if you don't ask a lot of yourself then odds are you won't receive a lot from yourself.

Don't you think?

So, with no further ado...

OPTION ONE

A hybrid of the Fiction Writer and the Confessional angles. Here I would fictionalize the present and future of my life in journal form. The journal would begin on March 1, 2009 using my actual, or true past as the backstory.

In other words, I would use the actual raw material of my life to date as the jumping-off point for the adventures of Fictional David Rielly. The changes would be subtle at first; I wouldn't win the lottery on the first day or anything like that. But, over the course of the next year, I would add fictional wrinkles to my real life as a way to... see what I would do.

This option would be a study in wish fulfillment and worst-case scenarios. I would make my relatively uneventful life... eventful. Here I could experiment in meta creative visualization, as the purpose of fictionalizing my life would primarily be to make changes in my real life.

There's something here, methinks, but it might take some digging to find it.

I've always loved this tagline

OPTION TWO

This one falls under the Stunt category. What I propose is to pitch you an original movie idea every day for a year. Each post will include three parts: 1) a title, 2) a logline, and 3) a publicity tagline. Here's an example using an existing film:

1) ALIEN

2) When Ellen Ripley and the crew of the deep space mining ship Nostromo answer a distress call on a distant world, they must do battle with the murderous alien life-form they unwittingly bring back to their ship.

3) "In space, no one can hear you scream."

This option revolves around several areas where I have a great deal of history and interest. I've written thousands of loglines for scripts I covered as a reader. I've brainstormed plenty of movie premises (though nowhere near 365). Perhaps most importantly, I know that there are copywriters out there who are paid to write taglines for the theatrical release of feature films and I'd love nothing more to join their ranks.

What better portfolio piece could there be for that job than this?

I'm going to think about this for a week or so, do some preparatory work and then relaunch The Word Player on March 1, 2009 with the first installment of the new concept.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and responses. I'll see you on the 1st.

the word player 2.0

This past weekend, a friend said "So, I see you don't post very often on the blog anymore."

This is true. I feel like I'm lacking enough subject matter to post with any regularity, and waiting for inspiration to strike only provides me with sporadic bits and pieces to chew on.

"Inspiration is for amateurs," someone once said about writing. I agree to the extent that you can't rely on it on a day-to-day basis. It is, however, invaluable in creating a keystone around which other pieces of the puzzle can coalesce.

I can't bring myself to write movie or record or book reviews due to the sheer glut of material already out there on the subject. Besides, I want to continue progressing as a professional writer, and the paid critic is a dying breed.

When I started this blog, more than anything it was a new channel for me to funnel and explore my creative impulses after hanging up my screenwriting boots. For over five years straight I'd been constantly working on one script or another, often taking more than a year to "complete" one. I really, really enjoyed the immediacy of completing something short and sweet in one sitting. Blogging not only flexed new writing muscles, but I quickly discovered that it kept me limber in other valuable areas as well.

After a year or so, however, I got the feeling that I was writing only for myself and a small handful of friends. If you'll permit me to speak frankly, I'm at a stage in my writing development where I need to either be writing for an audience or writing for money. Writing for neither is simply unsatisfying (sorry amigos), and gives me the unshakable sensation that my time would be better spent elsewhere.



So here's the crossroads where I find myself today, the fifth Wednesday of 2009. In the four years I've been seriously pursuing copywriting, it has become the first career path in my life where I can genuinely see an intersection of ability, confidence, earning potential and job satisfaction. I love doing the work, I just can't seem to find enough of it on a consistent basis. In the last 10 days, I've had three jobs that I thought were in the bag fall through. Two of them were because the client decided to call in favors with friends of theirs who are writers and try to get the work done for free.

I can't compete with free.

I am promoting myself as a copywriter as best I can using other more traditional channels, but as of this morning (hell, as of this hour) I am determined to exploit this forum more vigorously and inventively. I need to draw more attention to myself in order to reach the pivotal demographic of people who have money to pay writers to write. This is not an easy pill for a mellow introvert to swallow, but them's the breaks.

Now, I realize that blogging about the internal workings of my mind (what I've essentially been doing since the end of the "Bend Me, Shape Me" series) is never going to draw a crowd (and is probably boring as shit to most of you). I also know that I have now reached the end of this post without inspiration striking me with a swell solution to my dilemma (damn).

So, over the next week or two I will brainstorm here "live" for an hour every day I can. I'll see if I can come up with a new central conceit for this blog that will not only engage me creatively, but also have a realistic chance to draw a much larger audience to the site than the one I currently enjoy (an average of 45 page visits/64 page views per day).

I encourage you to chime in. If you've never been here before, a quick glance at the Labels running down the right-hand side should give you an idea of what sort of subject matter I respond to historically.

I market myself as a concept-driven copywriter, so I should damn well be able to come up with a marketable concept for myself.

Right?

We'll see what the process creates. Lacking inspiration (so far), it's time to turn to perspiration.

The Zen of the Bridesmaid

I don't know about you, but I read in bed almost every night before I go to sleep. So does Mrs. Word Player.

Several years ago, when the wife in a couple we were friends with discovered this about us, she could barely contain her jealousy. I had no idea... I thought every couple read in bed together. It was a strange exchange, in that from that point forward I looked at what I have as lucky rather than just the status quo. In life it's all about perspective, wouldn't you say?

So a few nights ago, MWP leans over and says "read this." I took the book she'd just started, Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein, M.D., and read the first sentence in the Forward, which was written by the Dalai Lama.

"The purpose of life is to be happy."

Whoa. The simplicity of that powerful statement packs an incredible wallop. It certainly goes against the Catholic upbringing I received, where suffering and deprivation are lionized and true happiness is deferred to the afterlife.

I bet the Lama is a big LOST fan. Maybe HE is this "Jacob" we keep hearing about...

Lately, my happiness has been yo-yoing quite a bit, but the biggest X factor has been my work life. When work is plentiful, I am practically exuberant. That sensation pervades the rest of my life quickly- I hadn't been happy with my "Development Guy" work in several years, so the 3+ years I've been relying on my copywriting work (which I genuinely enjoy) has been a boon to my overall mood.

I've also been on indefinite hiatus from my screenwriting projects since spring of '07, work that was often as torturous emotionally as it was fulfilling creatively. And I've been OK with that arrangement for a long while now... until recently.

First, work slowed down in December, and it's continued to be slow into January. My mood destabilized. Then, an odd confluence of events suddenly made me revisit my career path and the happiness factor attached to it. It started with LOST. We received Season 4 on DVD for Christmas, and since we already had Seasons 1 and 2, we went out and bought Season 3 to complete the collection. In watching it, for some reason, my eye kept catching on Jeffrey Lieber's name in the credits. He is a co-creator of the show, and someone I used to know. Even though he's had his own issues with LOST, for some reason seeing his name in the credits over and over had a different effect on me than it had in the past.

It wasn't schadenfreude, it was "why him and not me?" I came into (and then lost) contact with Jeffrey long before LOST. I was a newly hired development guy for Civilian (then known as Spoke Film) and I cast my net wide looking for submissions. Naturally, I hated most of the stuff that agents sent me, but when I read Jeff's scripts (one was called "Conspiracy of Weeds" and I can't remember the name of the second) I called and set up a meeting. Nothing ever came of my interest in the scripts ("Conspiracy" was later made with the far less interesting title TANGLED), but I became friends with Jeff and his wife Holly and for a while he even rented office space from Civilian.

Jeff was talented and a very nice guy, and remembering the clever twists and turns in his scripts that I read it's not hard to see how his contributions to LOST earned him a co-creator credit. "But aren't I ALSO a nice and talented guy who has clever twists of my own to share with the world?" that stubborn part of my brain kept saying every time I saw his name on the screen during our LOST-athon.

Try as I might, I couldn't silence that little voice. In fact, a rapid succession of similar events only made it more insufferable. I saw TWILIGHT and, lo and behold, one of the producers is I guy I used to work with at Wendy Finerman Productions. He was a junior development exec then (hey, kinda like I once was!) and LOOK AT HIM NOW. At the grocery store, I saw a girl I went to UNC with and was once friends with who is now producing Adam Sandler movies. We're the same age, and moved out to LA around the same time, but LOOK AT HER NOW. I watch an episode of GOSSIP GIRL and hey, I used to take meetings with the co-creator and occasionally go for drinks with our mutual friend. Damn, what did she have that I don't have?

Yeah, but would dealing with Chuck Bass' problems be any easier?

I know, of course, that it's an enormous oversimplification of the way lives and careers play out to compare myself to them, and I also know that the choices I've made have taken me out of the running for some of the successes that they are now enjoying.

BUT STILL!

Anyway, having all those things happen within a span of a few days really bummed me out for a while. But the more I thought of it, the more my mood improved. I've achieved a pretty damn high level of happiness without the industry success that I'd pursued for over a decade. I've indulged and explored my creative side and expanded and tested my business acumen while developing a personal life that I'm proud of.

And who knows, the best may be yet to come? But the biggest thing that came out of all this for me is the sensation that no matter what happens from this point forward, I was in the game. I played alongside some of the game's top players, even though I never won the big game myself. I've taken the sum of my experiences and spun them into a state of mind that, I feel, is at the very least prepared for any number of challenging paths the future may hold.

Should I happen to find my way back onto the industry path, I'll be ready. And if it doesn't ever "happen" the way I longed for it to? Well, I'll be ready for that too.

State of the Nation

Yesterday Mrs. Word Player and I took a walk in the park behind our house. It was about dusk, and there was a thick haze in the air that had been hanging around since I'd referred to it as fog in the morning. The setting sun looked beautiful, the hills mysterious. The horse running circles around its trainer in the Equestrian Center next door kicked up dust of its own, adding to the sense of early evening obfuscation.

I haven't been feeling myself lately. I missed a haircut appointment before going to SF two weekends ago, one that was already overdue, and my hair is too big and curly. I feel fat. I hurt my Achilles tendon playing tennis a month ago, slipping just so on the court after a match delay caused by scattered showers. I've been walking with a limpy hitch in my step ever since, and even though I haven't been on the court since and have stopped my morning walks, it hasn't healed properly. I miss the exercise, especially during the Halloween-Thanksgiving eating season. You make so many forward strides physically by playing tennis two or three times a week for a couple years, and then it feels like you lose it all with a month away.

Work has really slowed down after a pretty terrific year. Whenever this happens, my mood invariably turns darker. I've all but shelved the book, which is what I thought I would work on during the slow "paying work" times. It's not that I lost faith in the idea, it's that I lost faith in the possibility of it ever doing anything other than sitting on my shelf next to my screenplays. At my age, I feel like I need at least a fighting chance of remuneration if I'm going to invest thousands more solitary hours into a passion project.

And so, with all this in mind, we went for a walk.

Walking the labyrinth in St. George, UT

Solvitur Ambulando. "It is solved by walking." We've found this to be as true as any saying is, and yesterday was no exception. MWP is no dummy, and could see that I had little cartoon storm clouds roiling above my head. And off we went.

Just as the election was for the previous twelve months, the economy has now become the jumping off point for practically every conversation. We talked about what the dry period meant for us in the short term, and then the long term. Was it time for me to pursue full-time, on-site employment? I've been a stay-at-home freelancer since the end of 2000, and I've dodged plenty of bullets during that stretch. Maybe now, when I'm sitting relatively pretty and have amassed a decent-sized portfolio, is a good time to jump back into the office job fray? If there were any jobs available in my field these days this may have taken longer to discuss.

But then, we asked ourselves, where will we be in ten years? Let's say that we both have continued, sustained success as freelancers until 2018: will we still be hirable when we're not quite as cute or hip and our rates are exponentially higher than our less experienced but ever more cute and young and hip competition?

Will we ever be able to buy a house when the money we've invested to save for it is shrinking rather than growing?

How could anyone in their right mind start a family right now without a sizable safety net? And what kind of world will they grow up in where only the wealthy can afford to pay for college and masked gunmen roam freely?

F†®ƒ©¨ˆ∆˙©ç%$%#&^***CK!

And then we smiled. My foot was hurting a little, but we'd walked the circumference of the park and were on the road back home. There's never been any way to know what the future holds, and there's little wisdom in making long term plans with any expectations of seeing them play out as diagrammed. Hey, we've made it this far, haven't we? Our operating history; as individuals, as a couple, as wage-earners, as creatives; projects that we will continue to at least be competitive in our field, if not somewhat successful. Right?

Even though the majority of what came out of our mouths could be labeled as pessimistic, or at least moany-groany, the simple act of walking while we were talking took a great deal of the negative power of the words away.

When life gives you lemons, take a walk. Odds are you won't feel nearly as sour afterwards.

Life Hyphens

I was reading an article ("Sleepy Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium" by Charles McGrath) on the novelist and screenwriter Richard Price in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section yesterday when two things jumped out at me.

Price also wrote the video for "Bad", directed by Martin Scorsese

The first was Price's reference to Byzantium. Speaking about the Lower East Side today, he said "This place is like Byzantium. It's tomorrow, yesterday – anyplace but today." For a city that's been renamed not once (Constantinople) but twice (Istanbul), Byzantium seems to have been bouncing around in the consciousness lately. My best guess as to why is that the book/film NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN took its title from the 1928 poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats, and there's been no shortage of ink spilled on NO COUNTRY of late.

This second quote from Price, who was Oscar nominated for his 1986 script for THE COLOR OF MONEY, is the one that really grabbed my attention.

Discussing Eric Cash, the protagonist of his new novel Lush Life:

He's modeled partly on himself, Mr. Price said. "He's me if what has been hadn't been. I've always been interested in when the hyphen disappears – you know, actor-waiter, cabdriver-writer – and you have to settle for who you are."

Fabio celebrating his win for "Best Actor/Model"

This thought really touched on something that I've thought about quite a bit over the years. As a resident of either New York City or Los Angeles since 1995, I have encountered and befriended hundreds of hyphenates or "slashies". In fact, I've been one myself (screenwriter/development guy), but as of right this moment my hyphen has disappeared.

It may not last, but I have come to terms with and laid to rest my aspirations of being a successful screenwriter, and the time since 4/21/07 (the last time I modified the file of my last script) has been marked by an increased sense of well-being and peace with where I am on my lifetime career trajectory. When I think about it, the part of the decision that's the most meaningful to me is that I came to it on my own and in my own time. There was no final rejection, there was no self-imposed time limit that was reached, and there were no external forces forcing me to "give up the dream" before I was ready.

There was just the sense that I'd given it my best shot, that continuing to try was a study in diminishing returns, and that I could only continue to ignore the writing on the wall at my own peril.

I have reached the age where the hyphen is starting to disappear for more and more of my contemporaries (some, I'm happy to say, have dropped the "day job" side of the hyphenate for full time exploration of the dream side), but there are still quite a few who still toil in an unsatisfying gig primarily to provide the means to pursue the long-shot.

I think its fair to say that the odds get longer that long shots will come in the older we get, but does that mean that everyone should "do the math" and put the dream on the shelf at some point?

No one can answer that but oneself, and fortunately many people can balance the pursuit of the elusive dream with a meaningful and fulfilling pursuit of the reality until the day they die.

But what of the people who cannot find peace and fulfillment unless they achieve the fullest realization of the dream side of the hyphenate? I simultaneously root for and worry about many who occupy this category, and after some deliberation I have two tidbits to pass on from my experience that may be helpful.

1) Periodically, reexamine the nuts and bolts of what your dream career is and where you assess your chances currently stand of realizing it.

Will success as a singer or actor or novelist mean the same thing to you if it happens next year compared with how you imagined it happening at age 18 or 21 or 29? Will not achieving success in the same devastate you now as much now as you thought it would then, especially factoring in up-to-date placement of points on a graph representing your personal confluence of luck, hard work, connections, and talent?

2) Do everything in your power to find work on both sides of your hyphenate that is fulfilling in ways beyond the strictly utilitarian/monetary. No matter who you are, the day job has a decent chance of becoming the lifetime career, so maneuver as best you can to make that day job something that improves you and/or your chances for long-term fulfillment.

If you haven't already done so, Netflix FREAKS AND GEEKS

This line of thinking often brings up memories of a particularly thought-provoking episode of Judd Apatow's late and lamented FREAKS AND GEEKS. Rebellious A-student Lindsay Weir was dating spastic stoner Nick Andopolis, and as she came to the realization she didn't have the same feelings for him that he had for her, she also saw that his wide-eyed commitment to becoming a drummer in a rock band (damn the torpedoes of grades and parents) didn't come close to matching the talent level he possessed, which was minimal.

Her quandary was a difficult one: should she tell someone that she genuinely cares for that he should abandon his long-shot creative dreams in hopes of refocusing him on more attainable goals, or should she encourage him to pursue the dream that means so very much to him despite knowing in her heart that he has no realistic chance of it ever coming true?