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.

Move Over Sex...

I don't plan on watching any of HBO's new flagship series JOHN FROM CINCINNATI, but it's been impossible to avoid the saturation-bombing of its advertising campaign. In today's "Calendar" section of the LA Times is a full-page spread filled with one-word critical plaudits, including one word in particular that makes me uncomfortable every time I see it used to sell:

"Addictive"
- Oakland Tribune

Maybe it's just me, but I am trying to avoid any more addictions in my life, not seeking to add new ones.

not me, I can quit any time I want.

What bugs me in particular about using "addictive" to hype this series, is that the narrative backstory deals with addiction of the drug and alcohol variety. The following is clipped from HBO's site:

"The Yosts' reign and reputation, once defined in the curl of a perfect wave, have been eroded by years of bad luck, addiction and hubris... The gifts of 13-year-old Shaun rival those of Butchie, his addict-derelict father..."

(and then, my personal favorite)

"Into this world, where even simple joy has been turned into a commodity, steps a mysterious stranger named John. "

I guess if we're "exploring" how simple joy has become a commodity, then it's OK to commodify the sorrow of addiction too. You know, for artistic purposes only. Well, for marketing and artistic purposes only.

But ho, what does HBO have to say in it's full-page ad for ENTOURAGE on the back page of the "Calendar" section?

"Addictive"
-Chicago Tribune

Let's see... how about BIG LOVE?

"An addictive treat"
-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

And so on. I wonder if it's possible that in using the "addictive" blurb as a selling point, HBO might be alienating untold numbers of viewers who only want a casual relationship with their TV shows. I really started noticing the trend of using addiction as an overt selling tool about a year ago in the Glendale Galleria. Trendy boutique Planet Funk was offering a "Jeans Junkie" discount card for frequent shoppers of designer denim.

"Bayer Junkie" discount cards are now collector's items.

I just couldn't get over the fact that young women were encouraged to become "junkies" for jeans. The so-called "heroin chic" trend was bad enough, but that term was used to condemn a perceived strategy, not to openly encourage the connection between drugs and fashion.

Might as well face it you're addicted to... jeans?

The More Dominatrices, the Better.

There was a time when I read a handful of scripts and a book or two every week. I never really minded writing the "comments" section of coverage, but I quickly grew to hate the relentless synopsizing. I sympathized with Newman when he would rant about his job as a postal carrier:

"...the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming."

Thankfully (warning: rationalization ahead) all that "practice" I had synopsizing has helped immensely with my copywriting work. Far more often than not, I've been hired to help the client synthesize a copious amount of copy (inc. big ideas, pertinent product factoids, wide-ranging corporate philosophy, etc) into brief bursts of text.

The briefest burst possible is the headline, which, fortunately for me, requires blending a number of my personaly predilections like wordplay, potent quotables, and... synopsizing.

Heart'safire!

One of my favorite columns in The New York Times is William Safire's "On Language"... such a great way to keep up with the vernacular (and, for fellow wordplayers, a great source of sly humor too). Today's installment featured a delicious description of the synopsizing and headline writing process borne of Safire's puzzlement at the following headline from Brit-written The Financial Times:

"Murdoch denies Beijing kowtow as Dow Jones rhetoric hots up."

No, not "heats up"... "hots up." Wondering if perhaps the editors of The Financial Times were eager to save space by cutting "ea" and replacing it with a single "o," Safire writes:

"Granted, brevity is a whip-bearing dominatrix in the discipline of headline writing."

Combining S&M imagery with wordplay hots a brother up, no?

you never know what you'll get when you google-image "kowtow"!