don charles

On Writing with 2022 Vision - #55

This post in a nutshell.

This post will be about what’s been learned recently and what I must do going forward in 2022 and beyond. May this be a document for my personal reference.

When I look back on the last year since [my last post (April 2021), I saw that it couldn’t be summed up in an Instagram carousel with seven or so silly pictures of me on cross-Atlantic planes and having poolside rum and eating fancy foods with friendly mates and dates.

It was an era of reflection, as the whole Pandemic has been. Dividing what you want to show people and what actually happened is the great conundrum of ourselves on social media, I guess. What you’re reading is me – period.

This will be about writing.

The script in a nutshell.

As some of you know, I have a feature film project called “Valet Guys”.

I got the idea from my time being a weekend valet at a seaside Los Angeles hotel in 2019. It was my first year living in Los Angeles trying to break into the entertainment industry. While there, a few of the guys I worked with told me they were trying to do the same. “We’re gonna be producers, bro!” they told me. Earlier that year, Malibu experienced massive wildfires that leveled neighborhoods. These people lost their homes and needed accommodations quickly, so they sought refuge with their relatives and friends. Some went to hotels, like the one I was at, and my fellow valet dudes got to know one woman named… (typing “fakenamegenerator.com” into the search bar)… Lorie Spangler.

Isn’t that the most fucking Hollywood name you’ve ever heard?

Lorie Spangler’s Malibu mansion burned down to the ground and she was living (at the time) on the top floors of this ritzy resort. We got to know Lorie and eventually, when my work buddy “Jason Walsh” (fake name, of course) got talking to her, he pitched the idea for a film about valets. She loved it and said, “I am a producer for many reality TV projects over at [big cable-channel-now-streaming-service]. Who’s writing this thing?”

“Don, my friend! He’s funny!” Jason replied. And so I got looped into it.

Months passed. Jason got a couple dinners with Lorie. I did not. Jason and I were chatting over text one day when I told him I wanted a meeting with Lorie to “discuss story, what she does, and to meet me, the writer.”

“Sure thing, bro, let me get back to you on that, I’ll talk to her to find some time.” But another month passed and there was dead air between us. I reduced my time at the hotel and reminded Jason every week to get me a meeting with Lorie.

It was the week of Christmas in 2019. I was at LAX airport about to board my flight to Dallas to see family for the holidays. My phone went off and I saw the caller. “Jason!” I said into it – where the hell has he been? He replied that he was having roommate troubles and drama with his girlfriend, and apologized for going radio silent. “Did you get a meeting set?” I asked after.

“No, I didn’t. Sorry.” Jason then went on to explain that Lorie “wanted a treatment first” before talking to me. (A treatment is basically an outline of what the movie is about.)

Today, I know this is a big red flag. If you are coming on as a Producer, even as an Executive Producer (which I assume what Lorie would have been ideally), and you are trying to work with a writer on a movie, then of course, meeting the writer is vital to any project.

However, at that time, all I knew was that something didn’t sound right. Exactly what – I wasn’t sure. I thanked Jason for reaching out and that I would update him with any new developments on the film treatment. That was the last time I heard from Jason. The last time I ever heard of Lorie Spangler.

The Pandemic hit in March 2020. The movie studio that employed me Monday through Friday laid me off. What a perfect time to start writing this thing that I have been pushing to the side, I thought. By this point, I have stopped doing the valet work for a month or so.

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The “pre-work” in a nutshell. (Source: Library of Congress)

Then began “pre-work” during Summer 2020. Imagine me walking up and down a desolate service road out in rural Texas, talking into my phone’s audio recorder to get my ideas out. What is the story? What are the characters? What is the theme? Shit, I didn’t know, so I reread [“The Art of Dramatic Writing”, written up 18 pages of notes], and used those as a guide.

The transcriptions turned into a character document, then a plot report, until finally I had a complete book that went into immense detail of the many characters, their backgrounds, and how the movie started and ended. This document came out to be about 22,000 words of preliminary work… when printed, it was between 70-100 pages. Half a novel of something that wasn’t even the first draft of the real product.

Autumn 2020. I started writing. Every day. First in pencil on legal pads and notebooks, then retyped onto Fade In (because fuck Final Draft). And by January 2021, I kept expanding the plot and characters and thematic structures and everything in-between until one day I saw the number “200” pop up in the top right corner. I just remembered thinking, “Fuck, this is long.” I spoke to my Writers Group and told them the first draft was so shitty, I needed to do a Draft 2 before showing them anything. It clocked in at around 35,000 words.

This next part in a nutshell.

Cue the period of Procrastination (January-March 2021). The thought of “Fuck, this is long,” kept bumping on me. I avoided trying to fix it, I didn’t want to look at it, as I knew it was a steaming pile of crap and that reworking it would require a massive re-haul of everything I did. I passed the time by getting really into exercising, talking to a girl that wasted my time, and whatever else, honestly.

A part of this procrastination convinced me that I need to break down the structure of the feature film in order to understand it better. Between March and May, I sat on my apartment’s back patio area, had the entire 200 page script next to me printed on paper, and started summarizing scenes onto notecards. My efforts are shown below.

I then put this all on my wall, and went traveling between May and August.

That May, I went to Costa Rica with a girl. Long story short, it was a million little arguments over 3 ½ weeks and was quite the rollercoaster.

June through July was a month out in Italy, and it became a Grand Tour of the country.

July & August: I played around in Texas and had a California road trip with my mom.

(Source)

A complete summer of fun. And no writing. The amount of time away from the page bugged me so much, it kept me up at night sometimes.

I got back to my apartment in August 2021 and saw the notecards were still up. I rearranged them to create a better narrative structure, and tried to cut things that didn’t matter. This then began the Autumn of Monastic Morning Writing, or as I like to call it, The Inefficient Hustle (August-November). What happened during these weird days went more or less like the following:

The Hustle in a nutshell.

Get up. Go downstairs to my laptop. Write for 2 or 3 hours in my underwear. The script was next to me and it was rearranged to reflect the new structure I created on the wall. If I half-assed a scene in the first draft, I tried to expand on it in the second draft, still consulting my wall for guidance and watching how characters felt at certain inflection points. Due to the amount of people in my feature script (an ensemble) this required me to track 7 characters and construct it in a way that would have a satisfying ending. Mind you, the rewriting of the script’s 1st draft was literal – I actually retyped the movie for a 2nd draft, from page one onwards.

After my 2 or 3 hours of writing, I showered, got ready for work, and got lazy. Daydreamed for the day. Told myself, “I’ll get some writing done in the evening,” yet it never happened. Some weeknights I would goof off, go to bed late, and screw up the next morning’s schedule by waking up with barely enough time to do any writing. Hence the name: “The Inefficient Hustle”.

It was mid-November 2021. I remember waking up at 3:30am in my dark living room still dressed in a sweater and joggers. A nearby lamp coaxed my vision and the couch was not all that comfortable. There was a forgettable episode of a show still playing on the TV. I recall standing up, turning the TV off, slogging up the stairs, and sitting on my bed in the dark.

“I’m already awake,” I thought. The alarm showed 3:37am (or something like that), and there was a feeling of dread over me. A sense that I’m going to die someday and that at my funeral, my widow is going to be overlooking my coffin and saying something along the lines of, “I can’t believe he didn’t finish it,” as she sheds a single tear on the dry dirt that lays atop of me. Then she would walk away to one of those black limousines with the rest of the family. A little Hispanic girl would sit straddled in the corner with pigtails and a black polka dot dress and notice that her mother was crying. “Mama,” she might say, “Did Papa ever finish his script?” The widow would look at her daughter and imagine all the wonderful things that could have been; she would then say, “I’m afraid not, mi amor,” before doing a final glance at the mound of fresh dirt on the cemetery hill. “I’m afraid not.”

So I got out of bed and finished the fucking thing.

The alarm went off at 7:29am (don’t judge me) and my head was throbbing from the computer screen’s blue light fucking with my corneas. I went back to bed not with elation, but rather passable acceptance. The thought of “finishing” a movie script – not a novel, or a collection of poetry, or an academic thesis, or whatever of that nature – felt empty. I laid my head back onto the pillow and placed my laptop onto the nightstand. “I can probably squeeze in about an hour and a half,” I thought.

I woke up later. Rolled out of bed. Opened my work laptop. And I worked (which is not saying much: sending emails, have one or two meetings to talk about the emails, lunch, do it again for a few hours, then leave at 6pm). I was focused more on preparing my script for my Writers Group; given the nature of the material, I whipped up a Foreword (a content warning) and stuck it right after the title page. “Print to PDF” – always do “print to PDF”, never “Export”. And there. My Draft 2 of the “epic”:

VALET GUYS
Page count: 306

The 2nd draft clocked in at 49,500 words. Again, those are retyped words,. That’s almost a small novel (50k approximately). Over the course of the entire project, I have churned out a combined total of 106,500 words.

I have been complimented on my industriousness by friends and family, however, the sad reality is that I don’t feel like that. I know it’s easy to look at this project and say, “Hey, he did this thing, that’s effort! That’s what matters!” But to be honest with you all, I barely did any writing in 2021, even though I kept calling myself a writer to friends in town and to new people on the road.

Even if I split the 106,000 words into the 365 days a year, that’s 290 words a day. That’s nothing, especially given the fact that the majority of it is not new material and there were periods of no writing at all for weeks, sometimes months.

My feelings in a nutshell. (Painting: Sunset by Caspar David Friedrich)

I have two fears in life: 1) living with the regret of not taking action on what’s important, and 2) the fear of being seen as a fraud. These two sentiments are not the same thing.

When I hear how Stephen King has a daily goal of 2000 words a day, every day, including holidays and his birthday, and the math calculates out to 730,000 words a year, well, yeah – that’s going to make you feel like a fraud, feeding you questions at night, like:

Who are you calling yourself a writer? Do you actually know storytelling? Can you write one good joke from pure nothing?

But, as a friend pointed out, I’m comparing myself to Stephen Fucking King, and the usual notable author in history had word quotas way less than that, but my 2021 estimate of a sub-300 word quota still gets to me… (Source):

(Yes, Crichton was fucking nuts.)

(Source)

The fear of regret is worse, more deep seated, as it’s like a dagger sinking into one’s chest, except slowly, with the pain not being recognized until it’s too late. I’m legitimately scared of letting time slip by on my art — the rust will set in and the flywheel that I’ve been pushing at can come to a halt. One of my favorite comedians, Bill Burr, explained this phenomenon well in a recent podcast episode:

The whole lockdown happened in March [2020]; I didn't think about [standup] at all in April and May and I was kind of like, “Oh god, I kind of need a break, man. [I’ve been] going for 30 straight years.” And then by June, I had this really scary thing where, like, I wasn't even thinking about it. I was like, “Oh my god, this is how people stop doing stand-up. It's that easy!” I used to think it was going to be, like, kicking and screaming. It is as easy as just not doing it for three months, and then you just fucking move on to something else because I can tell you dude, I could literally eat, drink, and smoke myself to death with enough time off...
– Source (timestamped)

It’s also disastrous on the small scale, when the few hours you have each day to yourself are thrown away night after night. Evidence of this can be clearly seen from the author Joseph Heller when he spoke about writing Catch-22:

I spent two or three hours a night on it for eight years. I gave up once and started watching television with my wife. Television drove me back to Catch-22. I couldn’t imagine what Americans did at night when they weren’t writing novels.
– from Daily Rituals by Mason Currey (pg. 133)

Overextended relaxation periods filled with mindless distractions and time-killing hobbies – this is the real poison. It will suck you in and keep you there if you let it, and the regret of not taking action will seep in. Nothing is scarier than turning 40 and realizing I got nowhere because I loved Netflix too much.

But as a friend has pointed out — maybe I’m going too hard on myself? Maybe I should relax and take it easy? I am just bashing myself in this part of the piece.

However, I believe I have a greater purpose on this planet, and I am here to see it through till I’m dead. Otherwise, I don’t know what else to do? Bullshit my time till the reaper knocks on my door? That fucking blows.

So, lessons learned:

  1. Set a daily word count quota. A simple, honest goal that I know is achievable in 2 hours max.

  2. Write fast. Don’t open all the windows and doors, have your phone in your visual field, or stay connected to the internet. Writing with speed is the producer of good writing, so I’ve heard. I’m a man that is easily distracted, so the way to complete this is to cutoff as many annoying inputs as possible.

  3. Be showered and dressed at the computer. I know writers, throughout history, are known for getting words down on the page in their robes and slippers from dawn till 2pm, but not me. That’s uncomfortable and gross. I will never understand it.

  4. If I’m writing one of the newsletter posts, write it on the computer. If I’m writing comedy, like a script or stand-up piece, do it in pencil first, then onto the computer.

  5. Don’t go hard on myself on the first couple drafts. The first tries are always shit.

  6. Don’t write a gargantuan newsletter piece. They should be short and to the point. No more than a tight 1000 words. My real focus is on the comedy, as this newsletter can be better seen as a lark. (This reboot post can be seen as the exception to the 1000-word criteria.)

  7. I have to keep the plates spinning in my mind while writing or when I need to do something quick, like getting water or going to the bathroom. I noticed that when I even go to the bathroom, it is highly likely my mind will wander to thinking about my day job, or girls, or fun happenings in Los Angeles, or another writing project, or imagining my future, or whatever the fuck that is not the exact words on the page. The only solution I found is to keep talking to myself out loud about the project from when I leave the page to when I come back.

    When I turned in Draft 2 of Valet Guys to my Writers Group, having not turned in anything for a year, their reaction wasn’t awe. It was a sense of, “Fuck, this is long.” Two months passed and no one read it. A group member soon chimed in; she said, “If you can cut it to 150 pages, I’ll give it a read. Go back to the outline!” The issue of course is that I didn’t know what to cut (thankfully, my roommate-friend agreed to table read 20 pages a night with me to see what to cut). So, last but not least:

  8. Get feedback as fast as you can before you build something too big.

I’m leaving it at that.

Why now? Why am I rebooting this thing?

I had fun traveling Costa Rica, Italy, Canada, the Northeast, Spain – but I’ve let gone too much time. I’m still going places in 2022, just not multi-month expeditions.

Since my last post, I’ve learned life is full of time sinks: time-wasting relationships, dead-end projects, and pouring time into things that, in the grand scheme, don’t matter. What matters is making quantity to create quality. I have to experience a ton, read a bunch, and write a lot of different angles of the same format if I want any of what I do to be, in some regard, “good art”.

If I can do that, then that’s a fulfilling life.

And that’s what I desire.

Thanks.