Stripper-Turned-Writer (11.08)

If you’re a writer, particularly a screenwriter, you’d have to be living in a box not to know the story of Diablo Cody. Stripper in Minneapolis blogs about her life as a stripper. Producer/agent/publisher guy finds said blog, and turns it into a book, and then convinces stripper to write a screenplay. Jason Reitman gets screenplay, and they make Juno. Stripper wins Academy Award.

Juno was one of my favorite movies of that year, and I’m totally agree with the Oscar win. But I didn’t even know about the book until I saw it in some random pile at my brother’s house a few days ago. But being a fan of Juno, and of strippers in general (not to mention being someone who still has a yet-to-be-finished screenplay that’s set in that particular scene), I had to read it.

The book is called Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, and I read the whole thing in one sitting, in a marathon reading session that lasted from about 11 pm until 2:30 this morning. Rather than being a story about the “girl gone wrong,” it’s more of a “fish out of water” tale, as this desperately conservative (or so she would have us believe) 24-year-old suburbanite steps into her quarterlife crisis, and with it a seedy strip club on amateur night. Over the next year she hits an upscale gentleman’s club, an all-nude hustler bar, the peep show at a porn shop, back to a strip club, and finally a phone sex line, before it was finally time for her to call it quits for good.

One of the markers of Cody’s writing style is that it’s incredibly witty. The sort of thing I used to envy when I was … well, about that age, and convinced that the deeper you delved into the thesaurus, the more idioms you used, the more obscure and creative your analogies, the better the writing. One such perpetrator who comes to mind is the curmudgeon John Kelso of the Austin American-Statesman. (Side note: When I was in college I wrote a poem about a hyperbolically precocious squirrel. I came across that poem a few days ago digging through old boxes, and I still like it. But my favorite poem I ever wrote was called “From the Journal of a 13th Century Peasant”, which consisted of the title, my name, and a blank page.)

At some point I read an article that argued that good writers don’t need to call attention to their own writing in that way, and it cured me forever of that ambition. Every now and then I write something that violates the principle, like my recent short story, an attempt at Poe-esque American Gothic, where I literally spent hours in a thesaurus picking out every obscure word I could shoehorn into my story, and then hours more pulling all those words out. But I still like coining new words and phrases (if you can understand what it means, then by definition it’s a word, dammit!), and do so regularly.

But I no longer feel the need to litter everything I write with obscure references to popular culture or ancient classics. (In an interview with Letterman, Cody refers to herself as a naked Margaret Mead. The audience laughed and applauded. Cody mugged for them. I looked up who the heck Margaret Mead is.)

Regardless, there’s no denying that Candy Girl is exceptionally well told, because Cody has more than just a keen wit, she has an excellent grasp on story telling. This book includes every structural beat you would expect from a well-told story: solid turning points, as she goes from one club to the next along her questionable career path; a midpoint when she quits, but then just has to return because she can’t help herself; rising stakes as she does more and more, going from the partially-clothed to the all-nude to masturbating in front of fetishists, until she finally found herself as the Grade A stripper who took home the gold; and then the need to quit and exit the industry entirely.

Through all of it, the insights are candid; erotic but grotesque: the unmistakable stain spreading through the patrons’ shorts, the declining responsiveness of her genitals, the need to be better than everyone else for just one night, the power through all the objectification. And for that, we love the author, because she gives us, as all great writers should, a window into something we couldn’t possibly have known otherwise.

I like that she addresses, in the conclusion, her motives for doing this and the motives of most of the girls who take this career path. I’ve recently become fascinated with the idea of exploiting stereotypes to call attention to them and offer a contrapuntal alternative. And this book does all of the above.

So all in all, a great read, and one that has me respect this Oscar-winning writer all the more.

2009 Successes & Failures

If I were to make a list of “What’s Hot & What’s Not,” I think New Years Resolutions are eking their way onto the “Not” list. Read John August’s latest post if you need convincing.

What I will look at is successes and failures.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the measurements of success. If we were to look at the game of football, the ultimate goal in any given year is to win the Super Bowl. Inside of that goal, are 16-19 sub-goals per year – to win the game. And inside of each of those games are further sub-goals: to score a touchdown. If you ask any coach or player what they’re thinking about in any given week, the answer is always the same: the next game. And if you were to ask any of them what they’re thinking about in the middle of the game, the answer will always be the next drive; or the next play.

And yet, inside the game of football, there are a million ways to measure performance. Rushing yards; passing yards; touchdowns; interceptions; turnover margin; time of possession; punts inside the 20; explosive plays; “passer rating”; penalties; number of 100-yard rushing games per season; December record; number of times Jessica Simpson is mentioned during the broadcast . . . the list goes on and on.

Often, as humans, we trick ourselves into thinking that the measurement is the goal itself. When that happens in football, the result is selfish players who want more touches so they can pad their stats, ultimately leading to a poor locker room environment, bad teamwork, and a team that, realistically, won’t win the big one.

In real life, it can be just as insidious, though for most of us it’s less public.

So when it comes to being a writer, what are the measures? Finishing a screenplay? Writing every day? Selling a script? Yes, those are measures. But remember, they are not the ultimate goal.

So … what are my 2009 measures of success/failure?

• I’ve doubled length of Charisma, from 40 pages to 82. I’m still embarrassed to admit that I haven’t finished it, but you know what, I doubt I’m the only one who’s struggled to finish the first project that he really cares about. The fact that I’ve kept at it for 2 years is a big deal.
• I released my book, Ups & Downs, and have had a few scattered pieces of success with it, but overall have gained very little traction. I have two boxes of books in my study, and the predictable future is that they will stay there unless I change something.
• I had 23 blog posts in 2008 and 304 visits from October-December 2008; and 64 blog posts in 2009 with 407 visits from October-December (with a few days left to go).
• Over the last few months, I’ve come up with structures to increase my productivity, and now I have one to track the time I spend doing various activities, including writing. This way, I can do with my life what football players do with their game – look at where the failures occurred, and adjust accordingly.
• I don’t know how many books I read this year or how many movies I watched. I feel like I should be tracking that, too.
• I’ve figured out that I don’t like doing marcom (marketing communications), and am shifting my business more toward narrative nonfiction ghost writing; book editing; tech writing; and proofreading, all of which I enjoy.

For 2010:

• I’d like to continue my existence/time management structures. The goal is to have my time measured every day, without gaps. Realistically, I will get upset with myself some day for not doing something I was supposed to do, will make myself wrong, and won’t do it. But I will be back on track within a week, because I have enough people holding me to account for doing it. If I can go the entire year having missed, 30 days, I get a bronze star, 20 days a silver star, and 10 days a gold star.
• Finish the novel I’m working on with my dad, a short story/novella I started right before my dad’s and my scheduled start date, and Charisma.
• Exceed this year’s 64 blog posts and 407 4th-quarter visits, without being one of those annoying people who posts what color shoes they’re wearing every day.
• Attend, in some capacity, the 2010 Writer’s League of Texas Agent’s Conference, the Austin Film Festival, San Diego Comic-Con, two comic book conventions closer to home, and two more authors/publishers conferences/conventions.
• Continue reading every day and log every book I finish.
• Come up with a marketing plan for Ups & Downs that gets the two stacks of books out of my office as a result of sales.

So are these New Years Resolutions? Maybe. But they’re realistic, and I know going into it, that the likelihood of completing every one is slim, and if I screw up, I won’t stay mad at myself, I’ll just get back on the horse and keep riding.

Because success is just a function of being willing to fail more times than the other guy.

It’s a Lonely World at the Top

I’m reading The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.  The whole thing is about how to avoid the drudgery of the 2,000 hr work year that then leads to a delayed retirement.  So instead, find ways to work smarter, not harder, and spend your time doing the things you love.

A recent chapter points out, almost as a sidenote, that it’s “a lonely world at the top.”  In other words, it can be easier to score that one perfect 10 that walks into the bar than with any one of the five 8s.  Because there’s a level to which the people who are extremely successful are left unapproached by society.

I’ve long felt that I could make three phone calls and be talking to Stephen Spielberg, if I really set my mind to it – the only thing that’s held me back is that I don’t really have anything to say to him.  That’s not a conversation I particularly want to waste.

So it’s got me thinking about who I would talk to.  In my dream scenario, what are the things I really want, and who do I need to talk to to make that happen?

I think Kevin Smith is my guy.  Charisma is about a stripper who becomes a superhero.  Sex and comic books – the two things he loves most in the world.

Okay, but it’s not finished, and I don’t want to show him a script that I know is crappy.  But the first scene is pretty good, so I could make sure that’s all good to go, and then say, “Look, I just want you to read the first 7 pages and tell me if you want to keep reading.”

So now it’s just a matter of tracking him down … I know Brea Grant, who was in 16 episodes of the last season of Heroes.  I bet she worked with someone who’s at least met him.  After all, Kevin Smith is a comic book nut – how could he not have run into some of them at Comic-Con or some other comic book convention?  And it just so happens I want Brea to play the lead, so if I can get her interested, then I just might be able to make my way through.

I also know an entertainment lawyer who seems to know everything and everyone.  Oh, and I’ve got e-mail addresses of a dozen people I met at AFF, who I’ve never contacted, some of whom are pretty damn famous.  Maybe I could look through those and find a mentor or a champion for me.

I can’t say that I don’t feel self-conscious dreaming like this on a blog for all to see.  But I think it’s interesting what kind of possibilities show up when you recognize that you’re the one that’s holding you back.

Improv & Vampires, or How to Stay Awake on a 3-hour Drive

I’ve started another improv class, this one at MerlinWorks at the Salvage Vanguard Theater in Austin, TX.  I chose this one from the growing hoarde of improv schools in Austin (I can name 5 off the top of my head … an impressive feat, considering three years ago it took me 15 minutes of Google searching to find one) for the simple reason that they have a track that focuses on narrative improv – i.e., improv that tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Day one, hour one, we’re introducing ourselves to the other people in our class by finding out what stories we have in common.  Like, what kind of stories we both like.

Vampires came up a lot.

I haven’t seen or read Twilight, by love Interview with the Vampire and Underworld.  I’ve always wanted to do a vampire story, but Interview is a pretty tough act to follow.  As an adolescent I tried, with a short story I called Blood Moon.  Although I think that one was actually inspired by the movie Hocus Pocus.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about my take on vampires and how you might incorporate them into a modern world.  Of course, Twilight and Underworld, and Blade have done that to varying degrees of realism, but I’m looking more at the descent-into-hell melodrama that characterizes movies like Natural Born Killers and Requiem for a Dream. I’ve become intrigued recently by the concept of hedonism, and combining that with a vampire story fascinates me.

There’s nothing more beautiful as a writer than being on a long journey, coming up with an idea, and then using the next several hours of that journey to flesh that idea out.  The entire plot of Charisma came to me during one of our long hikes through the Alps.  And all of a sudden I had that turning point, and I had that character arc, and I had inciting incident, and I had that image of the opening scene.

Before I knew it, I was at home, sitting down at my computer and banging out the treatment.

I need to get back to work on Charisma. To hold myself to account and finally finish a story I’ve started.  But when I’m done, I know what’s next.

Subplots – The Love Story

When I started writing Charisma, I was really trying to avoid a love story between our heroine and Ben, her roommate/mentor.  As a general rule I hate romantic B-plots in action movies, because they’re so trite and predictable, so I wanted to have the love between them be completely in the subtext and not addressed on screen.

But the more I write, the more glaring is the omission.  While I like the fact that it’s all in the background, it’s becoming obvious to me that something in there has to be addressed, or else it’s going to hang out in the room like a really nasty fart.  And the more I think about it, the more I realize that no producer or director would let the screenplay go to production without it being addressed somewhere.

One of the themes of this film is the dichotomy between nudity and sexiness; the nudity in strip clubs is so gratuitous that it stops being sexy, and were I to direct this film, one of the ways I would do it is to exploit that theme by having the nudity (in the strip clubs only) be so rampant that you stop noticing it, while the other moments in life – when Ben and Chelsea are having an honest conversation, or when Chelsea is seen doing something completely banal and human – would play up the sexiness.

I have no idea, yet, how I want to address it, so I was bouncing ideas off my wife, and as soon as I mentioned the idea of Chelsea and Ben having a sex scene, she went through the roof.  “No, you can’t do that to Ben!” she exclaimed.

I was a little surprised, and not a little pleased by her reaction, because it meant that I’d created characters she cared about and hit on an idea that elicited an emotional reaction, which is what film is all about.  So in spite of her protests that I was being a jerk, I continued down that train of thought.

If they were to have sex, I like the idea of an incident not unlike the Meredith/George debacle from Grey’s Anatomy.  Because the stripper with the heart of gold who falls in love with the boy who’s trying to save her is cliche, and that’s the thing I have to avoid.  On the other hand, I kind of like it when films hint at that love or sexuality, where they have an almost experience, and then decide not to, for whatever reason – which would be easy to manufacture given the vast amount of history between these two characters and the vast amount of baggage each of them carries.  It would also set up some good internal conflict, and would make for a good Gap Between Expectation and Result and break the stripper cliche, since you’d expect sex to be no big deal to her, except that it is.

So I’m still thinking about it.  In an early draft outline, I had Chelsea walk in on Ben while he was masturbating.  I loved the idea, but it didn’t fit into the plot, so I replaced it with something else entirely, and now I get to bring it back.  That excites me.  But more than that, I like the fact that I’m opening up my second act , and giving myself more to not to say in those unspoken love scenes.

Montage Overboard

How many montage sequences is too many?

In reworking my second act, I’ve noticed that I now have four montage sequences in the first 50-odd pages of the screenplay, and I’m worried I’ve gone overboard.

In part this is a stylistic choice – the first such sequence occurs in pages 1-4, and it was very much intentional, and very much a cool way to introduce our heroine.  During the opening credit sequence, we’re interspersing a phone conversation with shots of her getting ready for work.

The second is pages 29-34, and it’s basically the first turning point.  I’m worried about that, because I think it may be a cop-out for me to avoid having to write the scene. That said, it’s supremely cool because of the visual imagery, and because we’re again cutting back and forth time-wise – this time even more so, moving between “before the decision” and “after the decision” until the “before” catches up to the “after” and we see how she got there.  So although I think it needs a little work to make the “after” scene stronger, I feel pretty good about it structurally.

The next one, which is the one I  just reworked, starts only 6 pages later.  This is worrisome.  Plot-wise, Chelsea needs to spend the entire day in the library reading, fall asleep in the library, wake up at 6 am, find a group of people doing Tai Chi in the park, giving her the idea to take martial arts classes, and then spend the entire day at the martial arts studio, before going home where she gets arrested.

As the “hero develops his mad skillz at the top of the second act” sequence, it makes perfect sense to make it a montage, but looking at it in context, just 6 pages after the one before it, it feels a little cheap.  I employed the same before/after time-cut device, and now that I’ve done it I realize that I’m just being lazy and trying to avoid creating multi-dimensional scenes.

So now I need to figure out how to make this multi-dimensional.  Which is hard because right now it’s conceived purely to advance the plot.  But if I can eliminate this montage, I can probably keep the one that comes after her arrest, which is basically the midpoint, establishing a theme that the major moments of the film occur in time-cut montage sequences.

So I guess it’s time to put my thinking cap back on.  Thematic scenes?  You bet.

The Beat Board

Don’t you love it when a plan comes together?

I’m sitting here struggling with what’s next.  I don’t want to write this scene, because it’s flat and does nothing but advance the plot, so will need to get rewritten anyway.  So instead I go back to the treatment to try to add depth to it.  But in the treatment, I realize that it’s a structural problem, so I go back to the outline.  And I try to rewrite, but it’s several pages long and it’s all convoluted and confusing, and I’ve got stuff in there like, at the start of the third act, “Selfishness turns to Selflessness,” a list of things she does that are selfish followed by the words, “Most of this stuff occurs in the second act.”    WTF?!  So I try to move it in there, but there’s something wrong in all of it, so I think, “Hey, you know what, I’ve heard so much about this Beat Board, maybe I’ll go and create one.”

So, following Snyder’s advice once again, I take a stack of Post-it notes and start writing the scenes down and sticking them on the wall.  I only have 7 in the first act, instead of the required 10 – but then I realize that Scene 2 is actually five scenes that all happen to take place right after each other in different parts of the same building.  So all told it’s 11 scenes, which is one more than code.  I’ve been feeling for a while that my first act is too long, so I’ll have to see about cutting one out.  But I’m not worried about that just yet.  It’s my second act I care about.

I keep going and start punching out the scenes, before and after the midpoint, and suddenly it comes to me!  “Development of Skill” and “Demonstration of Selfishness” are supposed to launch the first act, and I have it after the midpoint!

I start moving Post-it notes around, but by then the notes are starting to fall off the wall by themselves and the cat keeps jumping into my lap and I’m redesigning scenes, so I turn back to my outline, and boom, hammer out the entire second act, up until maybe the turning point.

My Post-its are going into a stack, so I can pop them out later, when I get stuck.  But let the maxim hold true: inspiration sometimes leads to action.  Action always leads to inspiration.

Writing is Hard; Rewriting is Easy

I had a breakthrough the other day.  I was on the phone with my Dad, harping at him about how much he needs to change this or that about some play he’s written, and silently cursing him for resisting completely rewriting every play he’s ever written.  And then it came to me.

You see, the reason why I think I’ll make a good professional screenwriter is because I’m really good at completely rewriting other people’s stuff.  If you know anything about the industry, it’s an incredibly nasty field to be in (read William Goldman’s Which Lie Did I Tell? if you don’t believe me).  On the one hand, it makes sense – everyone has an opinion about how a story should go, and writers, actors, and directors, all being creative people, think that they have the right to express that and make it so.

Unfortunately, the invetiable result is the complete destruction of the original screenplay, which, often enough, was in very good shape to begin with.  <a href=”http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp06.Crap-plus-One.html>Rossio and Elliott</a> talk about this and it makes you want to cry.  The number of times a screenwriter has heard, “This is so good, it’s almost perfect … we just need to bring in one more writer to do a clean-up …” Someone I saw at AFF said “It’s a reality of Hollywood that a studio isn’t going to make a hundred million dollar film on a script they paid a hundred fifty thousand dollars for.”  And on it goes.

The point is, many times have I pissed off a writer by interjecting my opinion about particular dialogue elements of scenes.  But in Hollywood, pissing off screenwriters and rewriting their work is fair game, which can only mean it’s a job I was destined for.

The thing is, I’ve never actually finished a full screenplay.  At least not one that I’m willing to show anyone.  I’ve got lots of ideas, I know story structure inside and out, I’m a whizz with dialogue and voice, and I’ve started about twenty of them, but I’ve found, as everyone does, that it’s easier to criticize someone else’s work than it is to write – and finish – your own.  Maybe it’s because second acts are hard.  Who knows.  But until you finish your own work, you’re not a writer, you’re just a critic.

And then it came to me.

Since I’m so good at rewriting, rather than writing it to make it perfect, I’ll just vomit it on screen and then rewrite it later.  Someone famous once said, “Scripts are  not written; they are rewritten.”  Just so!

Today I vomited about four pages of Charisma in about an hour.  I need to go to jail to do some research to up the level of realism in that scene, but who cares?  At least it’s no longer blocking me from writing the next scene.  And as long as I go into the rewrite process not attached to anything; knowing that it will take quite a bit to get it right, then I can avoid the nasty fear of being attached to my work.

He shoots … he scores!  And that’s the game!

Maybe Charisma Shouldn’t Be a Stripper

I read a blog post today on concept and execution that argued rather convincingly that strippers and mafia are cliches in film, and that having either in your film are a great way to get it dismissed with the dregs.

Boy, did my heart sink when I read this.  Charisma, by trade, is an exotic dancer.

I find myself wondering now whether it’s completely necessary for her to be a stripper.  In the first incarnation, as a comic book idea I came up with a year and a half ago, she was just a waitress (rather than a dancer) at a strip club.  I ultimately made the change to stripper because I thought (a) it would sell more comic books, and (b) it made the stakes higher.  From a plot and thematic perspective, though, all that matters is that she feels like a failure and that she’s lying to her father about her job.  Beyond that, we’ve got options.

I find myself brainstorming new options:

• Janitor
• Hooker
• Call girl
• Geisha
• Mafioso

Damn, I’ve run out of ideas.  Looks like it’s back to the drawing board.

Action Scenes

I wrote three pages of action sequence for Charisma today.  I can’t express how wonderful it is getting back into the flow of things and having the words just pour forth from my fingers.

As I was writing it, I was thinking back to something I heard a panelist say at AFF.  I asked how you write a good action sequence, mentioning that, as a reader for the AFF screenwriting competition, I found most action sequences to be painfully dull.  They’re exciting on screen, but extrapersonal conflict – man against his environment – doesn’t show up all that well on the page.  He reminded me that part of a screenwriter’s job is to capture the reader into the world of the story, and apologized for all the bad scripts I read, which obviously failed to do that.

As well as having absorbing language, good action sequences, just like good dialogue scenes, good acts, and good movies, need to have three parts to them: a set-up, a turn, and a conclusion.  Here, Charisma arrives at home and sees that her apartment has been searched.  The cop knocks on her door to arrest her.  She, convinced she is guilty of the crime for which she is being accused, makes the decision to run.  You see her make the decision, and you see her escape, before she is finally caught.  Set-up, turn, conclusion.  Expectation, gap, result.

It’s not perfect yet, but it works for the time being, and it’s put me a step closer to completion.