If you’re passively curious what’s going on here, the following paragraph is the tl;dr version.
My name is Dave. I’ve been writing my entire life. My background is deeply rooted in screenwriting. My present circumstances allow me the time to invest heavily in writing. I’m using that time veer off my well worn screenwriting path toward prose. This blog will be where I talk about writing as a discipline, the tools I use for writing as a filthy Linux deviant, and my overall writing process.
If that paragraph satisfies your curiosity, feel free to drop off here. I’ll never know and no one will judge you.
Otherwise, into the thick of things.
As of writing this post, I’ve been unemployed for nearly seven months. Another casualty of tech layoffs and a shrinking job market. My days include a fair amount of skills development, trying to decipher a way back into gainful employment as a software developer. I’m also trawling through the job boards and firing resumes into an ever widening abyss that does not answer in return.
There are limits to how many hours each day I can put into these activities. For my own mental and emotional health, I need other outlets.
While I have a lot of hobbies, writing has always been my primary outlet. The points in my life where where mental and emotional well being have suffered the most have always coincided with periods where I wasn’t writing. I’m not willing to draw a causal relationship, in either direction, but there’s definitely a strong correlation there.
When I was kid I would write short stories or poetry. There was something very appealing about the shape of words and putting those words onto a page. I’ve filled many notebooks and I have fond, frustrated memories of plucking out pages on a typewriter.
The writer and poet was a stark contrast to the disruptive, scattered kid in school.
In grade seven, my gym teacher threw me up against a wall and cocked his fist back, ready to punch me in the face. In grade eight, the same teacher subbing in for an absent English teacher couldn’t reconcile the poetry I’d handed in as being my own work. It was inconceivable to him that the kid he’d nearly knocked teeth out of was capable of anything other than being a distraction and a nuisance.
Side note: I’d changed schools between grade seven and eight. The gym teacher from grade seven became the vice principal for grade eight. It was not a great year for me.
High school is when my writing took a very sharp turn. There were a handful of indie filmmakers cranking out films that spoke to me. That was who I wanted to be. Taking my words past the page and onto a screen. No more prose or poetry. My path was going to be the way of the screenwriter/director.
There are a lot things that I like about screenwriting. The visual writing style always appealed to me. There was no (acceptable) analogue for spelling out a character’s internal thoughts or emotional state. No asides to analyze the present situation for your audience. Ideas needed to be externalized.
There are also things I dislike. A screenplay is not a completed piece. It is a blueprint for a potential piece, that may be realized, in whole or in part, at some point in the future. It’s work that is inherently incomplete. It is dependent upon time, money, and other people to realize. When you are nobody, have no money, and nothing to show for yourself, that means it’s up to you to figure out how to get that completed result.
I love having written a screenplay. Seeing that accomplishment is incredibly fulfilling.
I love being on set. Working with a cast and crew to build something together is always a joy, even when it’s difficult and frustrating.
I love watching my film in a theatre with an audience. I’ve watched my films in a converted high school gym with an audience of six, myself included, and in a sold out 500 seat theatre. Both are fantastic.
It’s the pieces in between that ensured I was never going love filmmaking the same way I love screenwriting.
It’s the pieces in between that limited my filmmaking to a bit more than a half dozen short films. This is despite having written more than two dozen feature length screenplays, over fifty short film scripts, and a handful of one act plays. There was always that sense of things being incomplete. The absence of creating a self contained and whole work.
Throughout all that writing I’ve had a persistent refrain: I wished I had the opportunity to just write. The world could go away and I would be able to stop working for awhile. I could focus on writing.
It felt like I was just scratching the surface of an inexhaustible flood of words. The only way I was ever going to really deal with it was the capacity for it to be the only thing I needed to worry about.
If I’m being honest, that wish was manifest from procrastination piggybacked on the excuse that I would love to write but I’m exhausted from having to work. Doing the adult pantomime was too taxing.
A good amount of that procrastination was fear. If I wrote seriously, then I cared about writing. If I cared about writing, the next logical step would be writing for other people. As soon as other people get involved the possibility of rejection and failure becomes very, very real.
I still wrote. I just did it while hiding behind an inability to make it my whole life as an excuse to half ass it. Pretend like I didn’t have the necessary tools to be serious about it. The problem wasn’t me, you see, it was the conditions. Societal expectations and what not grinding me down. You understand.
I don’t know why it took me seven months, but the time is here. That thing that I desperately wished for across two decades has tumbled into my life. Not under ideal circumstances, but it’s here. All I need to do is run with it.
I have no expectations that writing is going to be something I can sustain myself with. It was implausible twenty years ago and is significantly less plausible now. I also know that I can’t organize my entire life around chasing a tech industry that seems to be more repelled each passing day at the very concept of employees.
I’ll keep looking for work. Keep building my development skills and knowledge. It’s the in-between that I’m interested in.
I’m switching paths. I’m taking myself away from screenwriting and putting my words back into prose. It’ll take me some time to figure out my voice, to sort out the structure and the style. I have the time. I’m going to wrestle every moment I can out of that in-between to do it.