Since launching this blog eight years ago, I have maintained a consistent publishing schedule of one new post per month. However, given the ways in which this ongoing project has evolved, that level of output is no longer sustainable. Here’s a brief chronicle of the blog’s creative progression—and a statement on what comes next.
From the time I signed with my first literary manager in 1998 through the ignominious end of my career in Hollywood in 2014, I was exclusively focused on one form of creative expression: screenwriting.
Though ultimately unproduced, my scripts nonetheless earned praise from producers and development execs for their uncommon visual suggestiveness and sharp sense of pace, which I controlled through deliberate syntactic arrangement of the very things that do not appear in the finished film for audiences to appreciate: the stage description.
Screenwriters, if you’re unaware, are not by and large particularly skillful wordsmiths. And, to be fair, it’s not required of them. Plot structure, characterization, and dialogue are what the screenwriter is there to provide for a motion picture. Why waste time and creative energy on pretty prose in a blueprint, which is all a screenplay really is?
A rarified handful of pro screenwriters, Shane Black and James Cameron among them, paint immersive pictures with their words, imparting how the world of the story feels over merely sequentially reporting what happens. Such is the dynamic mode of screenwriting for which I strove.
Most screenplays—and I’m talking about scripts to produced films, written by Hollywood’s A-list scribes—aren’t much more than utilitarian laundry lists of things we’ll see and hear onscreen, conveyed without any visceral impression of style or tempo, and are, accordingly, nigh unreadable. The director, after all, is going to make the movie he sees in his head; the script is just a means to get all the above- and below-the-line talent quite literally on the same page.
I actually like words, however. I like how they sound, and the infinite combinations of meaning that can be made from them. Truth is, I never should’ve aspired to be a screenwriter. It was the wrong medium for my talents and interests. “Author” and “essayist” were always a better fit for my writerly sensibilities. It took the implosion of my career to finally embrace that.
So, when I started this blog at the encouragement of my wife—one of her many good ideas—I didn’t know quite what to write about except screenwriting. Accordingly, my first two dozen posts are almost entirely devoted to matters of narrative craft, from my customized Storytelling 101 curriculum to the violation of the Double Hocus Pocus principle in Ghostbusters II to character deconstructions of Jack Bauer and John Rambo and a comparative analysis of the Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger interpretations of the Joker.
One year into this blogging project, all my notions about narrativity were challenged—perhaps even shattered—by a book I’d read called Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (2013) by Douglas Rushkoff, which argued that Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey,” the dramatic schema that has served as the structural basis for nearly every story in the Western literary canon, had collapsed around the turn of the millennium, as evidenced by the fanatical popularity of “storyless” fiction like Lost, The X-Files, The Sopranos, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones.
Rushkoff’s premise inspired a yearslong scholarly investigation on my part, which began in earnest with a post called “Journey’s End: Rushkoff and the Collapse of Narrative,” and turned the blog in a new, more complex direction. This intellectual project would never be the same.
Working from Rushkoff’s concept of “postnarrativity”—i.e., fiction less concerned with cathartic resolution than with intertextual crosspollination (meaning dot-connecting and puzzle-boxing and Easter-egg hunting)—I began to try to better understand our culture’s insatiable appetite for endless recapitulations of 1980s-era IPs and transmedia “universes” in essays such as “The Great Escape” and “This Counts, That Does Not” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30—and the Cultural Legacy of the Summer of 1989.”
Through these posts, I came to recognize that Hollywood had systematically consigned Gen X to a state of commercial adolescence—that the nostalgia–industrial complex had purposefully fostered in us an addiction to superheroes and Skywalkers and other childhood ephemera—a thesis I would later develop into a comprehensive two-part post titled “In the Multiverse of Madness.”
As those concepts were first being explored, I turned forty years old, an event I celebrated in a post called “This Is 40.” The essay was a radical departure for me in that it was entirely personal, without any attempt to integrate the subject of narrative craft as I had in previous and somewhat experimentally intimate posts such as “A Los Angeles Crime Saga/A New York Love Story” and “Solitary Consignment: A Christmas Story.” Without much of a regular readership at that point, nearly two years in, I wrote “This Is 40” just for me, with no expectations that anyone else would care or bother to read it…
Somehow, that post got featured as an editor’s pick on WordPress Discover, driving theretofore unprecedented traffic my way. Many, many new readers read the piece and commented on it, some of whom—like Wendy Weir of Greater Than Gravity, one of my favorite blogs—have continued to stick around, all these years later. “This Is 40” was an inflection point for this blog, because it not only established an appreciable group of followers, however modest, but it illustrated for me the power of putting myself in my essays.
Over the two years that followed, I continued to experiment with purely personal essays like “Ghosts of October” and “Goodbye, Mr. Bott” and “Different Stages” and “Home for Christmas,” while further exploring narrativity in studies such as “Saving the Cat from Itself” and “Classifying the Star Trek Movies by Their Save the Cat! Genre Categories” and “Foundations of Storytelling: The Logline,” but more and more, I was incorporating personal experiences and insights into even my craft-centric essays, as evidenced in “‘I Heard You Were Dead’” and “Writers Groups—the Pros and Cons” and “State of Grace: How a Movie No One Saw Heralded the Last Days of Old New York, Old Hollywood—and Even My Own Innocence.” One post at a time, the blog was finding its creative identity.
In 2018, I trained to be an environmental activist under former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who introduced me to the concept of moral imagination: how getting a handle on the climate crisis would mean more than just drawing down emissions, but expanding our very sense of what a post-carbon future should look like—a more just and sustainable world for all—and then actualizing that reality through deliberate, sensible choices.
That got me thinking about how, as screenwriters, we are encouraged to develop our commercial imaginations, but without consideration for—often at the expense of—our moral imaginations. In the interests of mass audience appeal and maximal entertainment value, we (unwittingly?) embed dubious values into our stories by, for example, promoting neoliberal consumerism; supporting patriarchal mores; misrepresenting feminism; mythologizing Randian individualism; glorifying violence; affirming conspiratorial thinking; exploiting and vilifying things we don’t take care to understand, such as transgenderism and environmentalism.
Just as I’d started evangelizing for greater moral creativity, George Floyd was murdered. That tragedy inspired a critical essay on the police–entertainment complex, written during a period of intense self-reflection owed to the COVID lockdown, titled “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown: A History of Hollywood’s Hero Detective,” in which I definitively repudiated all the (many) cop movies and TV shows I’d consumed and adored throughout my life. Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, NYPD Blue—they could all go fuck themselves. I thought it was the most important thing I’d ever written—certainly the best post I’ve ever produced. I still feel that way.
That particular article marks the moment, for me, when this blog’s creative identity—it’s brand, if you like—fully cohered. I knew exactly what this project was all about, and would continue to be about from then on. I also felt that with “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown,” I had set a quality precedent for the content here that would have to be the new baseline moving forward. And I think—feel free to say so if you disagree; I welcome honest conversations in the comments below—I rose to that challenge.
As such, I can say with both pride and confidence that any of the posts published over the past two years—from “The Lost Boys of the Bronx” to “The Ted Lasso Way” to “Scream at 25” to “Superman IV at 35”—represent the best this blog has to offer. I could point to any one of them and say, “That’s me. That essay is emblematic of my style, my sensibilities, my interests, my experiences, my skills, my politics, my morals.”
Which is not to suggest those posts are my Final Word on the themes they explore. Not at all. If this experiment has taught me anything, it’s that the blog is an intellectual incubator, and that every post is a new opportunity to workshop ideas that can then be further developed and refined and elaborated upon in subsequent essays. From my first blog post through this one, I can chart my intellectual, ethical, and creative growth since making my midlife career pivot.
Somewhere along the way, blogging helped me attain the courage to express myself candidly—something I never did as a screenwriter—and the confidence in both my instincts and ability to do so creatively. Every time I sit down to forge a new essay, I completely trust myself to deliver a piece that meets the standards I have set for this project.
But as longtime readers can attest—and bless you all for being so generous with your support, time, and attention—my posts are what you might diplomatically call “deep dives.” They all come to be written because I have a bone in my teeth, and I’m looking to better understand some esoteric preoccupation. And in the drafting of them, I draw connections, and discover I have quite a lot to say—much of which I had not consciously considered beforehand—about the chosen subject.
Case in point: I’d initially planned to post a book review of Michael Mann’s Heat 2 this month, when, in the process of compiling my thoughts, I soon realized I was committing to yet another time-consuming and energy-intensive essay, not dissimilar to my review of Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome this past spring, which was intended to be a “quickie take” before, per usual, morphing into a goddamn doctoral dissertation. I can’t seem to help myself!
But that’s just who I am as a writer, a fact this blog has taught me to accept and appreciate. These are simply the kinds of essays I enjoy writing—the kinds of creative challenges I enjoy undertaking—but in order to continue to maintain the caliber of quality I expect from them, I’ve conceded I must reduce my output by at least 50% from here on out.
This is a programming shift I’ve been mulling all year, but to which I have only now, after much hedging and hand-wringing, found the courage to commit. I take supreme satisfaction from the portfolio of work I’ve amassed on this blog—I’ve curated links to the highest-value posts here—and have prided myself at consistently and unfailingly turning out one essay per month for over eight years… hence the difficulty I’ve had at letting go of that self-assigned obligation. But the practice and philosophy of minimalism, of which I am a devotee, teaches us that we have finite resources at our disposal, and encourages us to invest them mindfully—and to recognize when something has outlasted its value to us.
And to be clear: It is not the blog itself that has outlived its purpose, merely the monthly publishing schedule to which I have thus far faithfully adhered. Accordingly, I am going to aim to produce four to six deep-dive posts per year, but no longer a dozen. I’ll be reallocating that time and energy for my long-form fiction, which has gotten the short shrift of late. You can be assured, however, that when I do publish a new post, it will be carefully considered, meticulously researched, and—in keeping with my established brand—inexcusably prolix.
I have a hunch this may very well prove to be the greatest evolutionary challenge of my personal or professional life to date: learning to say a bit less.
When next we meet, I’ll share my many thoughts, as planned, on Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner.
This was a fascinating read, Sean. I think you’re right that some of your best posts are the ones where you’ve share yourself and what’s going on with you. I remember being entranced by reading about your childhood in the Bronx, a post so rich with nostalgia. Maybe that’s just me, drawn to emotional content and your journey of self-discovery over analysis of the film industry (though you have made me think long and hard about the importance of moral imagination).
And I totally honor your choice to decrease the number of posts you produce annually. Our blogs serve us; we don’t serve our blogs. Life is a journey of constant transformation (thank goodness, for how dull otherwise). Best to go with the flow and embrace change when it feels right.Happy Blogging!
Thank you, Diana! It’s fitting that you should be the first to comment on this post, given that you have been — and this is absolutely accurate and appreciated — one of my longest-running and most steadfast supporters. And thank you for the encouraging words on the post itself. I was concerned it might come off a bit like whining, so in addition to making a programming announcement, I tried to tell the story of this blog — its creative evolution, and how blogging has made me a better, sharper, more insightful, more emotionally candid writer. That was the gift blogging gave me — and continues to give me.
In fact, learning to bear myself so intimately here — to talk comfortably and candidly about my career setbacks, my romantic life, my childhood experiences — has made me a much better fiction writer. I’m actually at work right now on no fewer than three different novellas, all of which explore the experiences and friendships and emotional complexities of boyhood in the late ’80s and early ’90s. (And these are in addition to my as-yet-unpublished magical-realism novella Spex, about two 12-year-old boys in 1988 with a pair of enchanted “X-ray specs.”) By blogging about my free-range adventures as a kid, my bout with depression in high school, my ill-fated attempt at amateur filmmaking, and exploring the subjects of commercial adolescence (something to which I myself had once been susceptible) and the police–entertainment complex (I permanently shelved an entire novel I’d written, Escape from Rikers Island, because I could no longer in good conscience help perpetuate the “hero detective” archetype), I’m able to explore those themes in my fiction with more emotional honesty and intellectual intention. In short: My fiction is better for my having workshopped all those ideas here.
But my fiction, I’m compelled to concede, has been competing with the blog for my attention, especially this past year — and, as it happens, winning. A blog post is not something I can bang out in an hour or two; for me, every post is a laborious, resource-intensive task (albeit a rewarding and joyful one). I so envy our mutual friend Suzanne over at mydangblog: Every week, she’s able to extract a hilarious 800-word anecdote from some mundane, everyday occurrence: She goes to the flea market and something funny happens; her plumbing goes out and in trying to get it fixed, something funny happens; her dog gets sick and something funny happens at the vet’s office. I wish my mind worked like hers, but it doesn’t. It works like this.
As a writer, I feel I’m at the top of my game right now, and I have this blog to thank, in part, for that. But I have a lot of fiction I want to write — that I’m champing at the bit to produce — and the blog is siphoning too much of my time and attention away from those projects. More than merely my time and attention, in fact: my creative energy. I put everything I have into these posts — I think that’s fairly evident when you read “Young Indiana Jones Turns 30″ or “Superman IV at 35″ or “Sorting through the Clutter” — and I’ve kinda let it become a full-time job unto itself. So, since I can’t write shorter or sparser posts, I’ve resolved to produce fewer of them throughout the year.
And to echo your closing sentiment: I think it is good, right, healthy, and self-compassionate to pivot when some practice or occupation is no longer serving its intended function, or at least not serving it optimally. Such is why I saw an opportunity, with this particular post, to reflect on the writer’s journey I’ve undertaken here over the past eight years, and to draw a line of sorts — to mark the start of a new chapter. I wanted to celebrate all that had been accomplished here — all the surprises and insights and friends (like yourself!) gained along the way — and to formally declare my intentions for this project moving forward. I only hope the next eight years are even as much as half as rewarding as the previous eight have been!
I blog a lot, Sean, lately about 6-10 hours a day with a book tour. When it’s over, I also hope to rethink my blog and how I spend my limited time. You’re an inspiration.
Oh, bless you, Diana! How kind of you to say that.
The benefits of blogging are manifold, from creative outlet to intellectual workshop to social facilitator to promotional tool. For all of those reasons — and many others — blogging can be a joyous, useful, wonderful thing. However…
Speaking only for myself, what began as a “side project” — something decidedly secondary to my fiction — has been consuming more and more of my time and attention, as I’ve strained to meet the rigid content standards and monthly publishing schedule I’d set for myself all those years ago.
For example: I spent an appallingly disproportionate share of August writing and revising “Sorting through the Clutter,” at the expense of the novella I’m currently drafting, only to post it and immediately realize I had to get cranking on that Heat 2 review if I was going to have that ready before the end of September! I had a zillion thoughts about the book and knew it would take me weeks to get them sorted, structured, written, polished, and formatted…
And as I was sweating over that, I watched Weekend at Bernie’s on Labor Day — because that stupid movie still makes me laugh over 30 years later — I had this crazy notion for an essay that explores how that movie perfectly (if satirically) dramatizes how Gen Xers entered the workforce having been conditioned to believe they owed their souls to their employers, in contrast with all the “quiet quitting” happening today and the work-life balance the Millennials and Gen Z not only expect but demand. And I got really excited about that idea — I do plan to develop it into an essay (eventually) — but I realized that between the Heat 2 review and the Bernie’s post (which represented my September and October blog commitments), I’d have zero creative bandwidth left to devote to my neglected novella…
And that’s when I realized the blog was no longer serving me; I was serving the blog. I had become an unwitting victim of figure/ground reversal, another Rushkoff concept I first explored in “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse” and later elaborated upon in “In the Multiverse of Madness, Part 1”:
The blog had become a pet dragon — one with an insatiable appetite — that I felt obligated to feed continuously. It was harder to apply the principles of minimalism to my blogging than, say, a bad habit or toxic relationship, because the blog continues to add value to my life… but at the increasing expense of other priorities. Once I was able to understand and appreciate that, I was ready to give myself permission to let go of the monthly posting schedule. I realized that no one was holding me to that obligation but me. And I guess I knew that intellectually, but when I commit to something, I commit to it wholly, and it’s therefore been hard for me to grant myself permission to step back from it.
So, for right now, I’m going to rest on my laurels a bit. I have over a hundred posts on this blog, the best of which I’ve listed here, and I’m going to let those pieces “represent” me for the time being. I don’t need to keep feeding this beast. I want to get back to a headspace whereby I am genuinely excited to blog, versus feeling like it’s this compulsory obligation — this accelerating hamster wheel.
I’ve surprised myself over the past two years by producing a lot of quality work on a deadline, but now I’d like to see if I can’t do the same with some of my long-form fiction, which I am excited to write and publish and share with the world! It’s time to see if I can’t amass a portfolio of fiction as robust as that of my essays. I suspect a creative reprioritization is exactly what I need right now; just as focusing on my short-form nonfiction has made my long-form fiction better, I have a hunch that funneling my energies into my fiction for an extended duration will, in the long run, enrichen my essay-writing — a creative feedback loop.
Stay tuned…
An old story:
A man was ferrying his fortune in gold in a boat. The boat, overloaded, started to sink. The man grabbed as much of his gold as he could, stuffing his pockets and holding quite a bit in his arms. He tried to swim to shore. Naturally, he drowned
Did the man have the gold or did the gold have the man?
Do you have this blog or does this blog have you?
I think this story illustrates something about minimalism in general
Indeed, sir. That’s figure/ground reversal: The gold that was intended to improve his life wound up ending it when he could no longer see that it wasn’t adding to his fortunes but rather detracting from them.
It used to be we acquired material goods because they added value to our lives: Stuff made life easier, better, more comfortable, more flexible, more enjoyable, etc. — the goal of middle-class existence. But now it is the acquisition of material goods in itself that’s become the goal: The more we amass, the higher our (perceived) social status.
Or… we are “hostage buyers” who’ve been systematically conditioned to be “completists,” something that is especially true of those ensnared in the Multiverse of Madness. I loved the Super Powers toys when I was a boy; I was exactly the right age for them when they were first released, and I’d grown up watching Super Friends every Saturday morning. (I referenced my Aquaman figure in the last post, in fact, which was eventually eaten by my childhood dog.) And that guy in the video I linked to above has been conned into believing that by collecting the new line of McFarlane reissues, he’ll be able to purchase back his childhood. Christ, one of the comments on the video’s YouTube page literally says this:
This goes to a point I made in “In the Multiverse of Madness”:
Minimalism, therefore, is a helpful tool to gauge when our perception has become skewed by figure/ground reversal. By learning to ask ourselves if the things in our life still add value, we are obliged to identify — if only to ourselves — the precise value we take from them, or we think we take from them. Clearly the value those adult toy collectors think they’re getting is the restoration of their childhoods. But are they? Our childhoods don’t belong to Todd McFarlane to sell to us.
And would you really want your childhood back even if you could have it? Why not simply enjoy being 43 years old with the same joie de vivre you did when you were eleven? Recognize that this moment is what you’ve got, and it’s wonderful, and you’re fuckin’ missing it as you gaze longingly into yesteryear. I’ve quoted this lyric by Axl Rose before, but that’s only because it’s one of the truest ever sung: “Yesterday’s got nothin’ for me / Old pictures that I’ll always see / I ain’t got time to reminisce old novelties.”
I agree with Diana. My favorites of all yours are those that talked about how the world around you affected you. I guess I knew you were an activist, passionate about topics I maybe wasn’t, but where I usually avoid those (and politics), in your case, it never gets in the way of the message. That is a rare give, my efriend.
Now, I’m off to check your post on Ted Lasso who I just discussed and am now obsessed with.
Aw, thanks, Jacqui — for your longstanding support and generous contributions to this blog. I appreciate you.
You mention the Ted Lasso post, which I would cite as a perfect exemplar of how this blog’s brand has evolved. In the earliest days of this project, I would have simply deconstructed Ted’s character, very academically and dispassionately, as I did for Jack Bauer of 24 in “Like Clockwork” (July 9, 2014). It would have been more of a lesson plan than a critical essay, much the way “A Survivalist’s Guide” (September 4, 2014) is an impersonal and scholarly examination of the character of Rambo, whereas “‘It’s Over, Johnny'” (September 24, 2019) is much more of a deeply felt and passionately expressed opinion piece on the cultural phenomenon of Rambo.
As it stands, “The Ted Lasso Way” certainly delves into Ted’s characterization, but it also explores the series in a sociocultural and -political context, and it gets very personal when I talk about how, as a teen, I looked to fictional action heroes to model manhood for me because I had no father around, nor did any of my friends, to fulfill that function. I yearned for a Ted Lasso in my life. That the essay could touch upon and tie together all those different components — narrative craft, moral imagination, personal history — is what I find so satisfying about it. That’s the standard I came to hold myself to with respect to my blog posts… but it is a high bar to reach month after month after month. Without trying to sound melodramatic, these essays absolutely deplete me, emotionally and creatively, and I’ve come to realize that I need to give myself a longer “recovery period” between posts.
I am delighted to hear that, like everyone else I know who’s discovered Ted Lasso, you are a “believer”! I would absolutely love it if you shared your thoughts on the show with me, either here or in the comments of “The Ted Lasso Way,” which remain indefinitely open. It’s hands down my favorite series of all time. I love this new ethos of “radical kindness” in our TV shows, from Ted Lasso to The Orville to Abbott Elementary to All Creatures Great & Small to Around the World in 80 Days to Loot! I’d (hopefully) predicted in “The End: Lessons for Storytellers from the Trump Saga” (November 21, 2020) that we were ready for compassionate creativity again, but the aforementioned series have really exceeded my expectations…
I think you are brave for making changes to your journey. I believe I’ve said to you before that there are many roads to Oz and none of them straight. I’m glad you’re returning to novel writing. I have been patiently waiting to crack the spine of your book. I agree with the others, your personal heartfelt posts are the best. But isn’t our writing always better when we’re honest and vulnerable? Our best work can be found when we let go of our constraints (most of which are self-imposed) and give ourselves the freedom to let loose on the page. As always, I wish you a ton of success wherever your road leads. I’m glad I get to visit with you along the way.
Stacey!
If I’m not mistaken, I believe you were one of those readers, along with Wendy, who initially found this blog when “This Is 40” was featured on WordPress Discover. Thank you for six years of support, my friend!
My journey as an author and a blogger actually started concurrently, in 2014, after the end of my screenwriter career. During the early years of this blog, I was also writing my first novel, Escape from Rikers Island, which I completed in 2018. There was a substantial learning curve in going from screenwriter to novelist, hence the reason it took me about three years to draft and revise that first book. I tried like hell to get the manuscript read by prospective agents and editors, to no avail.
So, I put EFRI in a drawer and got to work on a novella called Spex (about which you can read a bit more here). I tried once again to get agents and editors to read me, unsuccessfully, and then got to work on my next full-length novel, about a municipal animal-control officer whose Upstate New York community is being terrorized by a creature in the woods.
In the middle of drafting that project, I posted “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown,” in which I called for an immediate cessation of the “hero detective” archetype. Since EFRI features as its protagonist an NYPD Gang Squad detective, I felt a moral obligation to permanently shelve that project; it would’ve been hypocritical to do otherwise. And it wasn’t even a very a hard decision, despite all the time I’d invested in it, given that Spex and the project about the animal-control officer are superior works, anyway. (I love the idea of making an animal-control officer, as opposed to yet another cop, the hero of a genre story!)
One way or another, the animal-control story will be my first published novel. Spex is going to be one of three novellas featured in a collection of coming-of-age magical-realism stories, but I need to write the other two novellas first (both of which are only in the rough-outline stage). I’m currently drafting a separate novella based upon my 2019 blog post “The Lost Boys of the Bronx,” a fictionalized account of that crazy summer in 1994.
So, though you wouldn’t exactly know it from reading this blog, I’ve actually been quite busy these past eight years amassing a portfolio of thus-far-unpublished fiction. But the time has come to start getting those projects out into the world (even if it means putting them out there myself). I’m just as proud of my long-form fiction as I am my short-form nonfiction, and I’m (more than) ready to share it. But that means judiciously redistributing some of the time, attention, and creative energy I have invested into in this blog. I owe this to myself.
And to your point: Yes, our writing is always better when we’re honest and vulnerable. Absolutely. I personally know a few (published and/or produced) writers whose work is actually pretty unreadable. It’s definitely overwritten. And I used to think the problem with it was that it was overwritten. But eventually I realized the authors in question never “go deep” with their work — they never expose anything remotely personal (even in a fictionalized way). They will not show you so much as a glimpse of their secret hearts. Consequently, they overwrite their fiction — not consciously, mind you — to distract from the fact that there’s nothing emotionally truthful or personal about it.
I mean, if you’re not willing to plumb the emotional depths of your psyche for story fodder, then what the fuck are you writing for? Such are the kinds of scribes who more often than not become successful work-for-hire screenwriters (and it’s also almost universally true of mainstream comic-book writers): They’re comfortable taking a commercial idea (usually featuring an archetypal hero like James Bond or Ethan Hunt or Indiana Jones or a superhero from the Marvel/DC stable) and crafting a sturdy (if formulaic) plot in service to a series of set pieces. But none of it draws on some deep pain or profound experience or embarrassing emotion. It’s merely by-the-numbers narrativity.
That’s why I think Game of Thrones is such a piece of shit: It’s just plot machinations atop plot machinations, without a genuine emotion or a single relatable character to be found, and who cares less? I read an article on House of the Dragon the other day that was more or less worthless save the title: “The battle for the Iron Throne is pointless when everyone in House of the Dragon is this evil.” Exactly: The show is pointless, and the characters aren’t anyone worth investing in. It has nothing to offer except plot turns, in service of nothing but yet more plot turns. Yawn.
I was on my way to becoming that kind of screenwriter when my professional life cratered. And what followed was an eight-year journey as a blogger and an author and, ultimately, a morally imaginative storyteller. And I’ve said my piece, for now, on narrative craft and socially conscious storytelling and commercial adolescence; I’m ready to show the world the kinds of stories I can spin. And I only got here because of all I learned from this project, and from the encouragement fellow scribes — such as yourself — have offered along the way. Thank you.
Sean
First of all, I enjoy your essays, I’ve learned quite a lot, and you have helped clarify my thoughts on these topics, so I will miss the more frequent updates.
However, I do understand and appreciate how time-consuming they are, as well as all the time and effort you put into replies to comments
And I CERTAINLY understand the need to work on your fiction writing
So I will gladly take what I can get. And I am glad you are not quitting altogether
Secondly, and on a more opportunistic note, does this mean you would be open to more guest essays? By myself and others?
Virtually all the people here have interesting and thoughtful comments, you have many great readers. Even if I don’t always agree w/ them I have to admit their arguments are well-reasoned. I would love to see some of their “deep dives”
I know editing can be in and of itself time-consuming, so I can understand if you might be reluctant to pull away from your own writing
Whatever you do, I’ve enjoyed watching this blog grow over the years since I found it, would like to think I had some small hand in helping it find its direction, and look forward to seeing what’s next
Dell!
Thank you for those kind words in your opening paragraph! Back at ya — and I mean that sincerely.
No one has been a more enthusiastic supporter of and generous contributor to this blog than you, sir! It’s probably fair to say that most of my regular readers, as evidenced by some of the other comments here, connect with the more personal essays I’ve posted (and I understand that, absolutely), but you really dug in and “geeked out” with me on the esoteric storycraft stuff — the STC! genres and the exhaustive analyses of how mega-franchises both influence and reflect the culture, etc. You’ve not only engaged me intelligently on those topics, but there’s no question you’ve helped shape and sharpen my own comprehension of them through our dialogues and the links to outside articles you’ve provided (like “Batman in the Operating Room,” among many, many others) and, of course, your multiple guest posts.
I’m incredibly lucky to have found someone who “gets” my thinking on this stuff, because it is esoteric, and I’ve always approached it from the skeptical perspective of an apostate. Most pop-culture blogs and websites these days, even when they’re being critical of Star Wars or Game of Thrones or the DCEU, still operate from a fundamental position of fandom. This blog is somewhat unique, I think, in that it questions the very nature of fandom — the relationship we have with the fictional (and corporate) storyworlds that define the culture.
A long time ago, I was a teenage geek myself who hung out at the local comic-book shop, but rather than taking delight in the subsuming of our culture by “geek” interests in the intervening years, I’ve been increasingly concerned — sometimes even horrified — by what that’s cost us. You get that, and you bring your own perspectives and thoughts and feelings on the matter to the ongoing conversation here. Thank you. (And there will be more to come, for sure, so I hope you’re not going anywhere, either!)
I am absolutely open to guest posts anytime anyone cares to pitch an idea (via my contact information). As it happens, I have an hourlong block built into my weekday schedule exclusively earmarked for blogging. Sometimes I spend that hour generating material, sometimes reading and commenting on other people’s blogs. It is certainly time I could spend editing guest posts! Where I’ve been running into trouble lately is that the 20 hours I have reserved for blogging each month — roughly five per week (one per day) — has been nowhere near enough given the kinds of posts I was writing. The fact is, 20 hours is a lot of time to devote to any single post, but I was putting in more than that, and that doesn’t even count keeping up with other blogs and responding to comments on my own. Such is why I felt it was time to put myself on a bimestrial or possibly even seasonal cycle.
Editing guest posts would not only be less time-consuming for me, but it would, more importantly, be less energy intensive. As I mentioned to Jacqui above, when I’m finished with one of these essays — be it “A Hollywood Ending” or “Young Indy Turns 30″ or “Superman IV at 35″ — I am intellectually depleted and emotionally drained. I put everything I have into each of these essays. That’s why when I posted “Sorting through the Clutter” only to realize I had to immediately commence work on my Heat 2 review in order to get it done before the end of September, I finally said, “I’ve got to stop doing this to myself.”
Writing is done hot, but editing is done cold. Editing doesn’t leave you nearly as emotionally exhausted as writing does. I’m not suggesting it’s easy — God knows plenty of people do it badly — but if you know what you’re doing, it doesn’t have to be fatiguing. But with writing, if you’re not leaving it all “on the page” (or “on the screen”), you’re probably doing something wrong.
All of that is to say: Yes, this blog is always open to pitches! Particularly if you have something intriguing to say about narrativity or popular culture. The fact remains, my opinions are going to quickly become less and less relevant as I consciously abstain from watching the things people like to talk about. I will never again watch anything Star Wars or Star Trek. I haven’t seen — and will not see — the recent “legacy” sequels to Halloween and Ghostbusters. And I don’t care if the reviews for the forthcoming Indiana Jones V and Beverly Hills Cop IV unanimously hail them as the second coming of Citizen Kane, I absolutely refuse to go there. I’m not doing them. Indy and Axel were my heroes when I was in junior high; I’m on the downslope to 50 and I’ve got to move on from that stuff, for my own mental health. And I certainly won’t waste even one hour of my life on House of the Dragon. Being part of the cultural conversation isn’t worth the masochistic misery of having to endure any more Game of Thrones.
And while I second-guess none of those decisions, I’m compelled to concede they will have repercussions: How am I supposed to speak critically or insightfully about popular media if I refuse to watch any of it? I can’t. So, if anybody does want to “go there” with those franchises, and has a good angle on them, hit me up in an e-mail and let’s discuss it!
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to doing what I’ve been evangelizing for the past few years: writing new stories, for a new millennium, with all the moral imagination I can muster. And I suspect that after I’ve been doing that for a while, I’ll have all-new insights about narrative craft and the culture to explore and share here.
But make no mistake, Dell: This blog has been immeasurably enriched by your contributions over the years. You’ve affected its evolutionary trajectory for the better. Thank you. And part of the reason I wrote this post was to assure my regular readers that if you see a little bit less of me in your inbox moving forward, that doesn’t mean I’ve disappeared, simply dialed back. And it would honor me if you all stuck around for the next phase of this project’s development…
SPC
P.S. Just curious: Do you by any chance recall how you stumbled upon this blog in the first place? Was it by way of a Google search for something STC!-related or…? I’d be interested to know, if you happen to remember…
To anyone thinking of doing a guest blog:
I found Sean to be an amazing editor. I highly recommend him. As I said, many of you have great insights that I’d for you to share in depth
–
Sean, thank you for those kind words. I’m honored
As for how I found you in the first place… IIRC, I’d just read the Save the Cat books, and wanted to know more. That led me to savethecat.com . I’d read something there by you, wanted to take a closer look, found this blog, and fell in love. But I don’t follow the Save the Cat site itself, so…
Incidentally, and again I might be remembering wrong, you had a sidebar w/ Mythcreants.com , which led me there, and I am grateful for that as well
I’m not sure how long I’ve been here, chronology is not my best suit. But the earliest of my comments that I could find is from February 12, 2017, though I may have missed an earlier one. And I may have read a few posts before I commented. Call it over five years and a half, almost six years
WOW!
And you’re still blogging and I’m still following
Again, WOW!
Thanks, Dell! That’s yet another gift this blog gave me: In addition to making me a better, more creative, more confident writer, I’ve had an opportunity, through the guest posts I’ve hosted here, to sharpen my editorial prowess. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, the key lesson I learned is that your job as an editor is to help the writer produce the best version of their essay/article/novel/manuscript/etc., not to impose your vision or personal style on the material. You have to resist the temptation to refashion the text to reflect how you would’ve written it, but instead help the writer deliver on the best realization of their vision. That’s the secret. If you keep that in mind, editing becomes easier for you — and more productive for both parties.
Yes, that makes sense you would’ve found me through one of those guest posts I did for Save the Cat! some years back. At one point, BJ — the guy who inherited that enterprise when Blake passed away — had a robust stable of so-called Master Cats producing weekly essays and beat sheets and podcasts for the STC! blog, but a few years ago, there seemed to be a mass exodus over there. (I like to think, though I don’t know for a fact, that “Saving the Cat from Itself” shamed them all a little bit.)
Nowadays, BJ can hardly get anyone to produce free content for him, so he takes whatever he can get, like beat sheets for chick-lit novels (a genre and medium the majority of STC! screenwriting students don’t read) and postnarrative TV shows (for which the STC! principles don’t apply). Christ, the only semi-relevant movie they’ve studied over there recently is Top Gun: Maverick, which you can tell from their own beat sheet is unmistakably a “Military Institution” story, yet those dopes inexplicably have it classified as “Epic Fleece.”
Like it matters. BJ has driven that entire program into the ground. These days, the weekly “blog” over there mostly just consists of advertisements for products and services. You (the royal you, I mean) don’t need any of that crap. Just study the three books Blake wrote — and only those books — and you’ll learn everything you need to know about the Save the Cat! storytelling principles. The rest of it — the classes, the coaching, the spinoff manuals — is all a misguided cash grab that does more harm than good.
Just between us, Dell, you and I have done more to study and promote the STC! tools here over the past few years — to carry on Blake’s legacy — than the official Save the Cat! blog has. Take some satisfaction in that!
Thank you so much for sharing so much of yourself and your thoughts, Sean! I’m glad you’re going to be carving out the time to put towards your long-form fiction writing. You’ve been so engaging and insightful and it has been appreciated!
Thanks so much for your encouragement, AB! Very much appreciated! I recognize you are a relatively recent friend of this blog, but I am just as grateful for your participation and support as I am for Diana’s, Jacqui’s, Stacey’s, Dell’s, et al. There is an extensive archive of articles on this blog — the best of which are highlighted here, subdivided by Narrative Craft, Socially Conscious Storytelling, Commercial Adolescence, and Personal Essays — and I will continue to post new content, on either a quarterly or bimestrial basis.
And please feel welcome to share or promote any projects of your own here, in the comments of any post, at any time. This blog is devoted to the study, celebration, and promotion of creativity!
Four, six, or a dozen. Your readers will still be here whenever you post.
Thanks, Priscilla. I know that with blogging, consistency is key — you set a posting schedule and you stick to it — but I feel comfortable saying that I have established both a loyal readership for this blog and a reputation for substantive, quality posts over these past eight years, so I’m going to trust that whenever I publish new content, the audience for it will return.
I even hope to expand that audience when my fiction is (at long last) published, hence the reason I am reallocating some of my time and creative energy from blogging: to facilitate the expeditious completion and release of my novels and novellas — projects I am very excited about!
Sit down
Brace yourself
Take several deep calming breaths
Then look at this
https://www.today.com/food/restaurants/mcdonalds-happy-meals-adult-versions-coming-soon-rcna50027
Yes, I saw that. I had the same thought about it as you, Dell. It reminded me of this Kevin Smith quote from “The Ted Lasso Way,” in which Smith talks about how he approached his Masters of the Universe revival:
I mean, it’s the same mentality, isn’t it? Give me more of what I loved as a little boy — only better. Those are the very same nostalgic Xers targeted by McFarlane Toys to scoop up the reissued Super Powers Collection. It’s commercial infantilization.
Remember the old Ben Cooper Halloween costumes from when we were kids? (I talked about them in “Trick-or-Treating Is Canceled?”) Ben Cooper would license the rights to Star Wars and G.I. Joe and Marvel and DC Comics and then produce those chintzy costumes you’d buy at the corner drugstore, with their vinyl jumpsuits and plastic masks, the tapered edges of which would slice into the side of your face, that came in those flimsy cardboard boxes with the cellophane windows — remember those?
Guess what? They’re baaaaaack! And they’re not just for kids anymore! In fact, they’re not for kids at all: “REVEALED! The Secrets of BEN COOPER’s New DC COMICS Adult Halloween Costumes”
Since I know you are a fan of Douglas Rushkoff, I was wondering if you had read this:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity
I would also recommend Chokepoint Capitalism, by Rebecca Giblin Cory Doctorow
https://craphound.com/category/chokepoint/
Quote:
In Chokepoint Capitalism, scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of “chokepoint capitalism,” with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others.
Yes, Dell, I had read that Guardian piece — thank you. It’s an excerpt (or extract) from his forthcoming book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, the ideas for which Rushkoff has been workshopping for several years on his Team Human podcast. (He uses the podcast much the same way I use this blog: as an intellectual incubator.) I read all of his work, so I hope to get to Survival of the Richest in the coming months.
I don’t, alas, listen to Team Human nearly as often as I used to, because it’s a dense podcast that requires my attention — I can’t listen to it casually, while folding laundry or paying bills, and still get something meaningful from it — and since I don’t have a commute, I don’t really carve out time for it in my week these days. To my regret.
I hadn’t heard about Chokepoint Capitalism, but it sounds right up my alley, since this is also ground Rushkoff and Naomi Klein cover. And though he doesn’t to my knowledge tend to use terms like “moral imagination” or “socially conscious storytelling,” Doctorow has lectured genre writers on the unintended social consequences of leaning on lazy and irresponsible tropes:
Thanks for making me aware of Chokepoint Capitalism!
Called it!
The first paragraph:
https://www.seanpcarlin.com/narrative-propaganda/#comment-5205
You should feel validated, buddy! I feel validated myself. When I wrote “The End: Lessons for Storytellers from the Trump Saga” in November of 2020, I had a hunch Biden’s election signaled a shift in the culture, at least with respect to popular entertainment: that we were going to be moving away from grimdark nihilism in favor of more aspirational stories, more prescriptive/cathartic fiction. But even I wasn’t prepared for the sudden surge of “radical kindness” in our scripted programming, like I mentioned to Jacqui above: Ted Lasso; The Orville: New Horizons; Abbott Elementary; Loot; All Creatures Great & Small; Around the World in 80 Days. (I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about the David Tennant adaptation of Around the World since last spring. It happily reminded me, in so many ways, of Young Indiana Jones. Excellent series, if you have access to it through the PBS app.)
Just as with hindsight Rushkoff was able to point to the turn of the millennium — the events that defined that period, from the Internet Age to 9/11 to the ensuing War on Terror — and observe how that was reflected in the fiction of the period (postnarrativity), I suspect we will look back on the events of the past few years — the impeachments, the insurrection, the unlikely passage of major climate legislation (with provisions for both infrastructural investment and environmental justice!) — and recognize that the culture had had enough at this point of grim, hopeless, “storyless” entertainment.
I’m well aware there are new spinoffs of both Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, but don’t let the corporate hype fool you: Outside the hardcore fanbase for those franchises, people aren’t really talking about them; they’re not affecting the cultural conversation (just Reddit boards). The zeitgeist has moved on, even if the studios that produce those shows haven’t. Over the past few months, I have had multiple friends — people who somehow don’t realize how passionately I hate GoT — ask me if I’m watching House of the Dragon. When I tell them I’m not, they’ve all said some variation on: Me neither. What do I want to watch more of that for? It’s about a bunch of shitty people doing violent things… and we already know how it ends for them. Seriously — many people have expressed that sentiment to me. I couldn’t believe my ears!
I’m even reading more and more critiques of the MCU — by superfans, mind you — who are getting anxious that the whole enterprise feels “directionless,” and that the “multiverse” doesn’t seem to be going anywhere or adding up to anything coherent. Yeah — no shit. Just like the last two seasons of GoT, superfans are starting to come to grips with the fact — even if they can’t accurately diagnose the problem — that the entire MCU “narrative” is a house of cards, the only point of which, as you yourself so acutely demonstrated, is to keep us watching every new offering in real time — to encourage and monetize automatic and accelerating behaviors.
Now, I am in no way suggesting we’ll see an end to the corporate mega-franchise anytime soon, but I do think, much like Trump’s political allure, we’re going to continue to watch it appeal to a smaller and smaller base of hardcore fans. Audiences are tired of this shit. To them I say: “Welcome to the club. Have you watched Ted Lasso…?”
Chokepoint Capitalism references Naomi Klein a couple of times, including a quote from On Fire
Oh, no kidding? Not entirely surprising, I suppose: The more of these types of progressive thought-leaders you read, the more you realize they travel in the same circles. They’ve formed an intellectual feedback loop of sorts: They explore the same subjects, borrowing from and building on one another’s work. And it isn’t competitive, either: No one wants “credit” for this or that idea. Everyone is working in good faith toward the same endgame: a post-carbon, post-capitalist world.
I’m making a note of Chokepoint Capitalism in my ledger; I’m gonna try to get to it after I read The Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet by Hal Harvey and Justin Gillis. Really appreciate your making me aware of it, Dell!
I totally understand your decision Sean. And the good thing about blogging when you already have followers is that when you do post, we’ll all be here. Wishing you much success on your new venture. 🙂
Thanks, Debby!
Part of the reason I’ve maintained a consistent blogging schedule over the past eight years was to build a readership and improve my SEO rankings (which favors sites that produce new content). Whenever my climate mentees have sought my blogging insights, I have advised them to do the same: establish a regular posting schedule that you can maintain over the long haul, be it weekly or bimonthly or monthly, etc. Consistency is key. And for many years, the monthly program to which I’ve adhered was both sustainable and productive.
But for all the reasons I outlined above, these monthly deep-dive blog posts have becoming increasingly less sustainable — they’ve been drawing too much of my time and creative attention away from my fiction — and, as such, it’s been clear to me for nearly a year that a step back was required. But there is no question that I am an appreciably better writer for having undertaken this project, and having met my monthly commitment without exception. Such is why I thought this post would be a good opportunity to celebrate what’s been accomplished thus far — I view as a best-of compilation album, in a way — and to formally announce a programming adjustment. I thought it worth saying, “Here’s what’s been done so far… and here’s what to expect moving forward.” Not just for my readers, but for me.
Thanks for all the support, Debby. I appreciate you.
I haven’t been blogging for long now, and I’m still learning, but I’m trying to catch up on all the posts I’ve missed. You have a talent for words and how to express yourself! I enjoy your posts; they are very interesting! But blogging can be very time-consuming; one has to prioritize between that and writing fiction. So, it is completely understandable to focus on fiction writing! You have my support!
Thank you, Lena. I am aware that you are a relatively recent subscriber to this blog, but in that short period, you have been just as gracious and supportive with your time, attention, and comments as the longtime readers I acknowledged in the post above. I appreciate that.
Like any activity/occupation that demands our time and energy, it behooves us to evaluate — and periodically reevaluate (because things change) — why we blog and what we get from it. I blog because I enjoy the particular satisfaction of conceiving, drafting, polishing, and posting a piece of short-form nonfiction all within the span of a few weeks, in contrast with my long-form fiction, which tends to consume a year or more of my time. Blogging exercises a different set of intellectual muscles and, in turn, yields different rewards. This ongoing project has been an invaluable one for me, as I indicated above, because it’s given me an outlet to express myself and, accordingly, to better understand myself, as both a person and a storyteller.
But about a year ago, I started to feel as though I was serving the blog more than the blog was serving me — that I was investing a disproportionate share of my time and resources in this project, especially since it was never intended to be the main focus of my creative efforts. While I consider myself something more than a hobbyist blogger, I’m not exactly a professional blogger, either: I don’t sell products or services here, nor do I generate any revenue via display advertising, affiliate marketing, or subscription fees. Despite this, I’d put myself under pressure to produce high-value content month after month after month, at the expense of my fiction, which wasn’t getting the share of my time and attention it deserved.
I did that because I’d made a monthly commitment to this blog back in 2014, and I am known for fulfilling my obligations, and because the exercise of blogging is always a rewarding one for me. Breaking the back of a new blog post is like putting together a puzzle; it is extremely gratifying to develop an idea into a thesis, a thesis into an argument, and an argument into an essay — and then get instant feedback from readers.
But the time had come to absolve myself from that self-imposed commitment. Accordingly, I am on track to produce four deep-dive blog posts this year: one later this month, one in June, one in September, and one in December. That’s the plan. But if I publish more or less than that, so be it. At this point, I have over a hundred articles here, so I feel justified in “resting on my laurels” a bit! I have definitely enjoyed the break from the blog — or, more specifically, the break from the pressure to produce new content — these past months. But I am very grateful when a reader like yourself discovers an archived post and takes the time to leave a comment, because I love engaging on these topics!
I hope you are off to a creative 2023, Lena, as both a blogger and an author!
Thank you! I hope you’re off to a very creative 2023 as well!
I am, thanks! I remind myself daily that one doesn’t wait to be inspired to write; rather, inspiration happens while we’re writing.
And be assured that this newbie will stick around!
Your presence and participation here are most welcome and appreciated, Lena. Thank you!