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.
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