Like the title?

That’s what I’m naming the screenplay.

Finally, finally, I have an outline that I can work with. I started by writing sixty pages furiously, and then realized that my plot was unraveling — and not in a good way — with each ensuing word.

Back to the drawing board, I’ve been freaking with index cards. They are my friends. I love the patriotic stripes.

But after three weeks of playing cards, and not the ones the have in Vegas, things were becoming cumbersome.

This afternoon I threw away all my index cards and started fresh. I labeled each blank card with a beat (hook, catalyst, act breaks, midpoint, finale, etc.), and shuffled them into a mixed-up order. Then I took more index cards and wrote what would happen at each turn of the plot.

Randomizing order freed my mind to think furiously and more creatively than I had been. And in half an hour (technically, three weeks plus half and hour), voila! The plot.

So now that I feel like I’m back to writing — finally, after over a year’s hiatus — I started searching for screenwriting blogs.

As you might imagine with the screenwriting industry being what it is (which is thousands of people who write and only a handful who get to see their writing come to life on film) the screenwriting “blogosphere” has people who come and go all the time. Quite a few of my former online pals have closed up shop. So I was out to search for some new buddies.

And then I find out that Blake Snyder, my all-time favorite how-to writer…died! He wrote one of the more recent, definite books on screenwriting called Save the Cat. I’ve e-mailed with him a few times — can you believe it? An author with a best-selling book took the time to e-mail me, a perfect stranger? It seems like he was like that with everyone. You can read comments about him here. He was always very positive and inspiring and I can’t believe he’s dead. He looks so young. And he was so young. In his early 50s. Cardiac arrest. Man.

I guess he’ll have to be my “buddy” in spirit now…

I used to be the managing editor of a magazine. A few years later, I ran special events for a hospital system. Both jobs, believe it or not, had similarities. In writing a fiction story, I’m again finding that similarity: start with the end.

At the magazine, we’d block out what we knew we had in the bag — feature articles, news stories, the directory, etc. Out of a 32 page book, right from the get-go, let’s say we had 20 pages covered, leaving us 12 pages to fill. Start from the back.

Same with special events. We knew that the only time the stars aligned for the location, our top administration, and the big-wig docs was at some specific date. Invitations go out five weeks before, which means we should circulate the mailing list to interested parties eight weeks prior. We’d need to set-up tastings, printings, swag, etc. all in advance. Back then I had a time table pinned to my cubicle that outlined exactly what I needed by when — all working backwards from the date we had resereved “the room.”

I’ve outlined the beginning of my screenplay any number of different ways. It’s constantly getting tweaked, and has everything to do with what I’m doing later in the story. I can’t rightly have a long-lost daughter show-up in Act III without first at least making reference that one exists somewhere before — and that “somewhere” is Act I, for the most part.

I haven’t read one book on screenwriting that says start from the back, but from the way things seem to be working in my trial-and-error fashion, it seems like that’s just what I should do. Start with how it ends.

Still plowing away at my screenplay. I’ve been outlining like mad, and it’s getting there. I dreamed about one of my characters last night — he was dead in a coffin, and decided that for his last hurrah, he would shake himself from that final slumber and announce, in public to everyone alive who knew him, that he had been in love with another woman for the bulk of his married life. It absolutely crushed his wife, as you might imagine, but made his exiled lover feel like she got the attention she finally deserved.

Nothing like this is happening in the screenplay I’m writing, but maybe it should. From my vantage, it was most certainly an entertaining — and a really creepy — dream!

I know why I had this dream. Before I went to bed, as I went over plot points in my head — rearranging which activity should go where and if that’s the best place to serve the story’s purpose — I kept judging myself. The screenplay I’m outlining is turning out to be very dark. So dark, that I don’t think I’d want to see it, let alone write it.

Maybe there is a way to lighten things up, I thought. Infuse a little comedy. Or, as my subconscious played it, go metaphysical. I’ll need to do something so that when you’re done reading the screenplay, you don’t want to just go out and open up a vein. People in our society generally don’t need help feeling depressed.

At the same time, though, if that’s where this story is taking me, that’s where I’ve got to go. I can always try brightening things up after it’s written.

Then I thought of the Coen brothers — the guys who did Fargo, No Country for Old Men, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Burn After Reading. Their flicks certainly aren’t about fluffy topics. In fact, when I looked up their movies on  IMDB, a few of them are listed as “comedy.”

How does offing people equal a comedy. If you can make a comedy about getting people killed, then what is the difference between tragedy and comedy?

Which gets me to a point that I’ve noticed about art for decades: the treatment of an idea is king. You could have the greatest artistic idea in the world — doesn’t matter if you write or paint or compose or design interiors — but how you express that idea makes all the difference.

Let’s take interior design. You decide your favorite color scheme is black and white. Your room could look sublime in the way that the black and white gets put together, or it could look like someone threw up a checkerboard. What matters isn’t the color scheme — the idea — what matters is how it gets played out.

In fact — and I’ve had this thought dozens, maybe even hundreds of times over the course of thinking about art in all forms — the idea itself doesn’t matter one iota. Constrain Mozart to just five notes, and I’ll bet that man could still whip out something bordering genius. Ask “grandma” to knit you a sweater with the yarn you select, and I’ll bet that even if she would have never chosen that type of material in a million years, given her deft technique with the needles, she could do it. Tell an experienced and talented writer, who has never picked up a club in her life, to go write a piece on golf, and it’s possible to have a bestseller.

It’s not the topic that matters so much as the execution. And therein lies the difference between the novices, the masters, the artists and the geniuses. Each category of creator executes that much better than the rest.

This is the long way for me to convince myself that the topic of my screenplay — no matter how dark it gets — isn’t what I should ultimately judge. It’s the expression of that idea that matters most. AND, I need to stop judging myself while I’m writing. Instead of having a muse, I have a nasty nitpicker sitting on my shoulder. Flick that guy off.

I wanted to have my screenplay outlined by yesterday. Oh, well. Didn’t happen. Not gonna happen today, either.

But! I did come up with a title and logline.

The Old College Try: An ethics professor, who catches her dying husband with his young nurse, finds consolation from a student.

I just hope I don’t think this thing to death. I do that. I think it until it dies in my brain and is no longer interesting to me. To thwart that from happening with this screenplay, I tried pushing through and just getting it out. That got me 60 pages, which became looser and looser the further along I got. I’m not one for spewing it all and going back to clean it up. My clean-up is hard enough as it is when I think I’ve written something well!

——

Schweet! Just got a phone call from Orsini. They’re a durable medical equipment provider who found a special needs stroller for E-Niner. We’re going to L.A. mid-month and E-Niner needs the stroller to get through the airport and other crowded places we may choose to visit. So excited!!!! It was entirely covered by insurance, which I was concerned about. They said that the stroller had to be a “medical necessity.” Since E-Niner doesn’t have any physical disabilities, I wasn’t sure if he would qualify. But thankfully, it all worked out. So happy, because otherwise it would have cost us $530.

My screenplay is entirely outlined — some areas are fleshed out more than others, but it’s all there. All there, plus an awesome ending.

I was struggling with not making the ending cliche. “Hollywood endings” are so obvious, and while this screenplay has one of those feel-good endings as well, it’s an unexpected route to get there.

So we’ll see. I’ll pound out ten pages a day for the next few days, and see if I can’t get a good draft together in a short amount of time. Is it a lot to give myself a deadline? Could I do ten pages a day for ten days in a row? That’s 100 pages, and about the length of a screenplay that’s off to a good start.

Went to see the doc about my damn twitching today. His first guess is that it’s a tight muscle that will work itself out over time. Stretch. Keep taking Xanax!! Can you believe that? Keep taking Xanax for a tight muscle? He said Xanax is a super muscle relaxer, so if it helps keep me limber and helps me sleep, go for it.

His other thought is hyperthyroid. I’ve been tested for this before, and came up with nothing. We’ll see what difference a year makes.

I wish I had other more interesting news than my relatively benign medical health. Let’s see…

Oh, yeah! Screenwriting is back on, baby. At the beginning of last summer I was all set to overhaul the screenplay I had written the year before. And then issues started snowballing with E-Niner, and I just never got back on track.

In the middle of the night of twitching as I was trying to get my mind off things, I came up with an idea for another screenplay. When I gave my sister the “elevator pitch” for it, she cracked up. If I can actually finish writing something I start, this one could be pretty entertaining.

I’m hoping to go to L.A. in October, it would be nice to have a draft done by then so I can show it to some people to get some feedback. We’ll see…

On the heels of nearly completely forgetting that yesterday was New Year’s Eve, I decided that New Year’s is a crock. A new day in a string of days that make up a lifetime. We don’t get all giddy about it turning a new month every month or even a new week or new day or new hour or new decade, what’s so special about a year?

I’m not getting it, and it’s not been too happy: so far, I’ve gotten into blow-outs with every single member of my family today.

Seriously, folks, I’ve had it. HAD it. I feel like I spend all day long roping in kids, and this morning, for once, it looked like I was going to get a peaceful morning. The kids were wrapped up watching The Polar Express; Joe was making pancakes. I thought we could continue like this at least through breakfast. Why not?

It’s because I put expectations on it that it all went down the crapper.

Ever hear of transference? It’s this doozy of a psychological term (dang I’ve been in therapy a long time) that is a fancy way of saying “taking something out on somebody.” We do it all the time, every day, always, always. You react a certain way to a certain situation not only because of the situation but also because of a history you’ve had with situations like it.

Well, like I said, I had it with the boys — and when E-Niner couldn’t sit still at breakfast (never can, what was I thinking?) after I asked him and bribed him and motivated him for the bazillionth time, all the while hearing Joe discipline T783 for hitting me because T783 was trying to get out of eating breakfast by crawling on my chair (which, when I tried to stop him, he hit me), in addition to having a TV commercial blaring in the background for some belly bulger on sale for $19.95 I. lost. it.

I’ve been stewing for a while (geez, ya think?) about E-Niner’s issues and why such an innocent little boy could be hit with so many awful things and how it is possible that we can do and are willing to do anything in the world to help him, but things still aren’t better (though they aren’t worse either), and I took my anger with his situation on him. Yelling, screaming, asking why he couldn’t just sit still and eat breakfast for once, just once.

Then I took it out on T783 for hitting me. Then Joe got mad at me since I was obviously way over-reacting to E-Niner’s tap dancing with pancake, which is when Joe suggested that he does a better job with the kids than I do, I told him to go ahead and do it. I’ll happily go to work. Happily. Can I be clearer on that?

This is totally not the family life I imagined. This is not how I imagined being a mother, a wife, a person. I was never a raging lunatic on the verge of an angry outburst or tears galore. I used to be this calm, quiet person who minded her own business and went about her day. In fact everywhere I could, I would try to keep the peace, not stir things up! I don’t like being an angry witch woman, but it’s who I’ve become.

I went upstairs and dreamed of disappearing, of moving to sunny California by myself and changing my name, of scraping together extra money here and there to use to buy an apartment and start leading a double life where at least I have an ounce of control over what happens in a day, of getting in my car and just simply driving, of hiring someone to fake-kidnap me for a week while I spent the time in a far-away spa. I liked the fake-kidnapping the best. Anything with a spa.

Then I thought if I were really a good screenwriter, any one of these would make an entertaining story. Then I remembered that this is real life and that I am way too responsible to do any of these things. And then I thought that perhaps this is my problem.

I feel way too responsible. Some things about our family’s issues aren’t my fault. And some things, I just can’t fix no matter how hard I try. I’m going to need to learn to accept some things, but how on earth do you go about doing that?

I don’t want to accept that my kid has profound special needs. I have higher hopes for him than that!! I don’t want to accept that my family can’t one day just be normal and do normal things like wake up in the morning and not have it be World War III or even minor battles on the fronts like Eating and Sitting Still and Chewing Your Food!!

I feel like if I accept these things that it means I’m giving in. Giving up. I don’t want to give up. I can’t give up. I refuse to give up on my son. I don’t know what else to do or where else to turn. But I am not going to let things turn out like this.

So instead, I will continue to plod along this God-forsaken course hoping that at some point, somehow, something will give around here and change for the better. In the words of my esteemed Governor, happy bleepin’ new year.

—-

I’m closing comments on this one. This isn’t a pity party.

Major screenwriting breakthrough for me. I’m quite the believer in what they teach you in writing classes: form follows function. Form follows function.

There is a general formula that most every commercial screenplay follows. Tons of books tell you exactly what page to put which activity. I’ve always struggled with the formula and I now realize why: it’s the exact opposite of form follows function. It’s like you’re trying to back-in to an artificial structure.

Now that I know what my hang-up is where that’s concerned, I can get over it and move along. It’s almost as if I’ve given myself the freedom to be free. If that makes any sense.

My screenplay idea continues to hatch. I like it. A lot. It’s hard to bottle cap the idea because I’d love to bounce it off people I trust to see what they think…

Well, only kind of…

Actually, I’d only want to bounce them off people so that they could say they totally love it too…

And let’s be honest, that kind of feedback isn’t really constructive.