Desire

And greatly underestimating the role of luck.

Thank you to the folks who reached out to wish me a happy second anniversary of this newsletter. Year three, here we come!

Somehow, recently, I wound up on the “desire” page of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I have no clue how I got there but I’m glad I did. It was fascinating.

I think about goals and obstacles a lot, but desire is slightly upstream in a story.

Desire is looking at your current situation and imagining it would be better, if…

Joseph Campbell’s disciples talk a lot about establishing the “ordinary world” that kicks off a character’s journey but it seems like the most important part of that ordinary world, the part that so many writers forget, me included, is the character’s state of desire when the story starts.

There’s something about that shift in language, speaking in terms of desire, that makes it feel more human and relatable to me.

We all have desires.

Our desires motivate us to act.

I DESIRE food. I set a GOAL, which is to get a package of donuts from a break room vending machine. I put my money in, press the button, the package of donuts gets stuck halfway down. OBSTACLE. How I respond to that obstacle reveals CHARACTER. Do I immediately start to kick it or slam my shoulder into it like a linebacker? Do I scour the break room and Maguyver a tool to reach inside? Do I pray? Or yell at the janitor, even though the janitor has nothing to do with the machines? Will any of it work?

I rewatched MiCHAEL CLAYTON recently and I had totally forgotten that it starts (after an in media res sequence) with him needing money to pay off a loan shark. He asks his boss for the money and the boss tells him, “I need you to fix this mess with Arthur or the law firm is going under.” Michael desires money. The loan shark stuff is a simple setup that motivates him to act. The boss gives him the goal that launches him into the actual legal thriller we all remember.

While I was down this rabbit hole I came across a book called Who Am I? by a writer named Steven Reiss. In it, he lists, “The 16 basic desires that motivate our actions and define our personalities.” Full disclosure, I did not read this book. I wasn’t really looking for an in depth look at human nature. I was mostly looking for inspiration for character motivations and I found it, so I’m passing this list on to you:

1. Power

2. Independence

3. Curiosity

4. Acceptance

5. Order

6. Saving

7. Honor

8. Idealism

9. Social Contact

10. Family

11. Vengeance

12. Romance (sex)

13. Eating

14. Physical Activity

15. Tranquility

16. Status

My favorite movies tend to involve the same handful of desires from this list. Power, independence, romance, vengeance. The primitive, visceral desires. But I can think of movies that I’ve enjoyed where characters were activated by all of these. Hopefully this list sparks something new for you as well.

What is your character’s state of desire when your story begins?

LUCK

Whenever I get to tell my story as a guest on someone’s podcast I’m always careful to point out that it takes a bit of a luck to break into this business, that it’s not just about hard work, and it’s definitely not a meritocracy.

But lately I can’t help but think I’ve been greatly undervaluing luck in this equation. When I look back now I see so many points where pure luck played a major role.

1. I was born to good people who raised me and my sisters with love and support and gave us a stable home environment. As I got older and showed an interest in music and theater they did everything they could to facilitate that love. They bought me instruments and paid for lessons, took me to concerts and musicals, and long days of play practice. They never told me to aim a little lower, or did things to shatter my self-confidence. I had nothing to do with any of that.

2. I was lucky to have extended family who cultivated and celebrated my interests. My uncles taught me to use their turntable and hi-fi stereo system, then gave me free rein of their extensive record collection before I was out of elementary school. That’s where I first heard songs like “Taxi” and “Operator” over and over again, and fell in love with stories and characters. My grandmas let me stay up late and watch TWILIGHT ZONE and Chiller Theater, with all the old Universal Monster movies. I was surrounded by music. I didn’t do anything to create that environment, I was just the lucky recipient.

3. I was lucky to be sitting in the front row of Mrs. Lawless’s music class in the 5th grade. Thanks to singing along with the family’s records I sang loud and proud and with decent pitch, so she offered me a part in the annual school musical, KIDS FOR AMERICA. I had been playing football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the summer. I was terrible at all of them. Being on stage in this musical was the first time I remember thinking, “I might be good at this.”

4. I was lucky that my high school did one musical a year and that every kid in the county got to see it. So many of the kids on stage were people I knew. It became an achievable goal. I knew I wanted to be on that stage at some point. I didn’t choose to go see NO, NO, NANETTE when I was ten years old, I was forced to, and I was all the better for it.

5. I was lucky that my high school band director’s wife was a voice teacher. I was lucky that she suggested I audition for the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. She helped me prep my audition and I got in to one of the most competitive programs in the country.

6. I was lucky that at CCM, Dr. Aubrey Berg, the director of the program, saw something in the monologues I wrote for our audition techniques class, and handed me a flyer about entering a ten-page play competition. It was the encouragement I needed to fan the flame inside of me.

7. I was lucky that the first day of my first professional summer stock job at Jenny Wiley Theatre, a job I auditioned for at CCM, the character actor they hired for the summer had a heart attack and couldn’t do the season. (He survived!) I inherited his roles and went from being in the ensemble for most of the summer to having three major roles.

8. Over a decade and a half later, one of my friends from that summer became the artistic director for Jenny Wiley Theatre and hired me to write and direct a Halloween show. It was a hit and for five straight seasons we put on a super fun and scary show for kids and adults alike, including two totally original ideas. That’s where my voice started to come together and I embraced my lifelong love for genre stories, just in time for me to move to LA.

9. I was lucky that I fell in love with a woman who had dreams and aspirations of her own, and who was always supportive of mine. We spent many difficult years dating long distance but we always knew we were both doing what we were meant to be doing and that at some point we’d get to live together. She never made me feel delusional or told me to, “Get a real job.” Instead, she’d donate money to projects when she had a great job, and when I said, “I think I have to move to California,” she said, “I’ll go with you.”

10. I was lucky to have friends and mentors along the way who believed in me and supported what I was doing. Sometimes that meant working for free for weeks, months, even years on projects that we started together. Sometimes that meant donating money to indie movies or Fringe Festival shows. Sometimes it was just a person stopping me in the grocery aisle back in Ironton to tell me they thought it was so cool that I was still chasing my dream.

All of that had to happen before I ever wrote a word of the script that got me my first job in Hollywood. After I wrote that script there were so many more key points where luck played a factor.

I’m not kidding when I tell people that, at any point along the way, someone’s assistant could have put EXTANT aside and said, “This isn’t for me,” and I may not be here writing this today. I was lucky to be partnered with producers and a showrunner who not only shepherded the show to a straight-to-series order, they also modeled what it means to be a good person in this business. They treated me with kindness and respect and made me feel like I belonged. Not everyone is so lucky.

But, it’s not all luck. Here a few key points where I had a hand in my fate:

1. 6th grade, fresh off my triumph in KIDS FOR AMERICA, I spotted a notice in the Ironton Tribune about auditions for the musical, BARNUM, at the community theater in Ashland. I asked my parents to take me and I got in. After Barnum I quit sports altogether. Theater and music became the only thing I wanted to do.

2. In high school, I devoted thousands of hours to performing. I did countless renditions of the entire score of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA in my bedroom, a rubber Phantom masked stuck to my face with double-sided tape. I sang in church, for weddings, at restaurants, in rock bands, anywhere someone would let me near a microphone.

3. At CCM I became addicted to the local art house cinema, The Esquire. I would also go to any video store where I wasn’t barred because of late fees and rent stacks of movies to study. Inspired by what I was seeing, I drove out to Joseph Beth Booksellers, I bought Syd Field’s book on screenwriting, and that night I started teaching myself how to write movies.

4. After college I made a difficult decision to move to Chicago instead of New York, like all of my friends. I didn’t exactly set the theater world on fire there but I did manage to finish my first feature spec in the middle of the coldest winter I’ve ever experienced, then I started the second one.

5. The following year I moved to New York and started putting up my own work with my friends. I didn’t give up when nobody showed up to my one-man shows. I scraped by and hustled, and when I wasn’t working some random day job I spent every waking moment writing, thinking about writing, making stuff with my friends, or taking in inspiration from the city. I was broke all the time, awkward, self-conscious, frequently lonely, a borderline sociopath, and it was one of the best times of my life.

6. In my late 20’s I read Robert Rodriguez’s book, Rebel Without a Crew, and very shortly afterward pulled together a bunch of my friends to start making our own movies. We were learning on the fly, working odd jobs to pay for shipping fees and film processing costs and my friend Jonathan Clark and I slept in my parents’ mini-van on more than one occasion because we couldn’t afford a hotel room, and it was also one of the best times in my life.

7. In my late 30’s I decided I had to give LA a try because the vast majority of the business was happening there. I started pointing everything in my life toward the goal of just getting here.

8. In 2012, I knew I needed a TV sample so I sat down with a remote control and a notebook and I taught myself how to write for television. A year later, my second pilot, EXTANT, got me in the door.

9. Even though I had a show in production I spent time every weekend working on new stuff. I constantly found ways to keep my love for writing alive after it became a more than full time job.

10. It’s been thirty years since I bought the Syd Field book. There isn’t a week that goes by that I’m not still trying to learn something new about the art and craft of telling stories. I listen to podcasts, I read other writers’ Substacks, I’ll watch a teenager talk about screenwriting on YouTube because I know that, due to their age or beginner mind, they may have some angle I haven’t come up with yet.

It took me twenty years to get where I wanted to be and it’s been hard work over the past ten just trying to keep a finger hold here. What I know from my vantage point now is that I needed both incredible amounts of luck and relentless determination. Neither one would have been sufficient on their own.

They are interwoven over the course of decades.