Getting Back on the Horse

Happy Friday!

Things are moving at a snail’s pace here.

Not much to report on the three original projects I’ve been telling you about. I think the HALF-LIGHT TV spec is going to a list of studios this weekend. My feature spec, ROAR, is out to a handful of directors. No word on the novel. I’ve been checking out material sent to me by my team, I’ll be throwing my hat in the ring for something soon. No staffing meetings to speak of.

You’re all caught up on the business side of the career.

I think I’d be going a little insane right now if I wasn’t so focused on repairing three decade’s worth of damage I’ve done to my body. (*This isn’t a fitness influencer Substack now, don’t worry. I promise this gets to writing.) The first thing I do when I wake up every morning is to get on the scale. If my body composition is going in the right direction, if my weight is on a steady decrease, then it means the day before was a win, regardless of what happened at the career level. And getting on the scale is also a motivation for the day ahead. If the numbers are great I’m psyched to keep going. If they’re not, I get pissed off and double down on the workouts and nutrition plan, fueled by spite. At the end of the day I’m excited to go to sleep so I can “check the stats” the next morning.

That one little daily habit has become self-propelling.

Last month I went back and listened to James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, again. Halfway through I realized how much of it must have soaked in the first time around because I was subconsciously doing a lot of what the book suggests in my effort to get back to feeling 100%. One of my favorite quotes of his is, “You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” My goal at the beginning of the year was to lose enough weight to take the pressure off of my knees and regain the mobility I’d lost. To do that, I had to put some new systems in place.

One of his suggestions was to design your environment to set you up for success. I had to rethink the way I use our fridge and storage space in the kitchen, not to mention what went in those cabinets in the first place and how (and how often) they got there. For example, a simple system I put in place is that I don’t have a “cheat meal” until I’ve gone shopping and the fridge is full of the stuff I need to get right back on track the next day. I don’t want to wake up the next morning and not have what I need, which will cause me to go, “Eh, I’ll just swing by Starbucks.”

I didn’t realize how important this was going to be when I did it last March, but I joined a YMCA that has two locations within five minutes of the house. They’re both in the day to day environment of my neighborhood. Even if I only have a half-hour to work out, the fact that they’re so close makes it easy for me to keep up the habit.

For the past two months my training and nutrition habits have been a perfect ten across the board. It’s second nature now.

My writing habits were at a zero.

I turned in the last draft of the novel at the beginning of December and didn’t start this new piece until mid-February. That means I went two and a half months without giving focused, dedicated attention to at least one big writing project, probably the longest I’ve gone in the last ten years. Once I started to get back on the horse I had to create habits that gave me some consistency again, which is weird, because writing is the thing that has been second nature for the past thirty years.

It was the only. thing. that. was. consistent.

I started by making sure I had my journal on me at all times, or within easy reach. That habit first became ingrained when I was living in Chicago and New York in my early 20’s. Any time I had a spare few minutes in a diner or on the train, I pulled out my Moleskine and pen and wrote.

This is another thing James Clear talks about in the book. When you’e trying to set a new habit, even doing a little bit is better than doing nothing. It’s easy to say, “I’m going to write ten pages every day,” and then fall off when you get waylaid by life. It’s a lofty goal under the best of circumstances. If you start by writing for ten MINUTES a day and stick to it you become “a person who writes every day.” As you build momentum it snowballs into bigger pieces, which is what happened to me last summer when I did The 1000 Words of Summer Project. Those thousand words a day got me over the hump to finish my first novel.

This time, I started with a random idea I had for a scene about a guy who starts a fight with the people in the room next door at a Super 8. While I was out walking with Ellie I’d write a bit of it in my head, workshopping the dialogue, then I’d make time during the day, even a few minutes, to get it on paper. Pretty soon I got to the point where the fight was over and he went back to his room. His date has long split because he ruined their night together but… there was a different woman waiting in his room. It was a surprise, the way she introduced herself to me, a quiet, confident counterpoint to this out-of-control brawler. It raised a lot of interesting (and obvious) questions. Who was she? What is their history? Why did she show up now?

I’d given him a fun character introduction and I knew I needed to backtrack and give her an equal chance to shine. So I kept going, writing her “chapter” in my head, then coming back to work in my notebook. Pretty soon I had abracadabra’d myself into thirty pages of a new feature, a two-hander heist story about a modern day Bonnie and Clyde. It’s pulpy, loose, and a little out of control right now, but I’m loving it. And it happened because of a little daily practice.

Shortly after I started working on this I listened to Ed Zwick's episode of Marc Maron’s podcast, WTF. He told a story about getting notes from Sydney Pollack. Sydney had ripped Ed’s script to shreds, and Ed was trying to defend some of the plot moves. Sydney said, “Plot is the meat the robbers throw over the gate to distract the dog while they go for the treasure, which is the characters.”

One of the other habits I put into practice is watching a classic or favorite movie when I’m on the exercise bike in the evening. For the first two weeks I watched YouTube, or the stock scenery rides on the bike’s program. Eventually, I got bored with those and decided to use the time for inspiration for this new piece instead.

I did a rewatch of JACKIE BROWN last week and it struck me how simple the plot was, especially the big climax at the shopping mall. There are some clever moments and moves but when I think about that movie I don’t think about those. I think about the simple pleasures, like Robert Forster going to the mall to pick up a cassette of the Delfonics because he heard them at Pam Grier’s house. I think about Bridget Fonda flirting with Robert DeNiro’s dopey Louis, in a transparent effort to turn him against Samuel L. Jackson. It was all about the characters and their relationships to each other. (I did a rewatch of THE NICE GUYS last week, one of my favorite movies of the past ten years, same thing goes for it.)

My immediate goal with this new script is to just keep living in the characters, making sure they’re not just a collection of tics and surface level personality quirks, but that there is something deeply emotional that drives them separately and collectively. There will be time to refine the plot moves later, to figure out a cool mechanism for the heist, for the crosses and double-crosses, and surprises that I love in the genre. The first draft will be shaggy and overstuffed, and will likely have some logic gaps because of this process of letting the characters drive the story, but it will all get smoothed out later. For now, I’m just glad to be back in practice and on the trail of something fun.

Speaking of rewriting, Cole Haddon has an excellent newsletter about writing called 5AM StoryTalk. He just published a two-part series where he reached out to a bunch of writers to ask how they attack their rewrites. It’s filled with great information and I was honored to be asked to be part of it. You can find the first installment and my advice in the second installment linked below. (Heads up, there is an eventual paywall.) While you’re over there, check out Cole’s series on his experience making his first television series, DRACULA. It’s a great (but heartbreaking) eye-opener about how badly things can go wrong, even when you have the best of intentions.

Cole's issue about rewriting, part 1

Cole's issue about rewriting, part 2

One more quote from Atomic Habits: “Habits plus deliberate practice equal mastery.”

By the way, I’ve seen a bunch of great movies this year but this music video by Zach Bryan is one of my favorites: Nine Ball

(If you made it this far and in case you were wondering, the past nine weeks of hard work is paying off big time. I’m walking four miles a day, going to the gym a few times a week, and hiking at least once a week. Feeling better than I have in a long time!)

I hope you have a great weekend.

Happy creating, whatever that may be!