I'm 50 Today and I Finished My First Novel!

Okay, I’m still 49 as I write this on Sunday, but by the time you read it I’ll be 50.

It’s a big milestone, turning fifty.

But, right now I’m celebrating another milestone.

As of August 5th, 10:26 AM, I finished my first novel.

After two years of false starts and sprints, of abandoning it and dusting it off again multiple times, I completed a longtime goal of writing a book.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter you probably know that I started writing short stories during the pandemic and worked my way up to longer pieces.

One summer day, two years ago, I sat on the back patio with my journal and wrote ten pages, stream of consciousness, about a guy who gets stuck in a Groundhog Day style time loop while he’s in the middle of playing pinball at a dive bar in Eagle Rock. Over the course of those ten pages I discovered he was an ex-con who reinvented himself in LA as an aspiring pizzaiolo. Those pages were weird and loopy and in a voice that is way different than my voice as a screenwriter. But… it was also a voice that felt comfortable for me in this medium. It’s much closer to how I speak.

I thought this was it. This character was the seed of a novel.

Every time I came back to it I recommitted to that style, to the quirky characters, and (what I felt was) the non-commercial mashup of concepts. Then, inevitably, I would second guess myself and consign the Pages file to the digital dustbin. I’d go a few months (or six) without thinking about it. If I did think about it I contemplated the feature version, thinking, “It would be so much easier to finish this in my wheelhouse.” Okay, but then what?

In early July I did the #1000wordsofsummer project with my friend Bob DeRosa. For two weeks we were accountability partners, cheering each other on as we did our best to write at least one thousand words per day. For most of the first week I played around with other projects. I accepted it as an exercise in reestablishing a daily practice. In week two I pulled up the The Kickout, the child I had already abandoned more than once. I thought I would do some experimenting, stretch my legs, so to speak. If nothing else, it was good research and development.

Then, two things happened.

First, I came across an article about how short novels were all the rage right now. Part of what was psyching me out about The Kickout was that I ran out of steam. I thought I had to aim for 60-90k words, at least. I was halfway through my story at 25k words, and I wasn’t going to jam a bunch of extra plot or side quests in to pad it out. The story was telling me exactly how long it wanted to be. If a novel could be 50k words, well, that was doable.

Second, I realized that I set myself up for success by writing about a guy who makes pizzas for a living and spends all his free time hanging out in a pinball bar. He was from Appalachia but living in LA, a city that he dearly loves, just like me. The textural details were filled with the stuff I’m currently obsessed with. I didn’t have to do any research, I didn’t have to go any farther out of my comfort zone.

I knew my 50th was coming up. I did the math and figured out that if I kept up that pace of a thousand words a day I could finish by my birthday. I had already established a regular practice of sitting down to write a thousands words of something other than a movie or TV show every day. It was just a matter of keeping up the reps. Having a self-imposed deadline was a huge help.

I doubled down and started telling people (like you) about my goal. Nobody would have given me grief about not hitting that target but I would have been disappointed unless there was some major obstacle, like if I had a heart attack along the way. It was just me, in a battle against self-doubt and impostor syndrome, and all the little ways that your subconscious rebels when you are doing something difficult. Deep down, it was saying, “But maybe this other thing is better,” or, “Remember when you used to take the whole day to see a double feature? BARBENHEIMER!”

Day by day, I carved out time to keep pushing forward. I said no to anything that wasn’t important to my immediate circle and my commitment to the picket line. When my family came to visit for two weeks in the middle of this final push I found time to write and took them to the picket line with me.

My dad, mom, sister, and me at Disney

I don’t want to give you the impression that it was a grind. There were so many moments that kept me inspired and fired up to finish over the past few weeks.

I ran into one of my directors from my summer stock days, a guy named Jim Daniels, on the line at Disney. Jim’s son Mike is a friend of mine and a fellow TV writer who created a show called The Village that aired on NBC. I was so thrilled to see his dad after all these years I teared up under my sunglasses. He’s an author now, with two books already published. We talked about his experience while we walked a couple of laps and it was the fuel I needed to go home and write that day.

Me and Ellie, with Jim, and Mike

Two of my friends from back home came through town to play a show at The Knitting Factory in NoHo. I met Dave and Luna years ago when I co-wrote a show about the history of old time and bluegrass music in Kentucky, called SOMETHING IN THE WATER. Now they’re a duo playing under the name Laidback Country Picker. It’s so unique and so utterly them that it almost defies description. It’s a mix of rock and roll, country, psychedelia, comedy, theater, and a lucid dreamwalk through American pop culture. They brought the holler to Hollywood. It was inspirational.

Laidback Country Picker and Honey at The Knitting Factory

I took my nephew and his girlfriend to see BARBIE opening weekend and I’m still in awe that something made by two giant corporations was allowed to be that personal, feminist, and deeply, deeply weird. There was a mom with a four-year-old on her lap sitting to my left and my teenage nephew and his girlfriend to my right. There were moments we all laughed together, times when just the teens were laughing, or the kid, times when the mom audibly reacted to an emotional moment between America Ferrera and her daughter. I could feel it twenty minutes in, Greta Gerwig and her team pulled off an honest to God miracle.

A few days later I listened to her episode of the Smartless podcast where she said, “I always feel like there’s something exciting about things that appear unlikely, or things that appear, like, “How’s that going to work?” I think that’s where really interesting things come from.”

I also listened to Quentin Tarantino’s writer commentary for TRUE ROMANCE, and he said something to the effect of, “You should always be a little embarrassed when somebody reads your stuff because you have revealed yourself in it.”

Somewhere along the way I stopped caring whether the book was the right strategic idea, or if it was “commercial” enough. Instead, I just focused on entertaining myself, line by line, chapter by chapter. I poured my daily experience into it, my worldview, my passions, the food I ate, the music I listened to, how I feel about life, death, love, friendship, religion, all of it. It became a love letter to LA from a guy from Appalachia. It’s the most personal thing I’ve ever written. If, by some miracle, you read this book one day, you will know me as I am, right now, at age 50. It will also be very clear that this book was written by a human being and not a robot.

In the last couple of weeks, the things that were really hard about the process faded away and I just fell in love with the act of delighting myself. I forget to do that in my scripts sometimes because I’m so focused on communicating how things look and feel and thinking about the “first hurdle” readers on the other side, like reps and creative execs, and studio folks. There are so many more opportunities to indulge your flights of fancy when you’re writing a book. There’s a new opportunity with every sentence.

When I got down to the last couple of days euphoria set in. I get excited when I finish a new script. I feel a deep sense of satisfaction. I love printing it out. Before I take it to a coffee shop to mark it up there’s always a moment where I’m holding it in my hand and I think, “I started with a blank piece of paper and now this exists.” But at this point it’s not a joy bomb. Finishing this felt like the first time I finished a full-length screenplay way back in the dead of winter in Chicago, 1995.

I  was a person who could do that.

Now, I’m a person who can also do this.

By the way, please don’t mistake my joy for confidence in the quality of the work. There’s a ton of rewriting to do now. There are supporting characters who feel flat, there are subplots to shore up, and ideas that need fleshing out. I have to let the logic police in my head have a go at some point. But this is part of the process that I understand. My skills are transferrable here.

Here are a few odds and ends that helped me over the past few weeks:

Weird one to kick it off: I didn’t start writing until I showered and shaved. This goes back to a book about poker that I read in college. The writer talked about how he always showered, shaved, and put on nice clothes before he went to a game because it made him feel more awake, alert, and confident. Feeling like he was at his best gave him an advantage. For some strange reason, it became part of my daily ritual. I think it’s because it was a psychological demarcation line between my morning routine with Ellie and “work.”

I also kept up my “outline on the fly” method that I used with ROAR and HALF-LIGHT. I started with loglines for each chapter. When I got to that chapter I spent a day brainstorming, fleshing out the beats and details and bits of dialogue. Then I spent the next day actually writing it. That process kept me loose and created space for new things to emerge. There were ideas and moments that surprised me on the very last day, things that I would have never come up with if I was just executing a page of an outline I generated months ago. It kept it fun and I didn’t get stuck.

I watched a bunch of different authors on Masterclass. David Baldacci talked about how he constantly goes back to the opening chapter as a way to ground himself in the world and the characters. I found that enormously helpful. I have probably rewritten the opening chapter fifteen times. But every time I go through it and make micro-adjustments according to my internal “good-bad” meter, I’m refining my understanding of the characters, tones, theme, and settling back into my voice.

If you’re out there and you’re struggling to finish a new piece, I’m sending you this surge of positive energy right now. I hope that you get to the finish line. I hope the runner’s high kicks in over the last mile and carries you though. I hope you celebrate and pat yourself on the back. If you celebrate with a margarita, maybe try some Tajin on the rim instead of salt. That worked great for me.

Lastly, I want to thank you for reading this newsletter and for your kindness and encouragement. On the eve of 50 I’m mostly feeling profound gratitude for all of the people in my life, and that includes you. Any time I meet somebody new on the picket line or at a writers mixer and they tell me they read it, or when somebody drops a line to say that there was some part that spoke to them, it ensures that there will be at least one more issue.

In the words of the brilliant Maggie Rogers, “If you leave the light on, I’ll leave the light on.”