Plantsers and Simplexities

and other made up words

It’s Friday!

Congratulations, you made it.

Last week I finally had to accept the fact that the strike is going to last a couple more months (at least) and my nightly routine of coming home and making restaurant quality nachos and margaritas was unsustainable.

My wakeup call came when I went to Dick’s to buy some new shoes for walking the picket line and my right foot wouldn’t fit in them. As it turns out there is sodium in tortilla chips, not to mention the Tajin that I put on absolutely everything once the temperature hits 70 degrees and I’m 49 years old, fine, whatever, I get it.

So I begrudgingly started making some lifestyle changes for long term strike sustainability. Stretching, more salads, less tequila, etc.

That applies to my creative life as well. I set up my routine so that there is a window on either side of my afternoon shift on the picket line for writing. I try to get 2-3 hours in a day. To do that I had to cut out making plans with other people for a while. I’m not starved for human contact or conversation. On the contrary, I’ve been able to catch up with old friends and make a bunch of new ones while we rage against the machine. It’s important to protect those few hours by myself so that when this is over I don’t feel like I’m in the same place creatively.

As of today I’m on page 48 of turning my HALF-LIGHT feature spec into a tv spec. I started with a beat sheet, pulling scenes from the feature, coming up with a new arc for the pilot, plus adding in a B story with a character that doesn’t exist in the feature. Whenever I hit the end of a run of scenes I spend a day free writing the next scenes in prose form, brainstorming ideas, images, and dialogue. The next day I tackle those scenes in the script.

It’s like doing a run and gun outline, the unholy love child of a pantser and a plotter. So… a plantser? I got excited just now thinking that maybe I made that up but I googled it and nope, plantser is already out there in the world. Anyway, I did this plantser thing with ROAR and I never got bored or stuck.

I’ve talked about this before but over the past few years I’ve started to look at this process on two levels. There are the ideas - the concept, character, story, theme, etc — and then there’s how you communicate those ideas on the page.

I’m always thinking about that Miles Davis quote, “A good musician can play anything he thinks. The difference between a good musician and a great musician is what they think.”

This hybrid process lets me spend a day just thinking about and refining what I’m thinking — trying to elevate the melodies, so to speak. Then I can spend a day just focusing on how to communicate those ideas (ie, play those melodies) clearly and effectively.

It may not work for everyone. It may not work for me the next time around. But for now it’s keeping me out of my own way as I race to the finish line of this new script. I’m hoping to be done by Monday, then I’ll put it aside for a bit and switch back to VESPER just in time for Jami Attenberg’s #100wordsofsummer project that she’s launching from her Craft Talk Substack.

The idea is you write a thousand words a day for two weeks. I think I’m going to use that time to explore VESPER as a novel. My last attempt at writing a novel stalled out at 25k words, maybe I’ll work up enough momentum to get past that by the end of summer. I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to get this kind of head start. If nothing else it will be a 14k word creative foundation for a future series or feature.

There are two things I came across that I wanted to share with you this week.

I caught an interview that Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt did with Rick Beato, a musician and producer who started a wildly popular YouTube channel where he breaks down what makes certain songs great.

A couple of months ago, Extreme released a song called "Rise" that features a Nuno solo heard round the world. It’s astonishing, and you should absolutely check it out, especially if you’re a rock fan. The new Extreme record and this interview are both GREAT.

In the interview, Nuno told a story about going to see his guitar hero, Eddie Van Halen, in Eddie’s studio, just as Extreme was reaching the peak of their popularity. Throughout the entire interview, he calls Eddie “Edward” which I found very sweet. When he walked in the room he saw Eddie’s guitar rig all set up and he found himself wishing that everybody else would disappear so he could play it and finally, after all those years of trying, he would sound like “Edward.”

And then he got his wish!

Eddie asked Nuno to play his rig so that he could do some tweaking. So Nuno straps on the guitar, he’s so excited. This is it, he’s finally going to know what it feels like to sound like Edward Van Halen. But then… he just sounded like himself.

“I was super disappointed. I was like, “I’m never going to sound like Edward, never. Never.” You know what kind of awakening that is? That’s when I realized, “Holy shit… it’s about you.”

He realized that it was all the little details. The kind of pic you use, the way you hold the pic, the way you mute the strings, the sweat on your hands, all of that is the stuff that makes you YOU. He had to stop wishing he could sound like Edward Van Halen and embrace the things that made him Nuno Bettencourt and Nuno Bettencourt is pretty fucking awesome.

I think most of us come to that realization at some point in our journey, but to have that moment in front of your idol, using the exact tools your idol uses —it was obviously a profound lesson.

One of the other things I loved about the interview is that he kept coming back to the idea of emotion over technicality, and focusing on what he wanted the audience to feel. He came up with a word to describe it that he called “simplexity,” where you take complex ideas and boil them down to their essential emotional core. Any good guitar player can blaze through a solo to show off their skills. But the real question is, “What is this song saying and does the solo convey that emotion?”

Chris McQuarrie was on the latest Scriptnotes episode and talked a lot about emotion as well. He said that his work on the last TOP GUN movie has changed the way he’ll approach every movie from now on. With the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies he starts with questions like, “What are the big stunts, what are the big set pieces? What’s going to make this difference from the other MI movies?”

Every movie from now on he’s going to start with, “What do I want the audience to feel when they’re walking out of the theater. What’s the feeling I want them to carry away from it?” If it’s not, “I feel great about myself and I want to see it again,” then you’re not doing it for them.” He was careful to point out that he didn’t mean “warm and fuzzy,” he meant “satisfied.”

It reminds me of the lecture that I listened to last week with Brian Eno where he talked about art as a place where people can go to experience emotions.

This drumbeat of emotion has come up over and over again this week and I’m so glad.  It’s something I want to keep at the forefront of my mind as I’m working on all of the things.

Embrace the things that make you YOU.

Boil the complex down to the simple.

Focus on emotion and what you want them to feel.

Lastly, if we met on the picket line over the past few weeks and you told me how much you enjoy the newsletter, I can’t tell you how much that means to me. Thank you.

I hope you all have a great weekend!