Points of Connection / High Value Word Map (13 minute read)
Happy Friday!
I drove up Highway 1 with my dad and Ellie last weekend. We went through Big Sur, watched the elephant seals, had dinner on the wharf in Monterey, then spent the day in San Francisco on Sunday before driving back Sunday evening.
You know those tour buses you can jump on and off of to see the sights around a major city?
We basically did that with most of California.
Along the way we listened to some of his favorite music, like Jackson Browne and Van Morrison. Music has been part of my bond with my parents since I was old enough to walk. One of my earliest memories is them taking me to see Bob Dylan during his Christian phase. I have a distinct memory of being on the balcony in a theater in Charleston, West Virginia, watching the show through a gap in the railing. There was a song on the Slow Train Comin’ album called “Man Gave Names To All the Animals,” which was the only Dylan song I knew at age seven.
In 2013, I had “sold” EXTANT to CBS but it was still a couple of months before I was due to get paid. The money from selling my Can-Am motorcycle had run out and we were living on Julie’s credit card. I told my dad that Dylan was playing Orange County that weekend and that one of my favorite bands, Wilco, was opening for him. My dad asked if I was going and I told him I didn’t have the money to see it. He deposited money in my account to buy a ticket, because, in his words, “You’re a writer/producer now, you should be living like a rock star.”
For me, the highlight of that concert was Jackson Browne coming out to join Wilco for “Late For the Sky.” I grew up listening to him via my dad but never fully appreciated him until that night under the stars in Irvine. I had just turned forty years old. Hearing, “How long have I been running for that morning flight, through the whispered promises and the changing light, of the bed where we both lie, late for the sky.” By that point I had lived the kind of night he was talking about more than once. That kicked off a Jackson Browne phase that's still going strong nine years later.
My dad is a bit of a talker so we also spent a lot of the trip in deep conversation. I don’t remember what the subject was but at one point he said, “You have to be a tough son of a bitch to be real in this world,” and I think that’s worthy of being chiseled into granite.
The first time I went to San Francisco it was to visit Julie while she was on tour with the musical ANNIE in 2006. She was a swing, which meant she was covering a number of roles, and she also understudied the role of Lily, played by Mackenzie Phillips of One Day At a Time fame.
One evening I was walking around Fisherman’s Wharf by myself and got an emergency call from her friend and fellow cast mate Antoinette, telling me Julie was going on for the first time as Lily at the last minute. So I hopped a cab and made it over just in time for curtain.
My sisters and I wore out the ANNIE cast recording when we were kids and we must have seen the movie a hundred times. I played Daddy Warbucks my senior year in high school (I wore a skull cap because I didn’t want to be bald for prom) but I hadn’t seen it in years. Walking into the theater I saw multiple little girls in Annie dresses, holding hands with their moms who no doubt had been obsessed with it when they were kids. I was blown away by Julie that night, watching her slip effortlessly into the role, and I fell in love with the show all over again.
A few years later I went back to San Francisco when I officiated a wedding in Napa Valley for my friends Jonathan and Ashlee. The first group outing was an early morning tasting at a winery called Frank Family Vineyards. It was my first wine tasting ever. While everybody else was spitting theirs out I was swallowing mine. “This is liquid gold and I’m supposed to spit it out? No fucking way.”
I was drunk by eleven am.
Flash forward to 2013, one of my first meetings at Amblin Television. As I was leaving I noticed a stack of business cards for Frank Family Vineyards. The exec I just met was Darryl Frank. I put two and two together and realized that it was his family’s winery. One of those moments where I started to buy into the whole simulation idea.
That same week in 2013, my Napa wedding friends Jonathan and Ashlee had a baby girl named Harper. I drove to see her the morning she was born. In fact, I was the first person outside of her parents and grandparents (and staff) to hold her. They played "Here Comes the Sun" in the room as she was coming into the world. Jonathan and I took a walk to the cafeteria where I filled him in on all of the crazy stuff that was going on, like having just met with Amblin Television about EXTANT.
On the drive home on Sunday I thought about the connections between those different points of my life. How certain cities become living museums to your memories and you can’t help but think about the people you were with or the person you were then. Cities are like works of art in that they continue to evolve and mean different things to you at different points in your life, just like “Late For the Sky” did for me.
Then it occurred to me that a work of art is like a city in that it too offers a place for people to connect with one another.
More than a few times over the past year I’ve hit the wall and wondered (occasionally in this newsletter), “What’s the point of all of this? Isn’t it all just content now? Am I just throwing myself into the gears of the machine over and over again hoping for the chance to make something that is eminently disposable?” With everything that’s going on in the world it can seem kind of pointless to keep making these things. But if you think about them as points of connection it's not selfish or indulgent at all.
Maybe you’re making something that’s going to forge a decades long bond between two people. A song that parents listen to with their kids, or becomes “our song” for a couple who later dance to it at their wedding. A song you play for your child as they're being born.
Maybe it’s a movie that someone watches over and over again with their family or friends, to the point where years later they can still quote it line by line when they’re together. A painting that sparks a conversation between two complete strangers standing in front of it. A dog-eared book that gets handed to someone saying, “I know you’re going to love this.”
Maybe you write "Let It Go" for the movie FROZEN and years later a young Ukrainian girl sings it to entertain the other people hiding out with her from the bombs that are dropping on her country. Maybe a video of it goes viral and inspires people around the world, giving it a whole new context that you never imagined when you wrote it. (video linked below)
You’re not making content.
You’re building new points of connection for the future.
It's not ephemera.
It's infrastructure.
And not only do we meet each other at these points of connection, we meet our past, present, and future selves. When I listen to “Late For the Sky” I visit the kid who first heard it in the garage in Ironton and the 40 year old in Irvine on the verge of his dream coming true. The next time I listen to it I’ll visit the 48 year old with the Pacific ocean to his left, the dog snoring away on the console, his dad in the passenger seat.
I want to share one more thing from last week.
I took Ellie to a park in La Canada so she could watch the kids play while I drank my coffee and played Wordle. I noticed a small sculpture of a figure on a rock near where I was sitting and bent down to take a picture of it. When I got down low with my phone I saw this tiny ray of light streaking across his head and I saw a perfect visual for how I believe inspiration and creativity work. It comes from outside of us, all of our experiences and relationships and stimuli we take in, then it passes through that little pink blob encased in our skull and comes out the other side in a form of our choosing.
That light passes through us and we send it back out into the world.
Here’s hoping that light of inspiration and creativity is shining on you this weekend, and if not, that the clouds are only temporary.
Oh, and ps: I was able to pay my dad back for those concert tickets when I sent him and three of my uncles to see James Taylor and Jackson Browne in Charleston last fall!
New Tool I'm Experimenting With
The YouTube algorithm coughed up a link to a lecture on academic writing. I started watching to see if there was anything that might be useful and ended up watching the whole thing. It doesn't necessarily apply to what I do but it's entertaining as hell. The teacher is a fascinating character.
There was one exercise that caught my attention. He suggested that the students spend 15 minutes a week taking one article from their field and circling every word that offered value to the reader.
It made me think about Stephen King's quote about writing as an act of telepathy with the reader in On Writing:
“Look- here's a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. [...] On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. [...] The most interesting thing here isn't even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room... except we are together. We are close. We're having a meeting of the minds. [...] We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.”
My adaptation of that exercise was to very quickly read through the first page of my BARBARELLA pilot and highlight every word that grabbed my attention. On first glance, these are the words I feel are most effective in creating that telepathic bond with the reader. They're the high value words.
I can already see I have a few lines where there are no high value words. It's an instantly visual way to see where the air might be going out in your scene descriptions. It kind of replicates what's happening in a reader's mind as they're skimming the action to get to the dialogue.
I'm going to add this as a late stage pass in my next rewrite, after I feel good about the story itself. I'll go through page by page and basically make a visual map of "high value words" through the whole script.
When I find stretches without them I'll make changes to insure I'm keeping that telepathic bond in tact. The goal isn't to make the prose more purple it's to find more effective high value words. I'm not playing Scrabble, it's not about using BIG words, it's about grabbing and holding the reader's attention. Writers talk a lot about doing more with less. Well, this is a practical tool to help you identify places where you can do it.
(*I should have highlighted "space" in the slug line)
LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively — www.youtube.com Do you worry about the effectiveness of your writing style? As emerging scholars, perfecting the craft of writing is an essential component of developing as ...
Grieving the Loss of a Loved One (Character)
I was catching up on an old episode of the Scriptnotes podcast where John August and Craig Mazin answered a question from someone about the healing process after a project falls apart. I had just reread an article about neuroscientist David Eagleman's thoughts on heartbreak and loss that helped me understand my own reaction to a recent loss:
"People you love become part of you — not just metaphorically, but physically. You absorb people into your internal model of the world. Your brain refashions itself around the expectation of their presence. After the breakup with a lover, the death of a friend, or the loss of a parent, the sudden absence represents a major departure from homeostasis. As Kahlil Gibran put it in The Prophet, “And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
It's no wonder why this is such a heartbreaking thing for writers. Not only are we imagining a future where we get to make this show or movie, we're also living with these characters in our heads. I spent a year and a half of my life thinking about a very specific person every day and then one day she was just... gone. Of course that's going to fuck you up for a bit!
I'm linking both the article and podcast below in case this happens to you, maybe it will help shine a light on your own situation.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman on How the Physiology of Drug Withdrawal Explains the Psychology of Heartbreak and Loss – The Marginalian — www.themarginalian.org “The difference between predictions and outcomes is the key to understanding a strange property of learning: if you’re predicting perfectly, your brain doesn’t need to change further.”…
Adaptation and Transition — johnaugust.com John and Craig talk about adapting in Hollywood: the process of reimagining existing properties for the screen and career transitions. They cover why some adaptations don’t work, revisiting source material, and developing projects with public domain intellectual property. We offer advice to writers on adapting to a changing industry and returning to writing after a
Late for the Sky (2014 Remaster) Provided to YouTube by Rhino/ElektraLate for the Sky (2014 Remaster) · Jackson BrowneLate for the Sky℗ 1974 Elektra Entertainment Group Inc. for the United S...
Kristen Anderson-Lopez on Twitter: "Dear Little Girl with the beautiful voice, My husband and I wrote this song as part of a story about healing a family in pain. The way you sing it is like a magic trick that spreads the light in your heart and heals everyone who hears it. Keep singing! We are listening!… https://t.co/rgetwt9ENG" — twitter.com “Dear Little Girl with the beautiful voice, My husband and I wrote this song as part of a story about healing a family in pain. The way you sing it is like a magic trick that spreads the light in your heart and heals everyone who hears it. Keep singing! We are listening! https://t.co/j8CnDSNJw8”