The Sucker at the Slot Machine

Hey, happy Friday!

I’m four months into the program, I’ve lost a considerable amount of weight, and I’m just feeling much better in general. Here’s a progress pic from a couple of weeks ago:

I was supposed to have my first pitch for the new series last week but it was postponed at the literal last minute and rescheduled for early May. On the plus side, the team is rehearsed and ready to go. We’ve got two more coming up, with hopefully more to come. (These are all people who read the spec pilot and are interested in hearing where the show goes from there.)

We did our run through a few days before and I read my pitch for the director and producer. It was way too long, close to 25 minutes, so I spent the time in between cutting it down to just under 20. My mantra was, “Character, relationships, emotion.”

I always add too much plot in the early iterations, mostly because I think I need context for the character and emotional beats to really land. By the end of the process I whittled away as much plot away as possible and found ways to summarize events and get to what’s most important.

I had the benefit of being part of a really cool pitch the week before and I got to see how important those things were in action. One section that really landed was the writer’s personal connection to his material, so I shored up mine as well. In both cases, one of the questions we asked ourselves was, “What can we leave out that might come up in the Q&A afterward?” If they’re really interested in, say, a certain supporting character or world-building element you can go on a deep dive later.

Nothing to update regarding the feature spec or the novel at the moment. I’m just waiting to hear the next move. That part is getting a little harder to take.

All the stuff I’ve written in the past three years, the new TV spec, the new feature spec, my first book, it’s all stuck in a slow moving business pipeline. I spent a lot of time over the first two years of this newsletter talking about my need to find other ways of telling stories. That’s why I wrote the novel in the first place.

I was so inspired by what Gary Whitta did with his book, Gun Dog. He hired an editor and a designer, he produced a full recording of the audio book, he made his own merch, and basically rolled it all out on his own. I can’t help but feel like I’m missing a little of that kind of control in my own life.

Do I keep pushing forward on the traditional route in hopes of finding someone else to publish it? Do I take control of it and self-publish? It costs more money to do your own thing, but self-publishing a book is a lot less expensive than making an indie feature. Actually, I would kind of love to make a trailer for it, like it was already a movie. That’s the kind of thing that sounds fun and creatively fulfilling.

I keep thinking about what George RR Martin said to me the morning I had breakfast with him. “I need an audience.” The idea of having other people actually read something I’ve written in the year of our lord, 2024, or even 2025, is exciting. And it feels like having some agency in a time when the business is, as one producer told me last week, “the wild west,” would be nice. And probably beneficial to my mental health.

When I was in college, I took a trip to Phoenix with my friend Stephen and his dad. We went to a casino on a reservation a couple of times, the first time I’d ever been, and every time I lost like $40 on the slot machines.

On our last night, Stephen and I went by ourselves and at the end of the night, we put our last $20 together to play a machine, maximum bet every time, which I think was $3. We won $180, $90 a piece, which would have put us close to even for the trip. We immediately cashed out and headed for the parking lot. But when we got to the car, in unison, we stopped. “When are we ever going to come back to a casino?”

We went back inside and promptly lost it all. The house always wins.

I think about that a lot these days. Despite the fact that I know the game is rigged against me, I’m like a sucker on a stool pumping dollar bills into a slot machine, working on this new feature spec, chasing the high of another sale.

This one’s called STOKE. The title was inspired by an episode of the Climbing Gold podcast, with Alex Honnold. There was a moment where he was talking about taking on a difficult climb, and how some days you’re fired up, and some days you’re a little freaked out, or, “You just don’t have the stoke.” I’ve heard the word “stoked” my entire life, but I’ve never heard it used as a noun before. I loved the double meaning of it, that it’s the fire/drive inside you but it’s also the action of adding fuel to a fire. It seemed like the perfect title for an adrenaline-fueled love (heist) story.

This one has echoes of crime fiction two-handers like MIDNIGHT RUN and THE NICE GUYS. Two movie stars going toe to toe for two hours. I wrote a showcase introductory sequence for each of the two main characters with a clear goal of showing their fundamental nature. I was very much following the advice I heard Glen Mazzarra give on a zoom during the pandemic, that you should, “Give your characters the stage.” Once I established who they are, I was able to go back to that with every new event and ask myself, “Knowing what I know about them up to this point, how would they react?” I didn’t stop with my two leads, I’ve been trying to give every character a showcase scene that a great actor would hopefully want to tear into.

This process also changed how I thought about the heist itself. These two have to steal money that another character has stashed away somewhere in New York. During my early brainstorming sessions I was Googling cool places in New York that would be fun to watch someone break into. I found secret subway stations on Atlas Obscura, luxury car storage, all kinds of fun stuff.

Eventually, I came to my senses and realized that I was going about it ass backwards. I was thinking from a writer’s point-of-view, not the point of view of the character who hid the money in the first place. Super obvious, also easy to forget.

We meet this other character in the early scenes, and we hear a lot about him from other characters. There’s a lot of data to draw from. Once I started thinking like him, I found my answer. So, yeah. Basically, I was halfway through a heist script before I knew where they were going to break into. I found out the same way my two main characters did, by asking, “What would Vic DaCosta do?”

This is not the way I normally work, and there’s some concern every day that the net’s not going to appear and I’ll get stuck on page 80 with no idea where to go from there. But last week I watched a documentary on Elmore Leonard, and he said, “I’m just making it all up as I go along.”

Obviously, I’m not Dutch, but hearing that gave me some comfort.

Here’s something else I’ve been thinking about recently that got me excited. While you’re creating a new work, that piece is also creating a new you. That new you is going to have access to ideas and skills that are beyond where you are right now.

That’s motivation enough for me to keep going, whether or not this particular script gets sold, or made, or finds an audience.

Hey, speaking of Mr. Leonard…

One of the things I learned from the documentary is that he was chugging along, writing westerns that were doing okay, until his agent slipped him a copy of George V. Higgins’s book, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and urged him to give it a read. Elmore turned his typewriter toward crime fiction and the sky was the limit.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle was the book that sparked my interest in finally writing a novel. I read it in 2018 and marveled at the amount of dialogue, and how he used it to reveal character. I read it through a second time and wrote a logline for each chapter because I wanted to see the basic action laid out as simple as possible. Again, it was amazing how little plot was there. That book became a sacred object that I carried around while I was writing my book, The Kickout.

Saturday night, Julie and I went to dinner in Montrose and stopped into The Lost Bookstore, an absolute gem of a new and used bookstore, created by the folks who own The Last Bookstore downtown. In the writing section I found a used copy of On Writing, by George V. Higgins, and immediately picked it up. There was an added surprise. The original owner had put her name, the date she purchased the book (5/9/93), where she bought it, and the price ($3.88). As I flipped through I saw that she had also underlined passages that stuck out to her. I loved that so much.

So, I followed suit. I put my name in the book, the date, where I bought it, and for how much. I also noted that the original owner had underlined certain passages, and that any lines I added would be marked with **. When I’m done I’ll stick it in a Little Free Library and hopefully someone else will continue the tradition.

I couldn’t help but Google the original owner’s name (she bought it 30 years ago!), and I learned that she died in 2021, at the age of 91. It made me think that at some point over the past couple of years maybe her family boxed up her books and either donated them or sold them off, and this one ended up in my path on Saturday. She was either a Higgins fan or a writer. In either case, she was a kindred spirit. So, I’m going to end with a paragraph from the book, one that Mary took the time to underline because she thought it was important. I dig it, too. It speaks to why I’m still hanging around this slot machine:

“So the first of the prerequisites to successful commencement, pursuit, and completion of one’s progress toward learning to be a writer is the importunate desire to do it. Writing is hard work. Only those more othered by shirking it than doing it can ever succeed at it. And do not be misled: we are not talking about self-discipline here, the exercise of will to overbear conflicting, distracting desires, but its antithesis: the overmastering desire to write that makes all other occupations and delights at best irritating nuisances and at worst infuriating acts of meddlesome interference.” - George V. Higgins

Things That Inspired Me Recently

This video from the writers of LEMPICKA!

Talk about a showcase, here's a showstopper from LEMPICKA.

New Maggie Rogers

Greta Gerwig going on a deep dive into the making of, "I'm Just Ken."