Unf**K Your Antenna

and a happy new year!

If you’re reading this it means you made it through the darkest days of the year. From here on out, the sun will shine a little longer. The time for reflection has passed. The time for promise and potential has come.

That’s not a call for you to hustle and grind, by the way. To build a fortune. To better yourself. It’s just an acknowledgment of the gift we’ve been given. An opportunity to do something with the raw materials at hand. The sun on your face. The breath in your lungs. They are finite, after all. It’s a lesson I’ve learned a number of times this year.

I know I don’t want to waste them. I want to do something. Make something. Leave something.

To be honest, I find it hard to make resolutions because I know that despite my hopes and dreams, the mountain ahead of me is going to change. Tectonic plates buried deep beneath the surface will shift the terrain. Cause rock slides and obscure the path. Looking back at last year, there were so many challenges and opportunities I never saw coming. What I’ve come to prize is not my ability to make a plan and stick to it but to adapt. Adapt to survive.

This year may be a mountain for you as well. Forge ahead when you can. Rest when you need to rest. Pause, occasionally, to take in the view. See how far you’ve come and how far you have to go. Fill your lungs with pride for all that you’ve accomplished. Brace your core for the impact of challenges to come. Carry only what you must and shed the things that no longer serve you. Use that reserve of energy to put others on your shoulders when they need a lift. And hopefully someone else will be there to pick you up when you need it. To shine a light when you’re in need of warmth.

Share your light. Share your resources. Your source. You are the sun and the wind on your face. The breath in your lungs. You are the mountain itself. You are the valleys you’ll get lost in and the map that helps you find your way again. You are the ever changing path. You are the traveler and everyone you meet along the way.

Wishing you health, happiness, and major creative success this year!

Quick Business Update

It’s been a couple of months since the last issue. I wish there was more to report on the business front but everything is in the same place as it was before the holidays.

I had a great meeting with the director and producer of ROAR in mid-December, just before everything shut down. STOKE is out to the reps. The Kickout is still out to publishers. I have pitches for two different TV projects set for mid-January. And I’ve been super lucky to be working on a new non TV/film project for the past six months, one of the opportunities I never saw coming. I’ll tell you more when I can.

Here is some stuff I’ve been thinking about over the past two months, a few things I’ve learned and tools I’ve been working with. Hopefully they’ll be of use to you.

1. UNF**K YOUR ANTENNA

A couple of months ago I was driving around listening to this interview with Justin Vernon on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast, and I heard him say, “I’ve rigged up a pretty big antenna,” in regards to his songwriting process. I love that idea of consciously building up an apparatus for creation, a tower that picks up electromagnetic waves from the atmosphere, receives, processes, then transmits back into the world. The taller and more well-constructed your tower, the clearer your signal.

When I think of a tall radio antenna the first thing that comes to mind is the radio tower for WIRO, the AM radio station on the hill overlooking my hometown. I grew up looking at the blinking red beacon on top. When I was in high school, I got a job there working the graveyard shift and running the Reds games on the weekends. Sometimes I’d put on a long song (“American Pie”) and walk the thirty yards or so to stand under the antenna. Here’s a more recent pic…

The building is rundown, the property is overgrown with weeds. The antenna is still standing and probably functioning just fine, but it’s not hard to imagine it’s also in disrepair. Which is how I felt about my own antenna in the final weeks of 2024. For weeks leading up to the election I was glued to my phone, riding a roller coaster made of cortisol. For weeks after the election I tuned out the news, but found it difficult to get jump started again on anything creative, or at least new things of my own. I was just sort of tired and uninspired.

But also, my antenna was fucked.

Because it’s not enough to rig up a big antenna. You have to do routine maintenance.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the past ten days. A lot of routine maintenance. I boiled it down to three simple steps.

DETOUR:

Get out of your routine. Do new shit.

Every month I read an article in The New York Times about all the new books coming out that month. Which means I get the same twenty book ideas funneled to me that millions of other people get. I’ve outsourced my interest in books to my phone. Last week, I went to Vroman’s and actually wandered around an actual bookstore instead, where I was able to…

DISCOVER:

I found an excellent book of poetry called The Mothman Apologia, written by a poet from Virginia named Robert Wood Lynn. It’s funny and heartbreaking and reminds me of home. I never would have found it if I hadn’t taken time to wander and pay attention to the signals being sent through the atmosphere. I can’t remember the last time I bought a book of poetry, but the title and cover pinged my antenna and I followed the signal. I also spent a lot of time in nature and driving around aimlessly. Even when I wasn’t driving around aimlessly I paid attention to things that pinged my antenna and followed up.

In addition, I’ve been spending a lot of time in nature and just driving around aimlessly, waiting for stuff to ping my antenna. Detour. Discover. Then…

DOCUMENT:

When an antenna picks up electromagnetic waves it converts them back into electrical signals that can be processed by the receiver. A few days before Christmas I started doing morning pages again. It’s one of the foundational tools of my creative process. Any time I get off course, I go back to the fundamentals and start with morning pages, writing a few pages longhand first thing in the morning. This time, I attached them to the first two steps of detour and discovery. I wrote about all the little details that I could remember and why they jumped out at me. Taking the time to document (process) made writing new stuff a daily practice again.

I’ve been doing this for a little over a week now and have noticed a significant difference in how my antenna is functioning.

2) THE RIGHT CONVERSATION

I came across this TED talk thanks to this other project I’ve been working on and found it insightful. In it, he says, “We think of a discussion as one conversation, but each discussion can have many different conversations.”

Then, he breaks down conversations into three general buckets: practical, social, and emotional. Conflicts often arise when people don’t realize they’re having two different conversations.

He uses an example where he was coming home from work and complaining about his job. His wife would jump in and start suggesting solutions and he would get upset, wondering why she wasn’t on his side. He was having an emotional conversation and she was having a practical one.

You can look at scene work this way and break it down into multiple conversations, moving from social to practical, or any combination of the three. It happens all the time in procedurals, where they’ll go from a practical conversation about a case to an emotional conversation about the soapy character stories. The more motivated and elegant the transition, the better the scene. And it’s a great way to look at conflict in a scene — is one character trying to have a practical conversation while another person is having an emotional one? How can you get them on the same page, or do you?

This video got me thinking a lot about the value of the social conversations. I love social conversations. I love small talk. I have a bunch of little social conversations with neighbors and baristas and fellow dog walkers every day. I enjoy looking for points of connection. Places I’ve been, pop culture we share, food we both like. And I genuinely like hearing about what people do, no matter how mundane they think it is.

I’ve heard people say, “I hate small talk, I wanna just get real, you know?” But that’s asking someone to skip right to an emotional conversation before you’ve built a foundation. I don’t even like to do that with good friends. Let’s talk movies or jobs or failed pitches for a bit before we get to the really heavy stuff. Let’s warm up, for God’s sake.

Next time you’re out to dinner with a group, pay attention to the mini conversations, and how they flow into one another. It’s fascinating.

3) SET THE STANDARD

Lately, I set out with the goal of writing a killer opening sequence, rather than a slow burn that introduces the audience to the characters and setup gradually. What I find helpful about it is, if I write something I absolutely love right at the top, it sets my internal standard for every scene that follows. I don’t want to let the whole piece down because some sequence later on isn’t as cool or as dynamic as the first ten pages. Having a great opening scene makes me work harder for everything else. I don’t settle.

But really, you can pick any scene from any act. Pick your favorite. Measure the rest up against it. Use it to set the standard for the whole piece.

RESTAURANT FICTION PODCAST

It’s been a couple of months since the last newsletter. In the time between, my friend Monis Rose released the episode of the Restaurant Fiction podcast that I was on, live from LA Comic-Con back in October. Super fun conversation about the intersection of movies/TV and food. Check it out!

I’ll leave you with this quote from Stephen Nachmanovitch’s book about improvisation, Free Play. A younger relative’s Christmas list included the request, “A book you’ve read that you think I’ll enjoy.” He’s a super creative guy and this was a book that I found invaluable as I was rigging up my antenna. Ultimately, I gave him a different book (The Prophet), but I started reading this one again and found some new inspiration.

“ Play is the taproot from which original art springs; it is the raw stuff that artists channel and organize with all their learning and technique. Technique itself springs from play, because we can acquire technique only by the practice of practice, by persistently experimenting and playing with our tools and testing their limits and resistances. Creative work is play; it is free speculation using the materials of one’s chosen form. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. Artists play with color and space. Musicians play with sound and silence. Eros plays with lovers. Gods play with the universe. Children play with everything they can get their hands on.”

Excerpt From

Free Play

Stephen Nachmanovitch