Back In The Saddle

January 19, 2023

Back In the Saddle:

I went to bed way too late. I got my second wind at 9pm and ended up staying up until 3:49am. I was working on my horror script for a little, then watched the movie BARBARIAN as a palette cleanser. Gotta say, this movie was quite entertaining — with the caveat that the underlying reason for the horror was downright awful.

However, as scary movies go it was original (-ish.) There are shades of Fede Álvarez’s DON’T BREATHE. Part of what makes BARBARIAN feel fresh and surprising is the way writer-director Zach Cregger chose to tell the story. It was like a puzzle where you keep finding new pieces in the box. High recommend for you horror fans.

(A special nod to the editing here. Done with a deft touch by Joe Murphy. There are two cuts in particular that I don’t want to go into detail on for fear of ruining the movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but they work in a way that impacts the viewer as only movies can. After the first cut, I was instantly disappointed I hadn’t seen Barbarian with an audience. It’s the kind of scene movies are made for, and why the best experience is still a dark movie theater.)

After the movie ended, I read some of the Lee Child novel I am into, but it still took another hour to fall asleep because I was still thinking about the movie, whcihis the mark of any good story. It sticks with you.

I finally dozed off just before 4am.

Fortunately, my wife is home today so she was able to get the kids up and at ‘em this morning (usually I am the early riser who makes breakfast). I woke up at 8:17, and rolled out of bed about ten minutes later.

Also fortunate is the fact that our children are all feeling better, one well enough to return to school. As a parent you can’t think quite straight when your kids are sick. Thank God for the blessings of good health. So off to school the middle child went, not without some protest once she realized her two siblings were staying home.

Sorry, kiddo.

Took the next couple of hours to ease into the day. I made breakfast for Nic and myself, then we cleaned up the house and tended to the laundry list of requests from the two children still home sick today. My son’s catchy sing-song way of asking for something — a melodic “I waaaaaant” — is heard so often that we’ve taken to responding to it by echoing it in our own octave ranges.

Finally, around 11:15am I turn to the writing. I remember like 20 years ago Kevin Smith did one of the first daily blogs I ever read. He used to write about the minutiae of his day in hourly detail. This included him discussing what he was working on and more importantly how he was going about getting his work done with a young family at home. I found it fascinating. I take a lot of inspiration from that, and from the Steve Martin autobiography, “The War Years” which is among my favorite books on having a career creating art that entertains people.

Stephen King says that audiences love to read about people working. I suppose it’s because as Studs Terkel once intuited work is something we all do.

Another of my favorite books on writing is “Working Days,” Steinbeck’s journals from when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath.

It shows Steinbeck, one of the great masters of the craft, doing his work in the most routine and ordinary of ways.

As writers today are fond of saying: “butt in chair, fingers on keyboard.”

One reason I like that book, and a blog like Smith’s is they deglamorize the art of writing.

Writing perhaps more than any other of the art forms requires deglamorization. Dance, painting, or sculpting say, seem to be imbued with a sense of elevation, of rising above it all. Writing on the other hand seems to require a declination. You have to get down and dirty. You have to strip everything away, get quiet, and let the imagination roam free to explore the limits of who and what you are writing about. If done right you wallow in flaws and failure. Not just those of your characters by design, but your own by default.

So then, enough delay, off to the day’s work.

I am still working on the few chapters leading up to the book’s ending. Though I prefer to write without an outline in first draft, there comes a point where the ending is in sight. At which point I write to that ending. Typically, a climactic scene takes shape in my mind and I attempt to steer the characters toward it.

During revisions, I am adjusting and tightening and shaping the character’s moves to get there so that (hopefully) the story keeps the audience guessing, enthralling them until the final showdown.

The goal is to be unputdownable.

Like all great books.

One of my favorite feelings in life is being caught in the grip of a good story (book, movie, tv show).

Everything else fades away.

You know the feeling. It’s that moment when you finish a chapter or an episode and you know you are going to read/watch the next one. It’s usually around this time that the excuses start to form in your head as to why you are going to be late for work tomorrow — or not go in at all. Heck, I’d skip work for a “Gone Girl” an “Exodus” or “The Dead Zone” any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

To the ink mines then. I will see you on the other side.