Questions Answered
People keep asking me why I don't write the blog so much these days. There are numerous reasons for this.
1. I now get paid to write, so I write all day long. I wake up at 6am every morning, drive out to Santa Monica to take a yoga class with Jerome, take Chips hiking up Runyon Canyon for an hour, and by midday I'm at my desk, ready for a stretch of writing which will usually end at 10pm. I'm working on a mix of projects: some are literally soul-sucking money projects - but even those are pretty interesting. Some are passion projects, and they're amazing. I earn money through screenwriting, but I keep dabbling in journalism as well as I enjoy it. My first love is, and always will be, prose. I don't know when I'll have time to write the second book. Having said that, two unfinished manuscripts, both 60k words each, are idling on my desktop, waiting for attention right now.
2. Now I get paid to write, I have more to lose. I bitch like hell about producers in private, but on here I can't get away with it so much. I look forward to the day when I can unleash my fury back upon the blogosphere again - probably after my first Oscar win.
3. From about September 2008 until January 2011, I made barely a cent and was heavily in debt. The recession hit me hard. I survived by going into human hibernation mode: I shut down pretty much everything, including my opinions. I didn't even write for a year after Obama got elected. The last few years have been the hardest of my entire existence, and I'm still, curiously, poking my soul, and examining it to see what I make of it all. It wasn't right to write about it then. It was too raw and real.
4. I got sick of letting people have a direct route into my head. For some reason I'm far more socially eloquent in person than I am on the page. This translates as: far better at concealing what I think or feel. I liked having my privacy back, so I kept stuff in. I don't really like people knowing what I think or feel. Oddly enough, it creeps me out when people - strangers - talk about the book. It creeps me out when boyfriends pretend it doesn't exist, but everyone else has to pretend it doesn't exist, aside from boyfriends. Huh?! I prefer the book to exist independently of me, and for us all to pretend it has nothing to do with me.
5. When I write in the first person, I'm as subtle as a sledgehammer, and I offend people, and it got quite exhausting - being a pariah. The last few years I didn't really exist, simply because I didn't write about me. It was peaceful. I'm not sure why I started writing this thing again. Writing the first draft of a screenplay is basically like hosting a four week party in your head, full of pretty obnoxious people having the same conversation over and over in slightly varying forms. So perhaps I'm tired of facilitating all these other voices, some of whom I love, some I loathe.
6. Another question I get asked is: if you write so many screenplays, how come you don't have IMDB credits? - I started writing screenplays in 2008. As in, I wrote a spec script, it got picked up by an agent, and then she sent my script around, and organized meetings, and for a year, I was unemployed but "taking meetings". After a year, people started asking me to do stuff - write treatments, come up with ideas, pitch them - a lot of it unpaid. And in the second year, I did two scripts on commission, and I got paid. One sucked - because the producers were crap. The second one was brilliant, even though the producers were crap. Now - I work with awesome producers, and I've lost count of how many scripts I've written, and I can't tell if they're crap or not. All my scripts are lounging around 'in development', which means a production company is in the middle of the arduous process of getting funding and a director / cast attached. Sometimes this can happen quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes not at all. As a writer you have to just brutally detach from the process and the script. Apart from with those one or two scripts you really, really love, and those you can't ever forget. I have one of those scripts written, and two on the boil right now. It's the best feeling ever. Although you're always dependent on someone to channel your words: a publisher, an editor, a press, a magazine - ultimately, a reader. If all else fails - hell, you can find a reader someplace. But screenplays - you really are fucked if no one makes your movie. Screenplays need a director, a producer, a cast, money, love - they need to have everyone converge on the same point, with the same vision, the same aim. Even if it gets made, a shit director will make a great script suck.
For an opinionated prose writer, adopting out your kids to strangers is pretty terrifying. Life is interesting these days.
Detachment. The key to all life's problems. Sigh.
Back to work....
1. I now get paid to write, so I write all day long. I wake up at 6am every morning, drive out to Santa Monica to take a yoga class with Jerome, take Chips hiking up Runyon Canyon for an hour, and by midday I'm at my desk, ready for a stretch of writing which will usually end at 10pm. I'm working on a mix of projects: some are literally soul-sucking money projects - but even those are pretty interesting. Some are passion projects, and they're amazing. I earn money through screenwriting, but I keep dabbling in journalism as well as I enjoy it. My first love is, and always will be, prose. I don't know when I'll have time to write the second book. Having said that, two unfinished manuscripts, both 60k words each, are idling on my desktop, waiting for attention right now.
2. Now I get paid to write, I have more to lose. I bitch like hell about producers in private, but on here I can't get away with it so much. I look forward to the day when I can unleash my fury back upon the blogosphere again - probably after my first Oscar win.
3. From about September 2008 until January 2011, I made barely a cent and was heavily in debt. The recession hit me hard. I survived by going into human hibernation mode: I shut down pretty much everything, including my opinions. I didn't even write for a year after Obama got elected. The last few years have been the hardest of my entire existence, and I'm still, curiously, poking my soul, and examining it to see what I make of it all. It wasn't right to write about it then. It was too raw and real.
4. I got sick of letting people have a direct route into my head. For some reason I'm far more socially eloquent in person than I am on the page. This translates as: far better at concealing what I think or feel. I liked having my privacy back, so I kept stuff in. I don't really like people knowing what I think or feel. Oddly enough, it creeps me out when people - strangers - talk about the book. It creeps me out when boyfriends pretend it doesn't exist, but everyone else has to pretend it doesn't exist, aside from boyfriends. Huh?! I prefer the book to exist independently of me, and for us all to pretend it has nothing to do with me.
5. When I write in the first person, I'm as subtle as a sledgehammer, and I offend people, and it got quite exhausting - being a pariah. The last few years I didn't really exist, simply because I didn't write about me. It was peaceful. I'm not sure why I started writing this thing again. Writing the first draft of a screenplay is basically like hosting a four week party in your head, full of pretty obnoxious people having the same conversation over and over in slightly varying forms. So perhaps I'm tired of facilitating all these other voices, some of whom I love, some I loathe.
6. Another question I get asked is: if you write so many screenplays, how come you don't have IMDB credits? - I started writing screenplays in 2008. As in, I wrote a spec script, it got picked up by an agent, and then she sent my script around, and organized meetings, and for a year, I was unemployed but "taking meetings". After a year, people started asking me to do stuff - write treatments, come up with ideas, pitch them - a lot of it unpaid. And in the second year, I did two scripts on commission, and I got paid. One sucked - because the producers were crap. The second one was brilliant, even though the producers were crap. Now - I work with awesome producers, and I've lost count of how many scripts I've written, and I can't tell if they're crap or not. All my scripts are lounging around 'in development', which means a production company is in the middle of the arduous process of getting funding and a director / cast attached. Sometimes this can happen quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes not at all. As a writer you have to just brutally detach from the process and the script. Apart from with those one or two scripts you really, really love, and those you can't ever forget. I have one of those scripts written, and two on the boil right now. It's the best feeling ever. Although you're always dependent on someone to channel your words: a publisher, an editor, a press, a magazine - ultimately, a reader. If all else fails - hell, you can find a reader someplace. But screenplays - you really are fucked if no one makes your movie. Screenplays need a director, a producer, a cast, money, love - they need to have everyone converge on the same point, with the same vision, the same aim. Even if it gets made, a shit director will make a great script suck.
For an opinionated prose writer, adopting out your kids to strangers is pretty terrifying. Life is interesting these days.
Detachment. The key to all life's problems. Sigh.
Back to work....
MIMI IN NY | 12:52 AM |
