What is my job?
how poetry and academia set me up with some smug little mind traps
Before I was a screenwriter, I was a poet and academic. The sorts of poems I wrote were weird, impersonal, surrealist tinged “experimental” poems influenced by the New York School of poets (mostly John Ashbery), French Symbolist poets like Arthur Rimbaud, and the somewhat obscure Arkansas backwoods surrealist Frank Stanford.
My first book of poetry is all in prose. My second book is basically me trying to show off how clever I am and how many difficult and obscure books I’ve read. Shockingly, I never made Oprah’s book club.
As an academic, I combined a poet’s quiet arrogance and an autodidact’s infatuation with jargon with the sort of grand gesture critical opining you read in Marshall McLuhan or Greil Marcus. While writing my doctoral dissertation on Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, I also wrote a book about Johnny Cash’s comeback album American Recordings that garnered such raves as the following Amazon review:
Good stuff. (Some people really like my Johnny Cash book, by the way…)
Anyway, I came into screenwriting with a very artsy-fartsy, intellectualized sensibility — though underneath that precious poet’s pose there still lurked the small town trailer park kid who loves country music and westerns and samurai flicks.
When I decided I wanted to drop out of academia and pursue screenwriting, I knew I had to rewire my brain. No more reading literary theory or continental philosophy or experimental poetry. No more listening to Radiohead or post-bop jazz or geeking out on Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren films. Instead — for a few years at least — it was a steady diet of pulpy detective novels, Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC, classic country, and Sons of Anarchy.
Weirdly, this helped quite a bit. I got less precious and clever. I got back in touch with my small town dude roots. My writing got more elemental, emotional, entertaining.
But I still had smug preconceptions I had to shed. And probably the single biggest misconception about screenwriting that I had before I started to really do it professionally was this:
I used to think that you could write a good script mostly by avoiding tropes and cliches.
I think some of this misconception was simply not recognizing how difficult it is to make something out of nothing — and not just making “something”, but making something irresistible. And not just irresistible, but irresistible to a shitload of strangers.
Some of this was also residue of my poetic and critical career up to this point.
Poetry is a pretty small cultural ecosystem. There’s no real chance at garnering a large audience, so you can establish a functional creative identity by simply finding a way to be different from everyone.
There’s not a ton of difference in readership size between the most accessible and the most obscure contemporary poets. And if you’re clever and fairly well-read and interested in getting tenure, it doesn’t take a lot of soul-searching to recognize that there’s more poetry career upside in being an outlier (as long as you have the right degrees, connections, etc etc) than there is in being a populist.
This situation in poetry means there’s a high value placed on avoiding common tendencies and tropes. Poets have built entire tenured careers by essentially shouting “look at what I’m NOT doing” on every page.
In screenwriting, it’s different. There’s more competition. And there’s actual capital at play. Obviously, it takes money to make a movie or TV show. And to recoup that investment, you usually need to reach millions of eyeballs. So artistic populism has a role here that it doesn’t necessarily in poetry.
Now, being different in your screenwriting — while signifying the right cultural references and opinions — can still garner you a prestigious career. And a very small handful of writers/directors/showrunners have sustained careers by generating work that doesn’t ever reach much of an audience but that still garners critical acclaim from a very small prestigious audience.
But man, that’s a tough, tough lane to try and operate in. Especially if you don’t already come from money and prestige. And especially if you want to, say, help support a family. This is probably why the people who navigate the teeny tiny prestige lane usually come into it with connections and pedigrees and backgrounds that make them right at home there in a way that most of us are not.
For me, I have all the pretension of a prestige writer, but I still have that trailer park soul. If I have any uniqueness in my writing voice, it comes from my struggle to reconcile my inner over-educated poet with my inner small town hick.
Anyway: simply being different can sustain you in the closed economy of poetry where the readership is limited and monetary stakes are low. But in screenwriting, there’s a much larger pool and actual real capital involved. The differential between the most accessible, populist screenwriter and the most obscure one is VAST.
I mean, you can still follow the I’m-a-unicorn calling in Hollywood, but it’s tough. But even if you are different from everyone else, you still have to convince someone to give you money for your writing. And usually, that means that someone with access to money will have to think that your writing will draw in talent, and industry interest, and ultimately lots and lots of paying eyeballs.
To make a living as a screenwriter, I had to overcome my poet’s impulse to just avoid what everybody else is doing — or, to not settle for simply doing only that. A script that simply announces “look at what I’m NOT doing” on every page is gonna have a tough time in a capital-driven creative ecosystem. (I say “thank God” for that, but I’ve also got my own issues.)
When I was breaking in, the other impulse I had to overcome was my critic’s impulse. There’s a lot of reasons why I fled academia even though I’d just finished my Ph.D. and gotten an increasingly rare tenure track professor gig. One reason was that the entire institutional critical apparatus felt absolutely alienated from the question of “what makes a work of art worthy of our attention?”
I’ll try to avoid going on and on with my cranky old man complaints about academia. But suffice to say, in my time in academia I found that there was lots of analysis of how works of art reflected political and historical currencies, or how they problematically presented social identities. But in my experience, there was almost no analysis of, say, why one poem or novel works artistically while another poem or novel fails artistically.
What am I getting at? This: I think I walked into screenwriting with a critical mind prepared to pick apart the imperfections of existing scripts and movies and TV shows. And to point out all the ways these works repeated over-familiar tropes. And to see all the ways that they poorly or ably reflected historical assumptions about class or identity or such.
So, I sort of had the mindset of:
avoid cliches and tropes
represent issues of class & identity better
?????
successful screenwriter!
Turns out, it’s not that easy.
Now that I’ve been doing this professionally for a bit over a decade, I’d say that the screenwriter’s job is simpler than I originally imagined, while also being infinitely more difficult.
These days, I think a screenwriter's main jobs are, in order:
Grab a reader’s attention.
Sustain a reader’s attention.
Reward a reader’s attention.
Of course, there are a million and one ways of doing each of the above. But as far as I can tell, that's more or less the job.
Everything that a script can end up doing — kickstarting your career, getting you hired, getting sold, turning into an amazing film or TV show, salving the wounds of your poor lonely immemorial soul (good luck!) — all of it has to begin with that script seizing someone’s attention in the opening pages, keeping them reading page by page, and rewarding them for that attention along the way.
If you’ve been reading this substack, you know that much of my last year has been spent prepping, directing, and editing my first movie, National Anthem.
A big portion of post-production is done now. We’re now at the stage where our composer is starting on an original score and our VFX team is at work. We’re on pace for a release sometime next year, I’d guess, though I don’t yet know when, or how, or by whom.
In terms of my nascent directing career, my goal is to have the script for my second picture ready to go once National Anthem comes out. That way, if some financier digs National Anthem and wants to know what I’m doing next, I can slide a fresh new script to them and say “this.” And maybe hopefully we can jump into it.
But first, of course, I need to have a script that’s undeniable, irresistible. One that grabs, sustains, and rewards a reader’s attention. I recently finished a first draft of my planned second feature. But after my wife read it and was decidedly underwhelmed by it, I realized that it needs some substantial work.
I’m working on a page one rewrite of my own script. And like probably every living writer, I’m convinced that this version is gonna be pure grade dramatic heroin.
My biggest revelation: I was telling the story from the wrong POV.
My first draft follows a middle-aged Bonnie & Clyde couple in modern day Arkansas. The script dips into street racing culture and the world of Indian casinos. Cool worlds, but the story just never quite grabbed my wife’s attention. (And the only scripts that have done anything for my career so far have been scripts that my wife unreservedly loved.)
For this second draft, I’ve invented a new character: a 15 year old niece of the middle-aged Bonnie character. This niece is a high-achiever who is wondering what she’s achieving for since all the adults around her are miserable and convinced that climate change and civil war and social collapse are inevitable. She’s drawn to her reckless, thrill-seeking aunt, who is utterly unconcerned with such questions.
The first draft’s middle-aged Bonnie & Clyde couple and their criminal activities in the street racing and Indian casino worlds are pretty much intact — though the criminal couple have undergone substantial character alteration — but all of this is now seen through the eyes of this 15 year old girl who is in total existential torment.
Basically, I’m doing what Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead did to Hamlet. Except I’m doing it between my first and second drafts.
That is, I’m taking a peripheral character to the first draft’s main crime plot and seeing the action through that pair of eyes in the second draft. The big picture first draft crime plot still takes place, but we just get glimpses of it here and there, until our narrator-of-sorts gets pulled into the climax. It’s a pretty common literary device: Ishmael narrating the story of Ahab and the whale in Moby Dick, Nick Carraway narrating the story of Gatsby and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, etc.
But for me, it’s made the whole story come alive. The coming-of-age story of the niece drives the storytelling on a scene-by-scene basis and presents us with a character who isn’t yet settled into a static identity. The middle-aged Bonnie & Clyde criminal couple externalizes our young narrator’s inner turmoil of how to relate to a social order that doesn’t seem to work anymore.
And as a bonus: I don’t have to go through the boring shoe leather of setting up the crime plot. Instead I can give tantalizing glimpses of it — with most of the mechanics taking place off-stage, so to speak — and then pull our narrator and viewer into it fully only once the shit really hits the fan.
So, we’ll see how round two turns out…
Great piece and useful thanks x