Saturday, May 13, 2006

My Brother and I

Okay. So I feel like Blair, taking so long between posts. Sorry Blair, but you’re the cautionary tale I have to cite. I still love you, though.

Baby's been sick, got an offer on our house, put an offer on another house way out of our price range, traveled to DC for pitch meetings, work's in one of those ultra-busy phases, got sick myself, blah, blah, blah.

I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad, though. I'm fairly confident my legions of faithful readers were able to dig deep and find a way to occupy themselves during the last couple weeks without me.

But I really should post more regularly. It's healthy for me as a writer. That's right, O legions of faithful readers, I'm thinking I should be posting more for my sake than yours. Although you will benefit. Oh yes, you will.

When I was posting more regularly (in my short term as a blogger) I was writing more regularly. Like, the screenplay-type kind of writing. If not actually writing, at least working on the things –- planning structure, sketching out scenes, tweaking characters, spell-checking.

It's nothing new; everybody knows this: when you write regularly, you're more likely to find that one tiny gem among the vast expanse of crap that’s spread about your brain.

A couple years ago, my little brother talked me into doing Nanowrimo. Do you know this? If not, check out www.nanowrimo.org. The basic idea is that from November 1st through November 30th, you have to write a 50,000-word novel. Now, obviously, your novel’s gonna suck. Mine sure did. The point is not to try to write a clean, elegant 50,000-word novel -- it’s only a month, after all -- but simply to bang it out.

And bang it out we did, my brother and I. One great thing was forcing myself to write every day. Kind of like what Greg and Blair did with their five-page-a-day rule. Another great thing was having my brother there to bitch to and celebrate with. Kind of like this blogosphere thing.

What we both found, my brother and I, is that as we wrote regularly, at a disciplined pace, we loosened up, it got easier to write longer, we got less intimidated by temporary writer’s block, we found ourselves strategizing about the story more when we weren’t actually writing, we had that weird thing happen when the character starts to write itself (you’ve had this happen: when you write a line of dialogue and stop and think, “Where the hell did that come from? It certainly wasn’t me.”).

My brother, right now, is trying to take that novel he wrote that year for Nanowrimo, plus another one he wrote, and revise them into a combined, cohesive story by adding a third element that ties them together. Very ambitious. Very cool.

And so I have to get off my goddamn ass and post more on this blog, and hope that helps me dive into the next rewrite of my next script, which I'm just calling the Harlem script right now.

I have to get in there and get revision dirt under my fingernails -– or I’ll end up trying more to figure out the weird story about astral projection, a runaway tractor-trailer, infidelity and abduction that came out of a dream I had after taking my wife’s codeine-laced medicine a few nights ago.

And figuring that out will take some time.

For both my brother and I.

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