Stories Rising

With the year winding down, I feel the need to step up my writing. I have all these stories in me – stories I’ve already started. Stories calling out to me. It’s getting crowded in my head. I have to release them…less I lose them. I don’t want to lose them. So I’ve set this goal to get these stories out of me by the end of the year. Some of them by the end of this month.

Now by the end of this month is a tall order, indeed, but I figure if I aim high and fall short of my goal it’s better than to aim low and reach it. I have to start setting the bar higher for myself. I have to push myself.

So by the end of November my goal is to finish editing my novella so that it will be ready for a proofreader. Also by the end of November I want to finish the final draft of my screenplay (UPDATE: That’s not going to happen. You can read a small excerpt from it from a previous post here. Hope you can follow the crazy formatting.). The screenplay will be harder to do given that one of the main characters is a professor who, in one scene, speaks in very subject matter specific jargon that I don’t speak nor do I fully understand. So I need to do a little studying in anthropology before I can attempt to do that scene justice. In fact, there are a couple of scenes in that script that get a little academic. I think that’s part of what’s holding me back with that script.

That and dialogue. I want to be a dialogue master. Dialogue in a movie script is probably the most important thing to me outside of the story itself. So I sort of stress over getting the dialogue right, making the dialogue sound like people actually talk instead of sounding like it’s scripted even though it is.

That only gives me 10 days to complete my November writing goals – nine if I don’t include today which is largely taken up already. I’m not sure if this goal is a good or a bad thing.

For the month of December, I have two more projects I need to tackle…well, actually four. One story is a trilogy. It’s funny, the movie script I talked about finishing above, actually started out as a short story back in 2017. I was up late one night on twitter and I came across a tweet about a screenwriting program at universal pictures. Of course I thought it was a sign that I was supposed to be accepted into that program, especially given the randomness of me seeing it and all. The only catch was, the submission deadline was just three weeks away.

So in three weeks I taught myself how to write a script by reading scripts online and checking out how-to books from the library. I then changed my incomplete short story into a movie script and finished it as a movie script. I submitted it and was ghosted. But part of the submission requirements was to also submit a treatment, which pretty much is a detailed summary of a movie script that hasn’t been written yet.

For those three weeks, I may not have been all the way locked in, but I was still in the zone. Perhaps that’s why I was able to write that treatment out of thin air in like an hour. It was like the Holy Spirit just downloaded it into me, and with such detail it amazed me. This treatment literally tells the whole story, and now I just need to give it dialogue and direction so it can blossom into a full-fledged script.

Then one day, while thinking about this treatment which is a drama, I had the idea to make it into a trilogy. But not just any trilogy – a three-part movie done in a way that I won’t say here, but I have never seen done before. It’s a crazy idea that I don’t even know would work, but I can’t help but try. It will be a challenge to write, for sure.  

Finally we have the most recent story idea I had. It’s, what else, a romantic dramady. Come to think of it, everything I write has some kind of drama in it. And I’m not simply talking about the necessary tension that arises when a character comes to a crossroads and has to make a decision, but I’m talking about serious drama – that kind that Mary sings about not wanting anymore of.

Now that I think about it, I don’t know that I could write a proper romantic comedy where the biggest point of conflict simply derives from the question of will they or won’t they end up together, even as we know more than likely they will. My stories all have a little extra something for you to chew on. A little extra piece of social commentary for you to grapple with that doesn’t allow them to fit neatly into the romantic-comedy framework. But who knows, perhaps one day that will change.

Anyway, I was inspired to create my latest movie script idea by the relationship that blossomed between Meg thee Stallion and Klay Thompson this past summer.  Obviously I don’t know them or anything about their relationship personally, but that’s where my imagination comes in. Besides, this isn’t a story specifically about them, but rather one that features a singer and a basketball player who have a relationship that takes shape in the public eye. I just found their connection to be fascinating this summer and enjoyed watching the Instagram reels of them together. Next thing you know, I had an idea for a movie. So I want to get that first draft out of my head, along with the first drafts of the trilogy I previously mentioned. That’s my goal for December.  

That means I have to write, write, write, write, write. I think part of the reason why it takes me years and years to complete stories is because writing doesn’t come easy to me…or at least not usually. When I’m in the zone and I’ve been thinking about something for a while, and I’ve been writing for a while, at that point, something often takes over and ideas and words and sentences just come to me. But it’s hard to get there. Outside of that, I’m at an impasse until it passes.  

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how difficult writing can often times be for me. Like if writing is my gift and my talent, why is it so hard for me? There are some people who can just operate in their gift at the drop of a dime. Take Jennifer Hudson for example. Someone can just ask her to sing and she can belt out a song, no problem. But if you ask me to write something, it’s going to take me a minute, and I can’t guarantee that what I come up with will be good. Then again, who knows? I’ve never been asked that.

The more I thought about it, I was led to two reasons writing can be an issue for me. The first – it’s a faith thing. Sometimes I have very little faith that anyone else will ever read it, or that it will even get to the stage where it’s an actual movie for people to see it. There is a part of me that thinks why even bother?, even though as a writer, I can’t really help myself. Writing and creating stories is a necessity for me whether or not they are ever read, whether or not they are ever seen…but I really, really, really want them to be read. I really, really, really want them to be seen.

I am a firm believer that no art form is complete until it has been experienced by at least one other person. No written word is complete until it is read, no song until it is heard, no painting, photograph, sculpture or other such artwork until it is observed. None of these things are complete until someone else lends their own imagination, life experience and interpretation to it. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, even though that infamous line from “Jerry Maguire” has since been debunked as good advice when it comes to relationships, when it comes to my writing, you complete me.

The second issue I came across would be the amount of time I spend writing. I was thinking about the concept popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 bestselling book “Outliers” that you have to put in 10,000 hours at something to become an expert at it, or something to that effect. I was in my late 20s when this book came out and thought surely I must have hit my 10,000-hour mark by now and therefore I’m an expert writer even if I don’t get paid to do it. I’ve been writing forever, pretty much since the fourth grade.

My writing time, however, has been very sporadic. I don’t think I’ve ever written for more than two hours at a time. Oh wait! The only time I did that was when I was trying to finish that script for that screenwriting program I told you about earlier. Talk about burning the midnight oil. And maybe when I was initially writing my novella over 20 years ago, I put in more than two hours a day. Though it did take me over a year to write it, so there was a lot of start and stop there. But for the most part, I don’t write over two hours at a time and I don’t write every day. I can go weeks without writing, which now has me wondering, have I actually put in my 10,000 hours yet?

To get a definitive understanding of just how long it takes to complete 10,000 hours, I did a few calculations.

Let’s say, for instance, I wrote one hour a day, five days a week for a year. That’s 1x5x52 (one-hour times five days a week times 52 weeks in a year). That equals 260 hours in a year.

Next I divided 10,000 hours by 260 hours. That turned out to be 38.46 years. Yikes! That means, using this theory, if I only write one hour a day, even if I do it five days a week consistently, it would take me over 38 years before I would be an expert at my craft.

Then I thought, what if I increased my writing time to eight hours a day for five days a week, like it was a full-time job? That’s 8x5x52, which equals 2,080 hours. Divide 10,000 hours by that and you get 4.8 years. Wow! What a big difference.

Now I haven’t read “Outliers” and I don’t know how reliable this 10,000 hours to become an expert number is. Just like anything, some people may need less time than others, some people may need more. But I think what breaking it down into numbers demonstrates for me is the general commitment and dedication that is necessary to excel at your craft.  The numbers help to show that talent alone isn’t enough. That talent must be honed by practice. The numbers sort of demystify the intangible that is the creative process, adding shape and form to a concept that is otherwise oblique.

It’s also showing me that I need to step up my game. That maybe writing won’t be so hard for me if I did it more.

But in the meantime and in between time, be ye not deceived – she still got game.