Sometimes Confusion Makes it Realer

Sometimes my heart is breaking, and I'm also thinking about how to tell the story of my heart breaking at the same time.

One of the odd things about dealing with my daughter's problems is that she is making good progress, but the baseline keeps moving backwards. Since we first noticed the problem, she's learned to use words, she's learned to look us in the eye, she's even started playing with kids sometimes instead of only playing alongside them. The people she's working with feel she's doing well. At the same time it feels like every month it's become clearer that the problems she started with were bigger than we imagined. So there's this odd combination of good news/bad news.

Normally in a screenplay, news is either good or bad. Usually, it's bad, because you want to jack up the hero's problems, and then have him solve them on screen. A scene where he found out that some problem he didn't know he had has started on the way to being solved, might be a confusing scene. Are we supposed to cheer? Or worry?

But in life, you sometimes cheer and worry.

Confusion can create a sense of reality, if it's the hero that's confused. (If the audience has no sense of what's going on, that's an art film.) Because life is confusion.

It depends on what genre you're in. If you're writing DIE HARD V: ROCK HARD, probably best for the hero to get either bad news or good news. The audience doesn't want the hero to be confused. Just missing pieces of the puzzle.

Malcolm Gladwell (was it?) was writing (a couple New Yorker issues back) about the difference between a puzzle and a mystery. A puzzle is something you'd understand completely if you had all the pieces. A mystery, even if you have all the information, you still don't necessarily understand it. In a big popcorn movie, you want the hero to be dealing with a puzzle, not a mystery.

If you're writing something in the genre of Pan's Labyrinth, you're writing for an audience that loves a good mystery. And for that audience, you could give the protagonist confusing news. Like, "Your daughter survived the car crash. But ... she's actually not your daughter."

What this gives you is that the audience is forced to think about whether that's good news or bad news. And by the process of thinking about it, they draw themselves into your story. They become more involved instead of less involved. They come to grips with the events because it feels like life, not like a plot.

This is a tricky approach, a subtle tool to use, but by that very virtue, it's the sort of think you could hang a major turn of the story on.

Something Else You Don't Know About Me

My daughter's been on my mind extra much lately. She's three, and she only has about 50 nouns and two or three verbs so far. No, she's not one of those kids who just talks late. She also only just started pointing; usually she uses a doll to point for her. She is incredibly happy and sweet; she has a lovely personality. She smiles with bright eyes, and laughs in all the right places. We think there's a bright, beautiful kid in there, but she's either mildly autistic or something called PDD-NOS. For us that means a big hunk of autistic non-communicativeness with little bits of autistic rigidity and, fortunately, no autistic oversensitivity as far as we can tell.

If you offer her a banana, she doesn't look at you. She looks at the banana.

And she's having a lot of trouble learning to talk. She's talking about as well as a one and a half year old.

I'm a writer, and I can't tell my daughter about ponies or clouds or the Good Folk. I can't even tell her about the Cat in the Hat.

I love her. I wouldn't trade her for another kid that was normal. I just want her to get better.

Yeah, and we've got professionals who work with her and all. And she comes home from those sessions and she's beat. It is exhausting for her to make contact.

I want to tell her it will be okay, but she doesn't know anything's wrong. I guess that's a blessing.

When this first came on, we thought she couldn't be broken. She's so happy. And lovely. She was just confused which language to speak. And then I thought, if she could just realize that she could get stuff by talking -- at that point she was only taking us by the finger and leading us to food -- the dam would break and she'd learn to talk.

I'm just coming to terms with the idea that she's not going to snap out of it, and that I don't know how much of this can be fixed and how much of this is going to stay.

It was a rough day today because she came back from a session of playing with other kids with problems, and she was so tired she could barely look at me. She was just out of it. When she's tired, that's when she has the most trouble connecting.

I'm a little bit like that. No one I know would consider me shy, but I find being with people exhausting. I just do it because I have to.

When I was her age, I'm told, I didn't want to be held. There are no pictures of me with my mom's arms around me. I used to think that was all her fault. Now I'm not so sure.

At least Jesse loves to be held. Not for long, but she loves it.

Today was not a good day. Lisa's in New York giving a talk (go Lisa!), and Hunter was home from school because of a disagreement with another kid that did not, um, turn out well.

I love being a father and a husband, and my life is blessed in ways that many people only dream of. I guess this is the rain that falls into my life.

In three days, we are halfway out of Winter. That gives me hope.

Five Things You May Not Know About Me...

... but I'm not going to tell you which one is false...

1. I'm married to my college sweetheart. With, oh, about 16 years in the middle where we weren't together.

2. I had to sue my first wife to get sole custody of my dog. (She wanted joint custody.)

3. I once took a psych exam next to Jodie Foster. Years later, at a premiere, she remembered my name.

4. I can remember almost nothing from before I was 13.

5. I was once initiated into a witch's coven. Purely for research, mind you.

Horloge Biologique

On the other hand I watched a neat little Quebecois comic drama called Horloge Biologique (Dodging the Clock in English, though a better translation would be "Biological Clock.") It's about three guys who are facing their girl's fertility -- one's got a kid, one's having a kid, one's got a girl who wants a kid. They're thirtysomethings and they're panicking.

Nothing particularly clever, just heartfelt, funny, well acted, well written, convincing. And, from a Canuck perspective, it made absolutely no effort to be "Quebecois." It just told its story unapologetically. And was all the more convincing for it.

Nice work, les gars.

Things Not to Do When You're a Famous Writer

/* Studio 60 spoilers */
/* no, seriously, Studio 60 spoilers. Don't read this if you haven't watched Studio 60 yet. */
/* Though honestly? probably won't make much difference to your enjoyment of the episode */
/* This is a revised and clarified spoiler warning. */

Here are some things we expect you not to do when you're a famous writer:

• Have someone lie about why they're breaking a date, then get busted on it by the infuriated ex-date.
• Have a guy show up with a bunch of poisonous snakes, then lose one.
• Have some people go up on the roof and then get locked out up there.

Unless, of course, you're going to twist the situation one further and surprise us all with your brilliance.

Which didn't happen.

/* Apologies for not marking *which* show I was writing a spoiler for. */
/* But, honestly, did anyone NOT see those plot turns coming? */

I Don't Have 1000 Words Today

So here are a couple pictures.

Here's a Quicktime movie of mean global temperatures over the past century or so.

And here's what happens when you successfully breed 16 baby pandas.

Wobblies

In the absence of any screenwriting insight today (help! I have to write a brother and sister bickering, and I'm an only!), here's a bit of wisdom from Scientific American. A mathematician has proven that you can always balance a table on an uneven surface if you rotate it.

Unfortunately, it doesn't say what you do if the table's legs themselves are bent out of shape, as is the case in most Chinese restaurants I know.

Execution Independence

I have a series I've been pitching to some very smart people at networks. They're all quite intrigued by the idea, but can't quite wrap their heads around it, and can't always pinpoint why.

I think what is going on is that the concept seems execution dependent.

That sounds like a funny thing to say. Isn't every show dependent on how it's executed? Well, in some ways. But in some ways not.

Take LAW & ORDER. I could describe that show to you in 60 seconds, and you could go off and create the show by yourself. It might not be exactly Dick Wolf's LAW & ORDER. But it would be pretty close to the hit show that's hived off so many clones.

Or CSI. And so on.

The shows I like to watch are mostly execution dependent. I could describe THE WEST WING to you in 60 seconds, but I couldn't tell you how to make it good. Ditto THE SOPRANOS. Ditto most HBO shows. It's not the concept that makes it worth watching. It's the way the concept is executed.

I think when people spark to this particular show that I'm pitching, they ask, "But how are you going to get 100 episodes out of that?" And I point to the 15 or so springboards in the pitch bible, and I tell them I've got another 10 or so territories on top of those. But they're still wondering: but how is he going to make TV shows out of this idea?

And the real answer is: by banging my head against the wall in the middle of the night. By having a great story room that works their asses off. Not to put too fine a point on it: not easily.

Which is not at all the same as saying I won't be able to come up with the eps. I know I can come up with the eps. There isn't a story problem I've run across in this show -- and I'm two acts into the pilot, with other episodes broken down into acts -- that I haven't been able to resolve. They don't resolve in 5 minutes. They resolve in a day. But they resolve.

But I'm asking these network people to put their faith in my ability to execute the show. It's not a show they'll be able to help me out on if I paint myself into a corner.

Network people are generally more comfortable with execution independent shows. Practically all my other pitches, I could hand off to any of my writer friends, and they'd be able to execute them. This one, not so much.

When you're formulating a spec pilot, unless you have a great relationship with network people who trust you -- or even if you do -- you may be better off with a concept that is relatively execution-independent.