Top Writing Music

I’m the sort of writer that has to listen to the same album again and again on repeat as long as I’m writing something. I feel like it’s a Pavlovian trick, once I’ve built the world out in my mind and associate it with the music - every time I replay it, it reinforces the mental environment I’m supposed to be writing in. With that in mind, here’s some of the music I’ve relied on in the past:

Wind River soundtrack - Nick Cave & Warren Ellis

The Proposition soundtrack - Nick Cave & Warren Ellis

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly soundtrack - Ennio Morricone

Bach’s Cello Suites - Yo-Yo Ma

And some others that have not been as consistently replayed as I worked, yet I definitely got a lot of use out of them: Imarhan, Stone Roses, Tobias Hume.

Taking Stock: the To-Do List

Series document (for the new pilot I wrote, everyone seems to enjoy it but is entirely dubious of where the show goes from there)

Revisions to my latest video essay text

An old feature - to rewrite (for development with a producer)

A new feature - to co-write with a friend whom I’ve co-written one feature with this year

Edit my short story and submit it wide

Blast my writers’ assistant resume out as far as I can

D&D - break some new story ground for the next session :)

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This post is pretty dry on its own, so I’m including the NatGeo photo of the day from Glacier National Park.

Daily Writing: What Counts?

Now that I’m entering a new phase of job searching (actively searching for the next writers’ assistant job), I’m returning to the familiar step of writing lengthy catch-up & ask-for-help emails half of every day. It’s fatiguing, but also - I remind myself - another form of writing. It’s a specific audience, each person needs to be addressed in a unique way. Does this immersive correspondence, day in and day out, contribute to my writing skills in any way? It’s hard to say, too many confounding factors with my video essay writing and other assignments going on at the same time. But either way it needs to be done…

Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

This is my next undertaking at the moment! Thirty pages in and already enjoying it quite a bit. I can already tell his sentences have that uncanny quality of stretching on and on unknowingly so that by the time you’ve completed one of their journeys you hadn’t even realized the story is only just beginning and you’re two pages in. And on a personal level, this is the only time in my post-college life that I’ve met an author (actually worked with him in a writers’ room) before reading any of his work. Who knows how that’ll inform my reading lens!

Better Call Saul

I’m in the process of diving down the rabbit hole of Better Call Saul, finally. Just like Breaking Bad actually, I didn’t really watch it until after a season or two was in the hole — though with BB I caught on much quick, before it became the gold standard. Why I am so late to the party on BCS, I have no idea. But anyways, it’s brilliant in its own regard and absolutely stands on its own two legs. I recently came across a (rare) Final Draft article about it which sums up why. The most distinctive point, for me, is that it takes its time. It makes serious sacrifices with its real estate to allow for cinematic moments — silent, drawn out, suspense-building and ultimately extremely telling. They somehow ensure that these moments are always worth their weight in salt. To me, it is wizardry. I’ll hope to learn how someday, and in the meantime will keep watching.

The Better "Succession"

I may be verging on the point of obsession by posting a third (fourth?) time about the HBO show Succession but it is only so far as to say, I’ve found a superior alternative. It’s a book called Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn — in conjunction with the publisher, Hogarth Shakespeare, St. Aubyn has adapted King Lear to novel form, and set it in present day. Not just present day, but within the skeleton of a multi-billion dollar media empire. Dunbar is the head, his two eldest daughters have gotten in cahoots with the family doctor to make Dunbar (temporarily?) insane - and committed, so they can take over the business amidst some serious corporate turmoil. It’s more or less the same exact world and tone of Succession but, well, I like it more. There’s more character depth, more shocking “battles”, the humor is multi-leveled and the tragedy absolutely real. Because there’s an internal existence to these characters, they’re not just caricatures of various forms of greed. Some of them in the novel are surely over the top, but even that heightened quality serves a purpose. And at the end of the day, isn’t Succession basically just an American version of King Lear anyways? I say go straight to the source, but with a twist, instead.

Update: Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Men"

Just a quick update (mostly to my future self to look back on): you made a whole schedule for writing different projects at different times. Yet, lo and behold, I’ve spent entire day trying to crack the Dracula video essay — haven’t been able to switch gears for a moment… Perhaps the scheduling process itself is cathartic but it doesn’t hold up well it seems.

"That Feeling" and, Attempted Writing Schedule: Diversity of Projects

I've been getting that classic nagging feeling that (I imagine) all writers get, in some sort of patterned recurrence -- like a toxic circadian rhythm. A dread sinusoidal schedule. That feeling that sneaks up on you after blocks of productivity have passed and you've just been idly enjoying our life. That feeling: you're not writing enough, you're not thinking enough, not noticing enough. It's the sort of insecurity that can always feel true, regardless of how busy or idle you really are -- but currently, I'm trying to harness the feeling as a catalyst to fill my schedule with new projects rather than just freeze me up. It's true that my schedule is more wide open than it has been in a long time. I wrapped my work as writers' assistant on the Netflix limited, UNBELIEVABLE, and got married and went on my honeymoon. I finished co-writing a feature with a friend which, after three revisions, is finally being taken out this week. I developed a scripted series for a digital company that is not moving forward with it. So, it's a lot of things that have tidily wrapped up one way or another. I'm searching and applying for new writers' assistant work but my hope is that the particular showrunner I know that I want to work for will have her new show greenlit soon - she said she'd hire mire as WA. So really, a lot of things don't require active energy (unless things get desperate and the new show falls off the horizon) -- otherwise, it's an open slate for writing these days. My goal to fill it as much as I can, and currently I'm feeling that a diversity of projects of different mediums will be more fun and more productive. There's a sociology theorist and economist whose name I'm forgetting (was it Keynes?) who asserted that people couldn't successfully work on the exact same task all day long, their brains wouldn't allow the focus. Ideal work needed to be broken up with breaks of course, but also with a variety of jobs. Now, technically if you're writing all day then you're sort of rebelling against this theory -- but the stages of writing can be different enough (research, character backstory and brainstorming, drafting, editing, etc.) that perhaps it'll work. My current thought: (early AM) write website post, (AM) research/draft video essay texts (need to prioritize the one upfront paid gig ;), (early PM) work on series document for BIG SKY COUNTRY, (late PM) work on novel (a new idea that I've just started drafting). We'll see how it goes... 

Homesick For Another World

Adding to the 2018 list of fiction that has influenced me: Ottessa Moshfegh's Homesick For Another World. The NYT described it as, "Dark, confident, prickling" writing and I would agree with that. She has a way of creating these incredibly sad or disturbed insular characters -- who are painfully aware of some of their deepest flaws yet painfully unaware of others. They're crazy, but she keeps it equal parts enlightening and disturbing in how relatable they continue to be. On a subtler level, I also really appreciate how she sets each story in a very different city (in America, in China, in unnamed "exotic" locales). Lastly, it's impressive how short she keeps her stories -- it speaks to a real and internalized discipline. Highly recommend!

Meandering Thought: Emotions as Profession

It occurred to me that a writer has to experience the emotions of the characters fully, but inwardly, and then transfer that to the page. 

Whereas the actor obviously experiences the emotions outwardly. They're opposite sides of the same coin. 

The director is some amorphous in-between, perhaps in the analogy they are the coin themselves. They have to translate the emotion from inward to outward and also create a conducive world wherein the emotion feels conducive and real.