Why are you doing this?
Screenwriting Tricks for Authors
As you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t been keeping to my regular, one post a week schedule for this newsletter. I wasn’t going to get personal about why, but recent events have changed my mind on that.
So here it is. My mother has been ill for some time, with joyous periods of recovery and traumatic periods of crisis, and I’ve largely disappeared from social media and public appearances to manage her care and family finances.
Mom died last month. I was privileged to be there and it was quick and painless, the three things I’d most hoped for at the end and that I’ll always be grateful for.
This isn’t an obituary, and I’m not going to go into detail about her amazing and inspirational life. This is a writing forum and those details are for a different venue.
But I know many of your stories and I know I’m far from alone in this situation. It’s actually the most often cited reason I hear from writers who are struggling and desperate to find time to write. And though I never talk about this publicly for safety and privacy reasons, like many of you, my husband and I also have young children in our family, creating the other side of the “sandwich.”
Those first weeks of intense grief are leveling out and I’m slowly starting to look around me at life— after.
A family or personal crisis is like a storm, or an earthquake, or whatever natural disaster is most resonant to you. In the midst of it, there is nothing to do but survive it, and hopefully help others around you to survive. Immediately after, you have to assess the damage, do triage, get help for the injured, including you..
And then there is the rebuilding from where you are now.
And that is an issue for a writing forum. Because as professional writers, we will find ourselves in this situation over and over and over again. There will always be periodic, devastating crises or loss, and the imperative of rebuilding from the new landscape, despite the grief, loss, and sheer exhaustion.
In fact, rebuilding may not be an accurate enough word. It’s more like reinventing.
Writing has been my only day job, my sole means of support, since I started doing it seriously after college. And in my decades of professional writing, I’ve had to reinvent myself and my career many times. The business changes. My passions change. My goals change. The mission changes.
If my writing didn’t change to reflect all that, who would want to read it? How could I even bring myself to finish a page, let alone complete the marathon of a book? And in terms of this newsletter, I realized I couldn’t return to my regular writing posts until I acknowledged my own changed landscape and spoke about it.
Because maybe not all of you personally are in the midst of a personal trauma, but the U.S, is in the midst of a collective trauma, that has implications for the rest of the world as well. This is a profound crisis of democracy, a political storm unleashed by a malevolent sociopath and a malevolent faction of fanatics both using him and used by him, that could actually bring about the end of the American experiment. Many, many more people will lose the rights that have been such a battle to gain even at this incomplete level—unless we launch a collective response to stop it.
And here’s the thing. When I addressed that crisis in my last post, I got more writing— and I don’t just mean responses, I mean passionate, detailed, articulate, heartbreaking writing— mostly private, but some bravely public—out of you all than I had with any other post of this relatively new forum.
As a writing teacher, I would not be doing you justice if I didn’t acknowledge and incorporate that into the forum. I know you’re reading the structure and movie analysis posts, but because very few of you respond, I have no idea what you’re getting out of them. Maybe they aren’t what you really need. And if that’s the case, what do you need?
As writers, we have no choice but to write through crisis. As a teacher, I want to be able to help you write through crisis. And I want those voices I heard last month to be producing and selling those books, and scripts, for all our sakes.
But I need to hear from you what you need from this forum. I can’t guess. You’re here, and you’re reading the posts. But why are you here? What are you writing? Where are you in the process? What do you need from me?
I don’t have to write this newsletter. I’m here because I love talking about story, figuring out what makes a story fly, more than just about anything in life. Talking about it makes me a better writer, so I do it whether I hear from you or not. But it’s no fun for me to do in a vacuum.
And here’s a question you might want to consider. I ask it of myself periodically, and in this rebuilding stage of my grief I am asking myself again:
Why am I doing this writing thing?
My answer is always the same, and always changing. Now all kinds of circumstances are different, including that I’ve written all my adult life and done well enough for long enough that I don’t need to write for a living any more. Which on one hand doesn’t really matter, but on the other hand, opens up some interesting possibilities.
So why am I doing it?
I owe myself a deep engagement with the question. And so do you.
Why are you doing this?
You need to know. And I want to know.
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Dear Alexandra, sending you love. I’m so sorry for your loss. I had 15 years looking after both sets of elderly parents, Alzheimer’s, dementia, heart failure. So many hospital trips. My kids were young. I went mad. Obviously. In the end I was blessed, in that my grief was greatly lessened by relief, for them, for us. My husband and I both thought (without saying so at the time) that we would not survive the oldies. But throughout it was the tiny slivers of writing that kept the little creative happy part of me alive long enough to survive. Now I try always to write with joy, not beating myself up about wanting to be published to prove I’m a real writer. Just embracing the joy. And my story is about the greedy Two-faces being destroyed - forever by a brave young boy and a wise young girl. Huzzah! May each day bring you joy.
Terrible thing to lose any loved one, and especially after a protracted illness. My older brother recently lost his battle with cancer after five years, and there has been the pandemic and the extended family circle with their needs, and even before covid helping ones spouse and children deal with extended health problems - you said it, people have a lot going on. And to lose a parent, you lose a constant that has been there your entire life. When your mom or dad is gone, it adds something unsettling on top of the grief. Lost my dad in July of 2000, and still miss being able to share things with him. So I am truly sorry for your loss. Life’s stresses certainly make it seem impossible to do creative work. So I appreciate your posting about what it might take to get through life’s stresses to write. You are asking for feedback, and I will need to get back to you on what I personally was looking for and getting out of your posts, but wanted to extend my sympathy for your loss. Your post btw was the first time I realized we could comment or give feedback, I just was not aware. I wonder if a lot if your subscribers may not be either.