Grow up

I've started reading an amazing book: Getting the Love You Want. I’m up to chapter 5. It's all about how early childhood experiences, especially with your caregivers, influence your choice of mates later in life, and, more profoundly, why and how you experience love.

I hate ebooks! Every time I use them, I have to relearn how to navigate. But there's no going back, I can't keep accumulating physical books, and have no time left to wait for their delivery. Libraries and book stores... what the heck are those?!

Learning and relearning: how to love, earn a living, survive, enjoy such a rapidly changing world.

Today’s assignment is to write the limo scene without dialog.

I asked my LA advisor why he liked my bike race scene so much better than everything else I showed him to date. He said, now that I know you can write, I can tell you what I really thought about the dialog you sent earlier: rank amateur wretched puke!

Someone else I sent it too basically said the same thing: “The dialogue sounds too stiff and contrived. It doesn't sound like a conversation.”  She apologized afterwards when I said ouch!

I think (I hope) she was the only other person I sent it to. I was SO EXCITED when I wrote that dialog that my instinct was probably to send it to everyone I know! It was the first dialog I wrote after structuring and restructuring the script for six months or so in response to contradictory feedback from three opposing camps (positive, negative, and silent).

No matter how bad it was, what I needed more than anything at that moment was encouragement! And despite all evidence to the contrary, I still somehow felt like a natural-born screenwriter! What the…?

I now appreciate even more deeply how good a teacher is my LA advisor. After my first dialog submission, he bit his tongue and wrote back “hey Ben, I think it's a great start,” and sent a bunch of suggestions about movies I should watch and things I should do differently.

I was chomping at the bit to do more, but he delayed responding, sometimes for weeks. He even asked me for advice about a project he was developing. I was so thrilled and flattered to oblige, no matter how great or little use any of my suggestions actually were to him.

I am learning an entirely new craft, and am repeatedly shocked at how tone-deaf I am regarding my mistakes. It seems so unusual to return to a beginner’s stage at my age. I’ve even been called adolescent for doing so.

What is it about achieving expertise that repulses me so much? I love the respect it brings, but loathe the predictability of knowing the answers. I really hate know-it-all close-mindedness, which is so hard to avoid with expertise.

Virgin territory is my sandbox; vocational risk, my drug of choice.

I guess what I really want is to play again. I can’t wait to keep writing my screenplay!