11/07, no, 6/05.

I am a failure. As of today. Not that I wasn’t a failure yesterday. It‘s just that with every new day I become a failure all over again; it isn’t like something that, you know, you become and then it’s just sort of…your identity, I mean…sticks to you and gets dull and gray with time. Every day is a new affirmation of everything that I could have been and am not. A new exposure of my incompetence, my impotence to that world, which goes on about its way, uncaring that it is leaving me behind (not that it should care; why should it care about the miserable fate of but one of its cling-ons), but also without pity, without…it doesn’t waste, or expend, a moment’s thought about the fact that I could have been on top of it, but somehow got snagged in something and ended up beneath it, trampled, flattened, and squashed by it; a nobody now, every day another different nobody.

Let’s talk about my writing. I say ‘my’ as if I ever had anything like writing to claim. I don’t mean writing like the kind I do; the kind I do…well, I would say ‘well,’ but it doesn’t really rise – that style of writing that is – to the level of a craft…or…evaluateable activity that one can do poorly or well…the kind I do one simply does. [I am trying to refer to the writing that you are reading.] Anyway, so I do not meant that ‘writing,’ in the mechanical sense. I mean the kind of writing that actually aspires to be something, that has form and function. And not even that the form that I’m aspiring to…the screenplay…is so majestic. But at least it’s a form, it’s out there to be conformed to. But I can’t do it.

Anyway, let’s talk about that writing, and I suppose to be useful here, I should pull myself out of the muck that I am rolling around in, as if I were a pig that knew it was going to be slaughtered…although that analogy isn’t good, because the pig probably likes the muck, whereas…let’s say…aw fuck this…

This is extremely self-indulgent, even if it is…what?…authentic? Whatever. So perhaps I will stop this and try to share my problem with you from a less emotional and a more analytical perspective.

So…here goes.

I can’t write.






How was that?

Now let me explain a little. I am imagining my writing process as the reverse of dissolving, like, a square of rice chex cereal in milk. NO!!!

Goddammit, I just want to be straight with this, and here I am being cutesy.

The truth is…or rather the simple fact that I am trying to get cross is that I am afraid I really cannot do the thing that I am trying to do. I am beginning to think that talent is something that is doled out (and I am tempted to analogize again, to compare working with one’s gifts as swimming in a river, and working against one’s gifts being swimming upstream) in unpredictable but de…and unknowable, even…but nonetheless definite portions. And the talent that I am trying to develop, the talent of writing in this specific form is not one that I was given.

This isn’t working. I keep coming back to the general inability whereas what I really want to explain is the specific experience that I force myself to undergo each day.

I do not currently know how my story is going to end, and so I am engaged in the process of trying to come up with an ending. But it’s not just, like, okay, let’s have it end this way. It’s envisioning the specific pieces that will lead up to that ending. And as it turns out, at least for me, this is not just something you can slap on. The ending, ultimately, must be generated from character, from the dramatic forces that the confrontation between characters and their respective needs unleash. And I’ve gotten…somehow, miraculously, it feels, to a point where I feel like I have generated characters who will bounce off each other, and I’ve gotten them to all get together, but then I get very confused and scared. I am so torn between the dramatic necessity of what happens and the role of invention in the writer’s process – and by torn I mean that…you can see how these are contradictory forces: necessity, or determination, on the one hand, and invention, which is a creative compensation for a lack, necessity’s child, as the saying goes. And I find myself at a junction in the story where I must invent something that must feel necessary. But there is a wide range of necessary. You can certainly point to movies in which the need is more manifest and urgent than others. Two films are running through my head right now – Chinatown and You Can Count on Me – which aren’t necessarily the best… Let’s take Die Hard, not necessarily a buoy on the sea of culture (this expression I got from the teacher…the seminar leader of my english class freshman year at Yale, where he was holding up Ulysses and referring to it that way, as a buoy, etc. And I don’t know why I have clung to that buoy, so to speak; but I have a hunch that it is because I have always hoped someday to be able to float my own), but certainly a classic of the genre, or at least a very good example of it. One could say that the needs in that film are extremely exigent; that’s part of what makes it an action/adventure film, the pressingness of the needs that the characters are undergoing, and the height of the stakes (which is really just another way of saying the same thing). Whereas You Can Count on Me, which to my mind is a great film, a great screenplay in any case, the needs, or what happens, isn’t as urgent, but it arises, again, out of character. And what happens in that film…and I like to think of it because when Mark Ruffalo’s character comes back, it’s not like everyone is suddenly faced with life or death, and he doesn’t really have that much that he needs to do…but relationships between the characters develop in such a way that a story is told.

Now the problem I’m having is that my setup is of the action/adventure genre, but my confrontation section, the feared second act, is of the You Can Count on Me genre. Or at least, that is how I am relating to it. And this, I think, gets at one of the biggest concrete problems I am having: THE WAY THAT I, AS A WRITER, AM RELATING TO, ENVISIONING, INSTINCTIVELY, THE SCENES THAT I AM SUPPOSEDLY CREATING IS CONTRARY TO THE LEVEL OF IMPORTANCE THEY NEED TO HAVE. In other words, I am trying to envision scenes that have a good deal of dramatic potency, but my head is in “Okay, let’s relax a little and write” mode; or “I think I’ll start writing now,” and the first things that comes to it are scenes that are similarly lax and accidental. And I find it is an extreme effort of will to start relating to my characters as people who are in their particular positions, rather than as reflections of me, secluded and privileged, off in the boonies with a few hours away from their children to kill lusciously.

And then, I externalize myself and see exactly what I have instinctively envisioned: these nowhere scenes that have no tension. Whereas, if I could make coming to writing a process of great necessity, or at least get it through my head that I have to imagine these scenes from a perspective of need, then maybe I could get some stuff down that would go somewhere.

But as it is, I have not been able to sustainedly do that. Perhaps I should start writing standing up. You know, sometimes I actually try writing lying down? I wonder whether my physical relationship to the process gets in my way. As it is, I have not been able to come up with an ending that makes sense, that feels logical, that feels not hokey.

And I am panicked because I see the end of the school year approaching, I see my deadline for having an outline (which was Nov. 1) receding behind me, and I am really honestly and truly afraid that I will not get this script written and that not even the threat of the inner torment this will cause me is getting me to get my shit together and start doing what it is I have supposedly been preparing to do my whole life. I am desperately afraid of having to switch careers because I don’t really want to. I feel like I will blame Persis and Burt for it, even though I have had sufficient time to get this thing done.

Why have I not made better use of it?

When I wrote my last script I was more able to write an outline, follow it, and come up with a finished product, though I may be misremembering. But my last script wasn’t good enough. And certainly the fear of what will happen if I don’t get this done is pretty intense, and perhaps intense enough to inhibit my performance. But I don’t know why I am having this problem. Every time I hit a crossroads, I panic and ultimately have to go back and tweak earlier parts to get the little wind-up toy that is the story to go past the block. And it’s not that I don’t think the story is getting slowly better. I think I have a clearer picture of the story then when I got to Ecksville.

But my great fear, the sort of dawning horror that is occupying my mind right now is that…I’m afraid that since I got here I have been largely spinning my wheels. I can’t accurately, as I’m sitting here, imagine where I was when I got to Ecksville, but it feels like I was pretty much stuck at the same place. For my own peace of mind I must go back and look, just a moment…


See, yes, I go back and I look at the notes that I wrote on June 30, and they are dealing with largely the same issue as I’m struggling with now. I mean I feel like I make progress with each breakthrough, but when I go back and look at my progress, it turns out to have been illusory. Now, I can’t say that with 100% conviction either; either because the thought of it being true truly terrifies me, or that because I really do think I have a better handle on who these characters are than when I got here. But can I say that for sure? No.

Somehow I have to press pass this point, jump into the void, and write my way to an end that I seem unable to envision convincingly.

This is why I am afraid I cannot write. Because I am not writing. I am diddling. I am diddling while imagining that I am writing. Somehow I was able to get from my germ of an idea to this point, but maybe I will not be able to get past it, and I will die here, starved and dehydrated from a lack of ideas, of imagination.

This is my Waterloo.

Though I was never great enough to even compare myself with Napoleon.

All kidding aside. I am really really afraid that I can’t get past this.

And this is the kind of thing that makes me go back to those images of shooting myself, this is where it comes from: the simultaneous moral need and constitutional inability to get past the point I’m stuck at.

And this is true of my life, too. I feel like I’m in suspended animation. I want to leave Ecksville, leave Persis, take Burt but have someone else take care of him, and restart my life somewhere else, and I imagine that somehow magically everything would fall into place.

I am a deluded fool, the kind of person I would talk to in the street and think as I walked away from him, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Except I’m I. Now I’m that guy whom the grace of God has forsaken, and I don’t know what to do to get back that grace.