If there is one thing that I must qualify myself as, among the ridiculously diverse array of things that have caught my fancy, it would be as a storyteller.  I have been writing all of my life, essentially, starting at age 7 when, inspired by the Brothers Grimm and Aesop, I penned a collection of children’s fables.  Since then, I have used prose, poetry, music, stage, film, and computers to tell stories, but I have never seriously embarked upon what could be the Quest for the Holy Grail of storytelling – writing a novel.

Oh, I’ve toyed with the idea, and fantasized about how cool it would be to publish a break-out book.  I’ve even started a few (well… more like a dozen or so).  But I have never sat down and worked at it.  Screenwriting, playwrighting and directing have always drawn me away for being serious about a novel.  And as it happens, it is actually screenwriting that got me to the point that I find myself wanting to get serious about writing a full-length piece of fiction.

My lovely wife, constant companion, creative partner, and muse, Tina Cardinale, and I have been working diligently on two projects for the past several years.  One of which is a high-budget, summer blockbuster type of film script.  The problem is… drum roll, please… WRITER’S BLOCK!  Something I never thought I’d have out of hubris or naivety or whatever.  But it hit and stalled the project.  After much research and introspection, and a lot of painful talks with myself, I came to realize that the block was not some sort of inexplicable loss of creativity, or drying up of the wellspring, but rather the simple fact that there were parts of the story that I did not fully understand or have answers for.

That’s good!  Right?  That is solvable, surmountable, and ultimately the path to better storytelling!  But… long investigations into the various possibilities lead to more questions rather than paths to solutions.  So, I decided to write the script as a novel, so that we could adapt source material into a screenplay.  This way I can do away with the conventions of telling a story for the screen and focus solely on what the story is.

Completion is key.  Neil Gaiman, one of my storytelling heroes, and, arguably, one of the greatest storytellers of all time, once said that he began writing short stories so he could teach himself how to complete a project.  This is more difficult than it sounds.  It is easy to get caught up in editing, re-writing, and incessant second-guessing one’s choices.  Often times, the difficulty in completion is due to the fact that unless someone has given you a bunch of money, and a very important deadline to go along with it, it is very easy to never get there.  Artists are supposed to let their minds wander.  It is what fuels the creative wellspring.  My mind just happens to wander far and often, and as such it makes completion a particularly difficult endeavor.

So, in the absence of the important deadline (and the bunch of money that goes with it), I have decided to, for better or worse, use this blog as a taskmaster.  I am beginning the book in conjunction with this post, and will keep you, Dearest Reader (if you are even there), apprised of the progress, the joy, the pain, and all of the unsteadiness that goes with telling a long-form story.  I may even try to post excerpts or peripheral material for you to throw tomatoes at, should you wish.

I hope you will go on the ride with me, and I hope that it serves its purpose, as well as has the desired effect.  For if it does, then not only with this blog be fun, but there will be an even larger prize at the end of it for us both!

Let the Bloodletting begin…

In the immortal words of Soren Kierkegaard, “God laid this shite before me and thus I must embrace it…” or something to that effect, and that got me thinking about my own personal path through life.  Lately it seems as though the entire universe has been conspiring against me, and that tells me, if I am to believe Mr. K, that *I* am doing something to make that happen.  So…

No more running in fear. No more hiding.
Play the hand you are dealt and play it well.
One man’s failure is another man’s tiding,
yet both are bound by the toll the a bell.

The measure of a man’s death is how he lived his life, and since death is a life’s ultimate action, the way we live weighs heavily against this event and your memory.  And that brings me to my own life… am I living it mightily or do I sit waiting for the box.  Some days one, some days the other, and the writing is what tips the balance.  They say, “A writer writes…” and I have oft lambasted myself for not being a writer, because I don’t write (or at least I didn’t).  I tell stories, I witness events and recount tales, but mostly it all swirls within my skull, interminably pondered, polished, adjusted, and rarely does it get committed to the page.  I was able to let myself off the hook a bit when I realized that I was actually writing, and that a great part of writing is experiencing life, researching, wondering, and fantasizing, which is exactly what I was doing.

Now, finally released from my self-perceived inadequacy, I have come to see myself as a writer, and I DO write.  All the time.  Every day.  This got me thinking about the nature of writing, be it fiction, technical, dissertative (not actually a word, but should be…), or frivolous, and this is what I have come to.  My own personal Writer’s Credo, if you will:

word - n.  A dagger, a lover's whisper, a cleansing flame, a silk kerchief, flitting through the mind, tripping off the tongue, or committed to the page.

Every word has a place on the page in the tale.  Each must be chosen for its accuracy, intensity, and absolute conveyance of meaning. They must burst from the your heart like the sobs of one who has loved deeply and lost. Let them trip off the tongue without contrivance or contrition as poetry. Commit to your speech, and make it yours. No one talks that way? They do if you do, but you must buy your own sales-pitch. You must believe in what you say and how you choose to state it. Find a single word where other use three. And above all, do not fear eloquence, for if a word is worth committing to the page, then it deserves every chance at eloquence that its scribe can afford it.

Every time I sit down to write, I get this nasty anxiety attack. I begin to sweat that sick, uncomfortable sweat that only seems to happen right before you lose control of your bowels out of fear… Not that that has ever happened… or at least not while I was writing. Artists talk about the “pain of creation”, and I get that. But sometimes, when I sit down to “open a vein” creatively, it hurts so badly that I really have to do a double-take to be sure I’m not really bleeding.

If I have ever been able to define myself as anything, EVER, it would be “storyteller”, which is why I took the title “Raconteur”. If I had to distill that down even further, it would be “writer”. Writing is the first thing I ever remember doing. It is the first thing I ever knew I was good at (or so I was told), and it is the first thing on the list of things that occupy my every thought, every day.

So why, in the Gods’ names, is it SO BLOODY painful to do? I mean I LOVE it when I get into it, for a few minutes at a stretch. Sometimes I can even lose myself, and not realize that the sun has fallen and the house is mysteriously empty when not 15 minutes before… oh. Oops… 6 hours went by. You know what I mean? But usually it is avoid, abate, admonish, repeat.

Now, here is the really cool part. Several years ago at Screenwriting Expo 1 or 2, one of the very early ones, we listened to Frank Darabont speak. Now this is a guy to look up to. He adapted and directed “The Shawshank Redemption”, and if he did nothing else for the rest of his life, that was enough. At the time he was working on “Raiders of the Lost Ark 4”, and the 1000 or so people in the audience we abuzz with the excitement of him being the one to scribe that long-awaited project.

Of all of the incredible nuggets of wisdom and craft that came out of his mouth that day, though, the one thing I remember most was him saying this: “You know that awful feeling you all get when you sit down to write…? It NEVER goes away. No matter how many times you have done it, or how successful you are, it is always difficult.”

So many authors over the centuries have disserted on this topic, and I know I am not writing anything here that hasn’t been said, thought or previously written about, but man, it sure was nice to hear Mr. Darabont describe so accurately the feeling, and let me off the hook for feeling it.

Now I just need to figure out how to avoid writing these blasted blog entries that no one will ever read, and go back to work on my projects that hopefully everyone will read.

Write on you huskies!