John Green:  I don’t know.  But when I do, it feels really good.

We all have moments of it.

People dub the experience with different names – Flow, The Zone, The Groove.   Whatever you call it, when that fate smiles on your clumsy little noggin, you feel transported and greater for it.

One particular ZOMG Hallelujahz! encounter I had with this godly force came on the basketball court at my alma mater.  I was a 4th Year then (and yes, we were designated by years, like sad imitations of the Hogwarts crew).  First of all, understand:  I stink at b-ball – I’m a mediocre driveway hoopster at best.  But on this particular day – for which, regrettably, there were no witnesses! – I, Mike “Clumsy Noggin” Martin, began to toss swish after swish following swish.

A photorealistic portrayal of me from my spring 2007 ZONE experience...'Kay, not really.

The satisfying snap of net echoed on the hardwood.  I put up threes, two-pointers, foul shouts, layups, Granny-style, skyhook:  Nearly everything arced, twirled, sank – hold your breath – snapped.

It was one of the most rewarding and enjoyable experiences of my life.

The pertinent question:  Just how the crud was I doing that?

The only way I know how to describe it:  I suddenly understood basketball.

Without thought, I knew exactly how hard to put it up, the precise arc each shot required.

When I left, I was shocked to find three hours had passed in the gymnasium.  Time had seemed to move both much slower and in an eye’s blink.  And as I headed out to the parking lot, I specifically remember thoughts were like this: 

ZOMG, I are prodigy wif skills!  I can be pro now, preeze?

I was back at the gym before seven o’clock the next morning.

And I couldn’t sink a freakin’ thing.

I was haunted and depressed (completely unjustifiably, by the way, as I was, in fact, at film school, and not a tryout with the Knicks).  What had happened?  What had I experienced before, and how had I experienced it before, and how could I get it back?

Come this point, you might be wondering, Okay Mikey, nifty tale, and I’m real sorry nobody saw you, but I trust you, and I bet you’re handsome and you’ll be in the NBA pretty soon.  If Mugsy can do it, you can, too. But one thing - what does this have to do with writing tips?

To Which I Reply:  Firstly, you humble.

And secondly – everything.

Getting in The Zone is something that can make your creativity soar.  It is something Stephen King talks about as an almost mystical experience, something Thoreau ponders time and again in Walden.

And most miraculously, it is something, I have been blessed enough to find, that we can do a lot to control and induce at will.

I offered an anecdotal description of a Zone or Flow experience above, but what is it, really?

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the world’s leading expert on what he calls “the psychology of optimal experience.”  In his classic book Flow, he describes being in Flow (his preferred term) as “the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity…being completely involved in an activity for its own sake.  The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.  Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”  He discovered the idea of Flow and dubbed it thus because (to quote the Oracle Wikipedia), “[D]uring Csíkszentmihályi’s 1975 interviews several people described their ‘Flow’ experiences using the metaphor of a water current carrying them along.”

So that’s a very neat and academic way of saying, d00d, I was so money ballin’ the other day, it felt awsum, whoa!

It would be a mistake, however, to believe that Csíkszentmihályi was the first person to document this phenomenon.  The sixth-century BCE Tao Te Ching has a wonderful example of it.

Prince Wen Hui’s cook

Was cutting up an ox.

Out went a hand,

Down went a shoulder,

He planted a foot,

He pressed with a knee,

The ox fell apart

With a whisper,

The bright cleaver murmured

Like a gentle wind.

Rhythm!  Timing!

Like a sacred dance…

Like ancient harmonies!

“Good work!” the Prince exclaimted,

“Your method is faultless!”

“Method?” said the cook

Laying aside his cleaver,

“What I follow is Tao

Beyond all methods!

“When I first began

To cut up oxen

I would see before me

The whole ox

All in one mass.

After three years

I no longer saw this mass.

I saw the distinctions.

“But now I see nothing

With the eye.  My whole being

Apprehends.

My senses are idle.  The spirit

Free to work without plan

Follows its own instinct

Guided by natural line,

By the secret opening, the hidden space,

My cleaver finds its own way.

I cut through no joint, chop no bone…

“There are spaces in the joints;

The blade is thin and keen:

When the thinness

Finds that space

There is all the room you need!

It goes like a breeze!

Hence I have this cleaver nineteen years

As if newly sharpened!

“True, there are sometimes

Tough joints.  I feel them coming,

I slow down, I watch slowly,

Hold back, barely move the blade,

And whump! the part falls away

Landing like a clod of earth.

“Then I withdraw the blade,

I stand still

And let the joy of the work

Sink in.

I clean the blade

And put it away.”

“Prince Wen Hui said,

“This is it!  My book has shown me

How I ought to live

My own life!”

I’m sure you can see how that is describing a Zone experience – the instrinsic joy of the task at hand, the sense of effortless mastery.  Makes me want to carve me an ox, how ’bout you?

But – and I’m guessing this is what you’re waiting for – the poem also hints at one of the the methods by which we can learn…

How To Get In The Zone

(Before we go on, a caveat:  We all know, there’s no magic bullet, right?  Reading this post will not make you a Zen master, or Stephen King, or be more “awsum” Granny-style fieldgoals, for that matter.  Getting in The Zone, like anything else, requires an effort of education and adjustment.)

Csikszentmihalyi found that, in order to have the chance of experiencing Flow, the activity in which you are participating must meet most, if not all, of these criteria:

1. You must have clear goals, and have a way of knowing whether you are on or off track. (How this applies to my basketball story:  I had a goal – play basketball – and knew whether or not I was on-track because sometimes the ball went in and sometimes it did not.) This doesn’t mean, necessarily, that in order to experience Flow, you must say, “I’m going to write 5,437 words today!”  Rather, it means that you cannot expect to experience Flow accidentally.  You must pick a task (sitting at your computer), and have a goal for that task (“I’m going to write my novel”).  Even now, though, I can hear my fellow writers bellow, But when I’m writing, sometimes I don’t know if I’m on track or not! Csikszentmihalyi speaks to this directly, when he writes, in Flow, “In some creative activities, where goals are not clearly set in advance, a person must develop a strong personal sense of what she intends to do.  The artist might not have a visual image of what the finished painting should look like, but when the picture has progressed to a certain point, she should know whether it is what she wanted to achieve or not.  And a painter who enjoys painting must have internalized citeria for ‘good’ or ‘bad’ so that after each brush stroke she can say, ‘Yes, this works; no, this doesn’t.’  WIthout such internal guidelines, it is impossible to experience Flow.‘ Or, put another way… 
2. The goals must align with – and stretch – one’s skill set and abilities. (I wasn’t playing one-on-one with Michael Jordan; I wasn’t playing Horse a kindergartener.  I was just shooting around,from distances I was strong enough to make, over and over again .)  In other words, you cannot expect to experience Flow while writing a novel if you’ve never written a novel before.  The more complex a task, the more complex your skills must be.  Have you ever been playing tennis (or any sport) with someone who’s juuuuust slightly better than you?  There’s a good chance you may have experienced Flow, because skills were capable and being challenged. Like a muscle being worked, there’s a pleasure to the difficulty.  Now, have you ever played tennis with someone much better or much worse than you?  Odds are, you won’t experience Flow in such a situation.  If the task is greater than your skills, you become frustrated; if it’s less than your skills, you become bored.
3. Concentrate and focus absolutely on the task at hand. (I was the only person in the gym, and had no homework to do that day, and so was not distracted either by other people/embarrassment for my lack of skill, nor by any other things weighing heavily on my noggin.) In our Twitter’d/Facebook’d/iPhone’d world, this may be the great barrier to getting in The Zone.  Why?  Because we can always justify multitasking.  However, this creates mental chaos, and all our psychic energy becomes too defused.  In order to experience Flow, you must must must be absolutely focused on the task at hand, and nothing else.  After a while, of course, this goes on autopilot, and thusly you don’t get hungry or pay attention to the time or particularly care or notice what’s going on around you.  (For instance, while I was writing this blog post, I shut down all other programs and closed all my browser tabs and even turned off my music, because although I know many writers really love to use music, I sometimes find it distracting and also find that it dictates rather than complements what I write.)  The easy lesson here? You can multitask, you can experience Flow…but you can’t do both.

Create those three criteria, and you’re on your way to experiencing The Zone.  If you do this and you don’t experience it, just keep trying.  One thing Csikszentmihalyi is very clear about is that it requires a very complex, structured, disciplined mind to get the most Flow possible, and we can add to that complexity every day.  Activities such as chess, reading analytically, and simply writing without Flow help create a more complex mind, which makes Flow more a consistent possibility for us.  Activities such as watching television atrophy the mind, and make you less likely to experience Flow.   (He has a very interesting discussion of pleasure [empty] vs. enjoyment [rewarding and personally challenging] that I may discuss later.)

Anyway, as a quick recap, just remember.

1.  Have goals, and know whether or not you’re doing well.  2.  Goldilocks your challenges – make them Just Right.  3.  Distraction = destruction.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play some b-ball.

Sara’s fictional work has the same indelible feeling of verisimilitude that simultaneously makes my heart expand in recognition, and crumble in empathy.  In fact, for novel-writing pointers regarding moment-by-moment emotional truth, I don’t think there’s any greater example than her work.

But that’s actually not what I’d like to look at today.

Rather (as the title of this post very subtly hints), I’d like to consider What We Can Learn About Defying Audience Expectations from Sara Zarr, Robert McKee, and “Rashomon.”

Story of a Girl Analysis

When she is caught in the backseat of a car – with her older brother’s best friend – Deanna Lambert’s teenage life is changed forever.  Struggling to overcome the lasting repercussions and the stifling role of “school slut,” she longs to escape a life defined by her past.  With subtle grace, complicated wisdom and striking emotion, Story of a Girl reminds us of our human capacity for resilience, epiphany and redemption.

That’s a quick summary – thanks to Amazon.com – of Zarr’s debut novel.  I recently reread Sara’s National Book Award nom’d Story of a Girl.  I’d gotten it from the library in hardback before, read it shortly after it first came out; and while I loved it back then – and learned a lot about how to write a young adult novel from it – I don’t think I fully gave it its due.  Because what I’ve come to realize is that Story of a Girl is one of the wisest thematic powerhouses I’ve read in quite sometime.

But before I get to that, I want to point a couple things out.

That three-sentence summary does something all summaries of great books do:  It immediately conjures in the mind of the audience the Obligatory Scene.

That funky-soundin’ term was coined by Robert McKee, screenplay guru, author of the brilliant STORY ,and the man who chewed the crud outta Nicholas Cage in Adaptation.  And what is that Scene Which Be Obligatory?  It has three main characteristics.

The first two:  It is the scene that must occur for the audience’s satisfaction to be fulfilled, and which is immediately foreshadowed by the premise itself. In Jaws, since the premise is about a sheriff trying to stop a killer shark, we know, as experienced audience members, that the sheriff and shark must go head-to-head (or head to…beek?  do shark shave beeks?) on the open sea.  If that never happened, we would be left unsatisfied.

So, in Story of a Girl, since the primary conflict is about Deanna being saddled with the role as “school slut,” the Obligatory Scene is one in which she overcomes her reputation.  (Of course, it’s not always a single scene, and in subtler, more realistic work like Story of a Girl, it isn’t.)  And yet…

Here’s the other important thing about the Obligatory Scene:  It must also be unexpected. (Or, as I seem to recall William Goldman once saying about what successful storytelling is, “You have to give the audience what they want, in a way they never expected.“)

Anyhoot!

Why all this jabberwocky about the Obligatory Scene, if what I really want to talk about is the theme of Story of a Girl?

Answer:  All this jabbwocky because I think it’s in the reversal of audience expectations of the Obligatory Scene that the theme is ultimately unveiled.

-

The theme is hinted at in the deceptively simple title itself:  Story of a Girl is primarily about storytelling, and the great and terrible power therein.

Having a reputation is storytelling, isn’t it?  Other people tell stories about you, and there are conflicting stories, and maybe there is no “true” version.  Because that’s the thing we all know about reputations:  It’s all sort of Heisenberg-ian (quantum physics reference, FTW!).  In other words, you get what you’re looking for.  If people think Deanna’s a slut, they’ll say, Hey, look at those jeans, they’re pretty tight, eh?  They think she’s a bitch, they’ll say, Jesus, what’s she so freaking defensive about?   In other words, what the truth is about storytelling – and what Zarr so beautifully conveys – is that people will always find evidence to support whatever story they’ve already accepted.  Like the off-screen judge in the classic Japanese film Rashomon, we in life are constantly making judgments based on limited information, zero hard evidence, and our own invisible and oft-subconscious bias.  Indeed, one particular passage – on page 125 in the paperback edition – made me sit up and think, Dude – Rashomon!

And that was the whole problem, really, that this thing had happened between us, and to Tommy it was one thing and to me it was something else, and once my dad got involved it became something else again.  Three people at the scene of the crime, each with a different story.  Add onto that the whole jury known as Terra Nova High School and who knew anymore what had really happened?

In case ya’ll have never seen Rashomon, it’s about – and I’m using IMDb’s summary here – “a heinous crime and its aftermath being recalled from differing points of view – a bandit’s, a husband’s, and a wife’s.”  The story is a series of flashbacks told to an aforementioned off-screen judge.  Spoiler alert:  In the end, you never know what the truth was.

In the respect that they’re both about storytelling and the hard-to-grasp-as-mist qualities of truth, Story of a Girl is similar to Rashomon.  But I actually find SOAG more satisfying an experience.  Why?  Because, in Zarr’s case, I think the book actually provides an answer – though it’s not a “Oh, the bandit’s version was true,” snoozer kind of thing.

So that leads us to the question:  What is the answer to the mystery of the Story, and how does the Obligatory Scene help to remedy it while also defying audience expectations?

In the end of the book, in the Reading Group Guide, it says, How does Deanna finally break free from her reputation?  One would think, of course, that the only way she could would be to get other people to understand that she’s not a slut.  (And I can specifically remember thinking when I first read it [forgive my slightly-more-youthful ignorance!], that that was the obvious and inevitable ending.)

Wrongo.

For what Zarr does is rather astonishing.  Because in the end, the world’s views of Deanna never really change.  Many many people still think of her as the school slut.

Except one person’s view of Deanna has changed.

Deanna’s.

Through an understated and elegant ending that embraces the power of forgiveness and hope, Zarr confounds our expectations.  And we realize that what she “was saying” was that the real “jury “- the one that matters, and the only one that can change how Deanna experiences her life (and that’s what she’s really after, though maybe she doesn’t know it) – is Deanna herself.

In other words, Zarr says, it’s not our past – the events of our lives – that define us.  If anything does, it’s our RESPONSE to those events.  And our response is largely dictated – if not TOTALLY dictated – BY THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES.

In (even more!) other words, Deanna is only able to break free – ALL of us are only able to break free – by taking control of our stories.  There’s this great line about reputations my dad used to tell me in high school:  “What you think of me is none of my business.”  Pretty terrific, eh?  But here’s the thing:  Zarr is saying – and I absolutely agree, on the deepest level possible – that what WE used to think of ourselves is none of OUR OWN business.

To live freely, take control of your own story.  Sometimes the power to do that comes to you by unexpected grace; sometimes it is pried from you by necessity on a threshold of catastrophe.  But whatever the case, a story of a girl – or boy – is ultimately determined by what they choose to believe about themselves.  The moment Deanna chooses to believe she is not a slut – and doesn’t deserve to be viewed as one, and truly ACTS on that belief – she’s taking the first steps toward freedom.

And with that revelation, Zarr gives us exactly what we wanted – for Deanna to grow – but in a way totally unexpected.  And because it is so wise, the book hums in the memory like only the best may do.

-

So!

Does that make sense?  My first in-depth analysis on the blog, and I must admit my mental muscles feel darn good for it.  But before I end, I’d like to post my three big thoughts about what all this means:

1. To make an ending truly powerful, give the audience what they want, in a way that is surprising both dramatically and thematically.  Zarr’s book contains no big whiz-bang Obligatory Scene – just a series of relatively quiet ones in which a deeper, truer version of Deanna is revealed to herself and the audience.  And the ending also leaves us with the tremendous wisdom, not even hinted at early in the book, that while we may be our stories, we also create our stories.
2. To create a truly powerful thematic journey, use Robert McKee’s strategy of “the negation of the negation.” Most stories fail because they don’t go far enough, deep enough, into the “negative version” of their “positive theme.”  In other words, the positive theme of SOAG represents truth; a lesser story, therefore, would only have dealt with the “negative version” of that value:  lies.  But Zarr is a much savvier storyteller than most, for she realizes that the worst possible opposite of truth isn’t lies – it’s SELF-DECEPTION.  By creating an even more negative version of the story’s negative value, she makes Deanna’s journey much more harrowing and convincing.
3. Hinting at the theme in a title can be very powerful, especially when the title contains hidden meaning.  I already talked a bit about this.  So how ’bout I let Ms. Zarr herself give her opinion on it?

Hey Mike,

This is quite possibly my favorite email of all time. While I haven’t seen Rashomon, and didn’t really think of all this stuff on a conscious level while writing the book, these are all things I was working out in the story. And – I didn’t realize myself until way after I settled on that title that the “story” in the story, is, in fact, about stories – all the versions, and the ones we tell ourselves. I think it’s a recurring theme in my work, because it all has to do with identity and that’s a biggie in Sweethearts, too.

Anyway, thanks so much for the second read and the response…awesome.

Have a great weekend -
Sara

So – yeah.  Nice to know I’m not totally crazy :]

I know you don’t know me yet, so you don’t know the back story of how I’ve gotten to the point where I may emphatically state that last sentence.  (More accurately, the last part of the last sentence.  I’ve been able to say my name since the age of two, yo.)

I’ll be honest:  It’s been a booming, jaunty, exhilarating, obliterating road to get to this point. So, as opposed to me just type-type-typing away at it, how ’bout I just give a Timeline of My Writing Life as an introduction?

– 1984. THE TERMINATOR, GHOSTBUSTERS, and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM are released. Also, I am born. Good year.

– 1992. “Welcome to Dead House,” the first “Goosebumps,” hits the streets, introducing the Nintendo generation to horror archetypes. I read the tome and promptly fall in love with Jovial Bob Stine.

– 1993. I write my first story, a two-page epic concerning a young boy named (I-josh-you-not) Max Maxwell who is troubled by strange anomalies in his own reflection, such as a skull showing through his skin and horns piercing from his scalp. It builds to a riveting climax, during which I build suspense admirably. (“Max looked into the mirrer. There was something wierd about the mirrer. ‘WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS MIRRER!’ Max shouted suspensfully!”) At last it is revealed that a ghost is in “the mirrer.” However, a shocking lack of foresight causes me to ruin the ending in the title: The story was called “THE GHOST IN THE MIRRER!”

– 1994. I write another story, this time about an archaeologist slug. When I am allowed to read it to the class, it goes down a storm.  (I vividly remember that during computer class, in between rounds of Jezzball, a sea of peers crowded me, inquiring when the sequel would be written.) For the first time in my life, I am popular. Then the teacher installs Math Blaster, and my day in the sunshine is through.

– 1995-1998. Middle school. Middle school is terrible. Mostly it involves me being sixty pounds overweight and boob-grabbed by my classmates. However, I find solace in horror films.  (Why this is?  Yanno, dunno.  Just the way I’m constructed, I think.)  I am especially drawn to the po-mo SCREAM. As a result, over eighth grade Christmas Break I write a 61-page screenplay called WRONG ANSWER: THE NIGHT OF THE CALLS, a beyond-the-pale ripoff of Wes Craven’s mini-masterpiece. There is not a single page formatted correctly, the characters are Styrofoam, and yet when I am finished I feel a gentle, heavy exhilaration. I’ve written a real Something, and it is wonderful.

– 1998. Freshman year begins. High school is better than middle school, the same way root canals with anaesthesia are better than without. As I meet with a distinctly ork-esque guidance counselor, she tells me I must pick my career path before the day is through. I panic, but then see under “Arts & Entertainment” something that sounds much more pleasant than anything else: “Writer.”

– 1999. Thanks to the recommendation of a Journalism teacher who enjoys my writing, I am hired by a new start-up newspaper as their film critic. For the next three years, it will be the only job I hold.

– 1999 (cont’d). Inspired perhaps by my new job, I somehow manage to lose 75 pounds. I am now The Average-Sized Nerd, not The Stay-Puft Sized one.

– 1999 (cont’d). Enthralled by the works of Wes Anderson, I pen a new script, a RUSHMORE homage (see also: ripoff) titled G.P.A. Unlike WRONG ANSWER: THE NIGHT OF THE CALLS, this script has proper formatting. Like WRONG ANSWER: THE NIGHT OF THE CALLS, this script is a skunk.

– 2001. In Media class, I begin to make funny film spoof commercials for the high school’s closed-circuit morning show. Shockingly, these create a huge stir. Girls who would otherwise not spit on me had I spontaneously detonated now want my digits. Obviously, I am a cinematic wunderkind. I apply to every affordable film school on the eastern seaboard.

– 2002. I am accepted to a few of them. I decide on Ohio University, mostly because of its proximity to my hometown and its lovely campus.

– 2002 (cont’d). Six weeks before I am to move to Athens, OH, I receive a letter welcoming me to their Telecommunications program. I call them, amused by this error, since they obviously meant their Film program. They tell me no. They tell me it was a mistake. They tell me I was not admitted to their Film program. I tell them: Oh.

– 2002 (cont’d). I decide to attend West Virginia University for a year, during which I will take general liberal arts classes and apply to transfer to a film school. Concurrently, I am admitted to the University of North Carolina’s arts conservatory. I also meet a button-cute graphic designer who will, in a few years’ time, become my fiancee.

– 2003. I attend the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts. I realize I am not a wunderkind. Very few girls, if any, want my digits.

– 2004. At the end of the first year, I become panicked by the thought of graduating from the program and working as a grip on reality television. Therefore, I devise a surefire fallback plan: I will become a children’s novelist. Easy-peasy, I think. Anybody could write that stuff.

– 2004 (cont’d). The peasy = not that easy. My summer is spent writing and rewriting the first 100 pages of a novel I plot as I go along. Autumn arrives. I am fairly certain the novel is on par with WRONG ANSWER, but nonetheless I give it to the Dean of the school, for he was a Pulitzer Prize nominee.

– 2005. Months later, the Dean surprises me by stopping me after an all-school meeting. He shakes my hand and tells me he is blown away by my voice, that he thinks I am “another Jonathan Sarfran Foer.” I’m thinking, He’s either joking or he wants my digits. Neither, it turns out. He just wants to send it to his agent, ICM’s Amanda “Binky” Urban. Following profuse thanking, I gracefully exit and Google both Jonathan Safran Foer and Amanda Urban. This time it is my turn to be blown away.

– 2005-2006 (cont’d). As I complete my children’s novel, I also come up with an idea – more-or-less-y: about kids fighting monsters – that I think could become my first non-skunk screenplay. I call it S.P.E.C.T.E.R. and breeze through it in perhaps three months.

– 2007. I finally complete my novel; five weeks later, I finish S.P.E.C.T.E.R. I send off the book to Binky Urban and wait in Hitchcockian suspense. (There’s something wierd about this waiting game! he shouted suspensfully!) At the same time, I hear from a friend interning at Phoenix Pictures that they are looking for sci-fi scripts. Never one to turn down an opportunity, I capitalize all the mentions of laser beams and jetpacks in S.P.E.C.T.E.R. and send it in, hoping to confound their genre-detectors.

– 2007 (cont’d). To my utter and gobsmacking shock, the story executive at Phoenix loves S.P.E.C.T.E.R.

– 2007 (cont’d). For the next few months, while finishing my last semester of school, I rewrite the script with him. I keep this development a secret and feel super-special.

– 2007 (cont’d).  Heaven’s name, the bubble bursts!  My friend then tells me of the story executive’s proclivity for stealing people’s ideas and claiming them as his own!  As our Brit cousins might say:  Shock-horror!

– 2007 (cont’d).  Shock-horror no-more-r:  I leave the company and go with another production house that has shown interest, Kopelson Entertainment.

– 2007 (cont’d). The day after I graduate film school, I fly to Los Angeles and meet with the executives at Kopelson. They want S.P.E.C.T.E.R. to be a SPY KIDS-esque franchise for them. They compliment and call me things like “Big Daddy” with no discernible irony. That same day, I check my e-mail, and find a note from International Creative Management. One of their top YA agents read my novel and wants to work with me on cutting it by 50,000 words. She, too, loves my voice.

– 2007 (cont’d).  Sunset Boulevard pays witness, next minute, to me strutting my stuff.

– 2007 (cont’d [yes, again!]). I spend the summer rewriting S.P.E.C.T.E.R., writing a new teen thriller called THE APPLESEED, and cutting my book by a third. Most of my thoughts are like:  OMG I CAN HAZ HOLLEEWUD CONTRACTS AND BOOK CONTRACTS AND BE AW3SUM!! REVISIONS, FTW!!1

– 2007 (cont’d). Autumn falls on West Virginia. The leaves are gorgeous and the air smells of woodsmoke and a mist plays across the hills like the breath of a witch’s cauldron.  Also: My book is rejected by ICM and then twenty other agencies I send it to; my manager hates my new script and dumps me as a client, and the Writer’s Strike hits just when Kopelson was considering buying my script.

– 2007 (cont’d). Most of my thoughts are like this: Aw hell naw.  I am promptly butt-kicked into a spiraling identity-crisis-depression.

– 2008. Said crisis turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because (Oprah moment alert!) I am forced to confront who I really am and what I really want. I become obsessed with self-development and the development of a peaceful inner life. Oh dear, and you thought this blog was cool until now, huh?

– 2008 (cont’d). I begin lecturing (for dollars, ya’ll!) at local schools on story structure. I learn more about writing from this, and come to love discussing life with teenagers. Moreover: I get a job reading scripts for money and doing “coverage” (like book reports about why it is they are teh suck) on them. I also adapt S.P.E.C.T.E.R. into a young adult novel. At the same time, I continue to develop S.P.E.C.T.E.R. as a screenplay with Kopelson Entertainment and then Valhalla Motion Pictures. However, I feel a growing apathy as to how it turns out. All I shout suspensfully into “the mirrer” is, Why do I no longer care!

– 2008 (cont’d). I finish the S.P.E.C.T.E.R. book but feel a very odd numbness toward the material. Two reasons I can come up with for this: First, I’m sick-to-effing-death of the material. Second: I have a new project, one that literally made me sit up gasping from a dream, titled THE END GAMES. And it is (he said humbly) very…good.

– 2008 (cont’d). I stop working with all film companies. Lunacy? Yanno, I don’t think so. ‘Cause deep, honest moments with self over the course of the year accumulate into the following conclusions, in no order particularly:

1. While I’m good – and maybe could be great – at both, I love writing novels, and just like writing scripts. Put another way, I may want screenwriting’s digits, but I want novel-writing’s hand. (And yes, I do acknowledge that was such an awful pun I may want to reconsider this whole prose-writing = destiny! thing.) I therefore pour all energy into my growing as a novel writer, reading 3-4 novels a week and reading anything I flippin’ can on the craft of writing.  Why?  Well, ’cause…
2. As Tony Robbins says, Success leaves clues. I humbly realize, all joking aside, I don’t know everything about everything. And that’s fine. (Own the truth: It’s pretty much a huge relief.) So I decide to study the masters. And I get much, much better for it. Yet, fascinatingly and at-first-glance paradoxically, I also learn tons more by reading those really bad scripts than I did in four years of A+ performance at one of the best film schools in the world. I realize that…
3. I’m really dang good at looking at a story and figurin’ out where THE SUCK is inside them. (Flip side: I’m equally good at rooting out THE AWESOME in there, too.) Additionally, I find I’m solid at looking at something complex and distilling the essential, most useful essence of it into an easy-to-understand form.  Thus, I think I should begin somehow to contribute to the online resources on the craft of young adult writing, which are, doubtless, legion.  However, I soon find…
4. THERE ARE PRECIOUS FEW FREAKING RESOURCES OUT THERE EXCLUSIVELY ON THE CRAFT OF YOUNG ADULT WRITING. Yes, there are some wonderful blogs out there. And no doubt, there are some terrific books (and we’ll get to them at some point, trust me). But what I wanted was a single-source place where I could find enlightening, useful interviews with the very best writers in the world, about how they do what they do. How do they plot? Which comes first, character or theme? Do they have a regular way of finding The Zone? I wanted something that could help my own writing, and also the writing of the invisible multitudes out there longing for tips both basic and esoteric. I also thought: Gee, wouldn’t it be radical if Said Blog also had cool YouTube stuff?

And, thusly:

– 2009. I start MIKE’S WRITING TIPS (OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE YA CRAFT), a resource for the invisible multitudes, complete with cool YouTube stuff.

And that is the story of how I came to understand how to make my stories better.