Save the Cat! Strikes Back: More Trouble For... (25 page)

If you do, you're on the right track.

If you don't, you might not be.

It's all about finding your place in the world, so wherever you end up, you will be okay if you listen and abide.

Because this is where I found myself, at that very crossroad, wondering what I should do next, and I tried it.

And it changed my life.

Things were bad.

I had been in Hollywood seven years and had little to claim for it. I'd written a couple of TV shows, gotten into the WGA, and had a few things optioned, but was otherwise a failure.

So I went home. It wasn't Kansas; it was Santa Barbara, a mere 90 miles away from Hollywood, and if you like exile, there's no better place for it. But I might as well have been in Kansas.

Seven years in, nobody knew me. And nobody cared.

I'd actually had professionals tell me, or tell others who told me, that I would never make it in this man's business. I had read the coverage on me. But I didn't have to. My plan to work part-time jobs and write on the side was getting me nowhere. And all my best ideas were not connecting with holders of checkbooks.

I was 31.

In January, my father died.

I joke about the All Is Lost point being the place where all mentors go to die. Obie-Wan dies on page 75 in
Star Wars
, if only to allow Luke to go the rest of the way on his own. These story beats resonate for a reason — because they happen in real life, too. The feeling of being left on your own early, having not yet fulfilled the mission you were assigned, was a very real one for me. So what was I doing wrong and, more importantly, what should I do about it? My very concerned and caring girlfriend suggested getting my teaching credential just to have something to fall back on. But I was resisting. It felt like being a lobster in a pot of slowly boiling water. Get in! The water's fine! I was being told.

If I surrendered one degree at a time, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

I was a night writer back then. I had a laptop and used to go to the only 24-hour coffee shop in town, The Fig Tree, to at least be a writer in public. And then one late night, looking over the empty tables, watching a clutch of waitresses giggling together, I was right on the brink of giving up. Yams. Got plenty, right here. They're really good for you. Just take a bite.

What transpired next defies rationality.

It came from my Dad.

My Dad was the ultimate optimist. He liked to tell the joke about the little boy who was so sunshiny that his father decided to
teach him a lesson one Christmas morning. The father filled the kid's stocking with horse manure, expecting to see his son finally disappointed, only to be amazed when — upon finding this joke gift — the boy ran excitedly around the living room, looking behind every nook and cranny, exclaiming: “There must be a pony!”

That was my Dad. And that was his maxim for life.

But where did he get it from?

Shortly after my father died, I found a box of his favorite books. And as I dug in and starting reading them, I began to see where all his positivism came from and why he thought that way. There were lots of books that explained it. And by reading them, I started to see what I'd been doing wrong — in my career and my life. I had been resisting my father's jolly optimism forever. That upbeat attitude seemed naïve, and worse than that, a denial of “the truth about the world.” Yet with him gone, and without getting the chance to ask him anymore, what I was finding was in fact denial of the truth about myself:

► I'd been a bullhead — it's true! I was much more interested in doing it my way than succeeding.

► I'd been all over the map, writing TV scripts, movies, sketches, even radio. But more than that, I had been thinking small, and mostly thinking about me.

► I had not been hearing the people who were trying to help me, ignoring the messages that were loud and clear from all corners.

And all had led to an even greater crime. In a world of glorious possibility — at a time and place where opportunity was all around me — I was standing in a field full of diamonds, refusing to reach down and just pick one up.

Even though my Dad was gone, I heard him more than I ever had before. And maybe because he was gone, everything he had taught me that I had ignored, every heroic act I had seen him
perform — including the brave optimism he had shown in the way he died — now seemed to be what the real lesson of his life had been. All the goofy slogans and the “glass half full” outlook that never waned was the real theme of his life. He could've been any-one, and done anything, but the message would always be the same:

Believe in yourself and never quit.

There is a cosmic law that lets us know almost immediately that we are on the right track. Up until the point when you have a “moment of clarity,” it really doesn't seem possible to change. And then when you do, the floodgates open. Yet all it ever really takes is a decision — and just the tiniest action step as proof.

What was mine? What amazing action changed it all?

I bought an orange, College ruled, Note-Tote notebook.

It was to be my diary — and I still have it, along with all the others that have followed. And here was my first entry:

“How To Be A Famous Screenwriter – April 22, 1989 – This is to be my daily diary of how I became a famous screenwriter. It is to encompass notes on movies I see, ideas, sketches, and movie plots. It will also include my own strategies including how they worked, or didn't, and why. Mostly it is a step-by-step account of how I ultimately succeeded in writing for the movies.”

Can you imagine the audacity of this?

I shared this story with — and read this entry to — my audience at Screenwriting Expo in 2008 and was embarrassed to say it out loud. Here was a guy who was, by every conceivable standard, so far away from making this claim that it bordered on delusion. I had no agent. I had no prospects. And did I mention I was broke? Oh man. This was the period when I had to dig coins out of the couch to treat myself to a cup of coffee along State Street. And yet with that simple action, everything started to change.

I had decided to change. I'd decided to win.

Synthesizing all the aphorisms and techniques I had been reading about into
my
way — we bullheads die hard — I took a look at the following laundry list of my deficits, determined to kill these old ideas about myself and create new ideas and new truths:

► I lacked discipline. My very mopiness about my situation meant that on some days I didn't write because I wasn't in the mood. I rationalized this, of course, and didn't notice that often I'd not written for weeks. But if I was to be “Open for Business” here in the universe then I had to keep business hours.

► I lacked focus. I had been dabbling. And by seeing it suddenly not just from my perspective, but from someone who might be eager to buy something from me, I realized: How could they? What was I? What specialty did I offer? What was my service? I was impossible to find, or even see, because I had no silhouette. When they thought of me the writer, what did they think? Well, nothing. I'd thrown myself in all directions, not mastering one.

► I also lacked my father's positivity. If someone gave me a stocking full of horse manure, I'd cry. The idea of turning nothing into something just by seeing it from another angle made my brain hurt. And yet there were examples in my Dad's life, and many in the books I'd read, of that very thing. Could the power of perspective, the power of one's mind, turn gossamer into gold? Could the right mental leverage on a situation somehow change it?

Again, I did something small.

Knowing what I knew, I took another gi-normous action step:

I bought index cards.

On the first index card I wrote my wild goals — proclaimed in the affirmative tense as though they were real. I made sure they were as crazy out there, as pie in the sky as they could be:

►
I have sold a script for a million dollars

►
I have a multi-picture deal with a major studio

►
I have an office on the lot

Again, I can't stress how insane this was.

And just to make sure I would keep reminding myself how to stay on track, I took a second index card and wrote this:

►
Discipline

►
Focus

►
Positive Energy

And that's when the flood began.

Like I say, it's a law. And it's simple. By declaring that I had been changed, I was. By setting goals and sticking to them, they started to appear. And in a very short order proof came.

Out of the blue, my pal Tommy Lynch called and hired me to write more television shows for him. It wasn't much, but it was enough to let me write full time, and gave me a great excuse to go to L.A. and the set where my episodes were being taped. Walking downtown in Santa Barbara one day, my girlfriend saw an office for rent above a bar, cheap enough for me to afford. Suddenly I was no longer a night writer but one with office hours… and a place to hang my index cards.

When I think of the snapshot of my happiest time, it was that summer. Broke, yes. Scared, sure. But every day, things kept getting better, and more people started to appear, as if by magic, to assist me in achieving my secret wishes. Looking back on it now, everything that happened bears a startling resemblance to “Storming the Castle.” Doesn't it? That's why these things ring so true in stories — because they are true.

It began with a proactive decision, a “turn into Three” in which I set a goal, gathered tools, made amends to my allies, and set about to pass the “Final Exam” and “rescue the Princess.”

And everything was driven by that phrase, one I kept repeating like a mantra during all the in-between moments:

Discipline, Focus, and Positive Energy.

It guided everything I did.

How was I disciplined? I made sure that I did something
every day
to move my career forward. Not only did I write something (even if I threw it away the next day), I made a goal of a number of pages, and a deadline to write them. When I ran out of juice in the afternoon, I wrote letters or made phones calls to possible connections. And lucky for me, my allies now appeared too, primary among them Jim Haggin, who at the ripe old age of 24 had sold a script to Disney, and “got it” more than anyone I knew. Whenever I could, I met with him to pick his brain and bounce off new ideas.

How was I focused? Realizing that I had no specialty, I decided on one. Family comedy. I let go of my idea of what I liked at the movies — that was for me
after
work. Instead I embraced what I could
do
. And family comedies came easily to me. I saw that as my service, my specialty, my strength. And now I began searching the trades, reading about the sales of spec screenplays in that category, trying to figure out how to make mine like theirs. It was a focus bordering on being laser-like, and yet by doing so, by cutting out everything that was not that, I saw how someone might be helped if they ever actually hired me.

How was I positive? Well, I wasn't always. There were blue days. That's life. But like every part of my new regimen, if I failed, I did not berate myself for it and call my day a failure. I knew I'd try to do better tomorrow. And it worked. One time that summer I was set to have a meeting with a producer, but it wasn't until I drove the hour and a half to Los Angeles that I learned the meeting was off. Calling to break the news to my agent, I tried to be chipper — and because of my attitude, she invited me to lunch. And it was during that lunch that much of the rest of that year was planned out. By being away from L.A., I was realizing how many opportunities I'd wasted when I lived there, and now made up my mind to make sure I took advantage of every one that came my way.

And when I did feel down, I'd take walks by myself along State Street, sometimes late at night. And as I did, I would silently repeat my mantra in time with my step —
Discipline
,
Focus
,
and Positive Energy
— while imagining what the world would look like if I did succeed. And as I walked, I realized that other part I had read about, the part in my father's books that he sought, which was now being confirmed to me: I wasn't alone. I never was.

The best part of that summer was my relationship with my agent, Hilary Wayne, but that too was part of the serendipity. When I got the job to write for Tommy Lynch, I desperately needed every cent. But I also knew what an opportunity this was to secure an agent, so I offered Hilary the commission for taking me on. She had just been hired by Joan Scott at Writers & Artists Agency as an assistant, and with my deal and a few others, she was promoted to agent. We were the same age, at the same stage of our careers, Hilary and I. And as focused as I was on cracking this thing, she was doubly so — and fearless! The day she became an agent, she went to Universal, talked her way onto the lot, and knocked on doors introducing herself to executives. She was the new rep at Writers & Artists, just stopping by to say “hi.”