It's Been 31 Years This Week...

Turning one year older has me feeling reflective

It’s been thirty-one years.

I mean, it’s been longer than that if you consider how long I wanted to be a writer before I actually began my career, but it’s been almost exactly thirty-one years now since the first public production of my work.

As long as I can remember, the only thing I have ever really wanted is to write things that people read or watch. I can’t remember a time before my wanting to create things for other people. I think the very first thing I ever wrote that had a beginning, a middle, and an end was a short story, four typewritten pages long, about a superhero called Major Disaster. I was either six or seven, and the only people who ever read the story were my parents and my grandmother. I wrote it because my grandmother had a typewriter and I’d seen enough writers in movies to know that you were supposed to write things if you had a typewriter. While I can’t really remember anything besides the title, I was delighted by the reactions everyone gave me, and I think I’ve chased that feeling ever since. When I found books in the library with screenplays inside, I read every single one I could. I learned format before I had anything to say, and my earliest screenplays were all imitations of things I’d seen and liked. I churned through things, determined to learn how the mechanics of a script worked.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I was 20 years old. I was a baby. I look back at the decision now and I think of it as the most insane thing I’ve ever done. I didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles except for Rebecca Swan, my high-school writing partner who moved from Tampa with me. We had worked together for five years by that point, slowly honing our voice as a team by working together every day on videos for our school’s closed-circuit television channel. We met in 1985, and by the time we left Tampa, we were convinced that we had stories worth telling and that we could break into an industry where we had absolutely no advantages walking in the door. Now, I say that acknowledging that I was a white male movie brat with parents who reluctantly supported my desire to make art as a primary vocation, which is advantage on top of advantage on top of advantage. But this is a business that loves to promote from within, and until you can find a way to be within, it’s incredibly frustrating. I moved out here knowing I would have years of struggling before I would do anything or get anywhere. We wrote together every single day for years, consistently, one draft after another, one script after another, and on the side, I wrote prose and fiction and we both created outlines for things we wanted to write in the future. And good god… we dreamed. We dreamed as hard as we possibly could.