📍Kitchen Table, Reno, NV
To my dear, intimate readership, thank you for digitally sticking around in spite of the crickets.
It’s been quite some time since I’ve Substack-ed (has Substack become a verb yet?), so I thought I’d give a little life-summary and lay out my plans for the publication so you can determine whether or not you’d like to stick around for the ride.
My husband and I have spent the last two years living full-time on the road, working and traveling with a couple different North American touring theatrical productions. Now, you have to understand. Immediately before this, I had barely a single toe in the theater world. I was among the hoi polloi who cited Wicked and Phantom as my favorite “plays” pretty much up until I could legally purchase a G&T.1 Now? Somehow I’m a member of a bona fide mobile village of theater people.
But what does this have to do with re-launching the Substack-ing (let’s say it has become a verb)? Probably nothing. Probably everything, in the way that one thing can be reflective of everything else in your life. Mainly, I just wanted to provide some lifestyle context. Mainly, I wanted to warn you that what is to follow will likely be just as chaotic as my travel schedule.
Let’s get back to those metaphorical chirping insects. Why haven’t I been writing my 1-2 short stories a month, my occasional self-indulgent (A)musing? Essentially, a mélange of Start-a-holicism, Overthinking, and apprehension around being a “Fake Journalist.”
Starting Things
Hi, my name is Christin, and I’m a start-a-holic. I enjoy long walks on the beach, French 75’s, and picking up and dropping new habits like a bad habit. When it comes to sticking to a single life path, I’m a total commitment-phobe.
Exhibit A: The Different Career Paths I’ve Pursued in the Past 10 Years
❌ Neurologist
✅ Psychometrist
❌ Firefighter2
❌ Stunt Doubler
✅ Emergency Medical Technician
✅ Music Teacher
✅ Data Scientist
✅ Freelance Writer
❌ Voice Over (VO) Actor
❌❌ Actor, Actor
…
1,382. Screenwriting..?
Screenwriting. That’s what the better part of 2023 has been about. My new, intense, greatest-of-all loves. It’s how I’ve been spending nearly all of my waking (and many sleeping) hours: buried in Final Draft, storyboarding on index cards, and combing through hours and hours of Scriptnotes and The Screenwriting Life. Unlike my comical dives into stunt doubling and acting, this time I can feel myself wanting to settle down. The problem? I am terrified of allowing myself to do anything non-screenwriting related.
Okay. The addict analogy is a little dramatic and more than a little f*cked up, but it does feel like I have a problem. Maybe a more apt analogy would be compulsive promiscuity? Like, I’m worried if I do take that sexy brunette out for a “one-off coffee date,” she’ll start leaving skin care products in my house by the end of next week. And how would that make screenwriting feel?
Now don’t go all Julia Cameron on me. I know, I know. I’m supposed to go on Artist Dates, to “see other people,” to be a normal goddam human being with diverse, symbiotic interests that [[insert cutesy gardening analogy here]]. I know this intellectually. But emotionally? A decade of sputtering false starts gives a girl self-trust issues. I CAN NOT, WILL NOT be a debutante forever.
A few weeks ago in the midst of some audio-spelunking, I was reading the brilliantly narrated audiobook version of Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. It was written in the 80’s, so the Hollywood landscape it depicts is worlds away, but still, the book is bold, hilarious, and gloves-off honest. So I’m driving, squeezing screenwriting wisdom into some ten-minute trip to somewhere when Goldman smacks me with a very simple assertion: “Being a screenwriter is not enough for a full creative life.” It’s as if Grandpa from The Princes Bride is sitting next to me in the car, paperback in hand. Only, instead of paternally reassuring me that Buttercup does not in fact get eaten by the shrieking eels, he starts beating me with the book, saying, “it’s okay for you to do (and WRITE) other things, stupid.”
I knew then that not only was I “allowed” to write (and DO) other things, but that the sustainability of my personal and creative life depended on it.3 Cameron-esque gentle artistic grooming works sometimes, but I highly recommend a periodic Goldman-esque smack in the face.
“Don’t overthink it.”
-Husband
This morning, in response to me changing my order from plain croissant to ham n’ cheese no less than six times.
Overthinking: Why write at all?
Okay, so you’ve gotten over your fear of going on another spiraling start-binge. Now… what else do you write? And, for that matter, why write it?
All of us have struggled with a barrage of limiting beliefs. I’m too old / young, not talented enough, not worthy of success, a victim of circumstance, etc., etc. I’ve dabbled with all of these examples. But my favorite pick-your-poison flavor has always been:
There is no point.
Part of me truly believes this, especially when it comes to writing. That there is no point writing anything new when there are so many incredible historical works of literature, film, essays, journalism to fill centuries of lifetimes, not to mention all of the work by the brilliant artists alive today and beyond. And when the “there is no point” belief bleeds over to my life in general, I can get a bit like Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar when she decides things like showering are also pretty pointless, floating around “still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullaballoo.”4 Again, it took a backhand from an artist I admire to try on a more nuanced frame.
I’m currently working with a mentor to put together a portfolio of spec scripts to help launch my screenwriting career. In my most recent spec, an hour-long SciFi TV pilot, my main character was coming off duller than distressed driftwood and about as original as air plants swinging in macramé. We were on one of a series of Zoom calls focused on ringing out even a single drop of interesting from this poor, monotone fantasy woman, when my rightfully frustrated mentor comes out with it, demanding: “WHAT DOES SHE EVEN WANT? WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
What do I want? I mean… it would be nice to not be dull. To not, just, add to the garble, the noise. To be the kind of person who is brave enough to go to a bar by herself just to meet another seeking stranger. To connect. To examine the things both big and insignificant that make people scream-cry or scream-laugh or just see living life in a new way.
Ultimately, cyclically, simply:
I want to write.
Me: Why write? There is no point.
Also Me: Okay. There is no point in writing. So why do you write?
Me: Because I want to write.
Also Me: Okay. So… why don’t you write because you want to write and write what you want to write because you want to write it?
Me: As you wish.5
Fake Journalism
I stumbled across a quote from the American Press Institute that described journalism as such: “Journalism is storytelling with a purpose.”
Well… I won’t pretend that what I want to write about will have any obvious point or purpose. This is a fear that I’ve been running away from for a very long time. BUT, I can promise that I will do my best to be human-being honest in a human-being honest world: a fake journalist writing fake journalism.
TL;DR: I’d like to use this space to write things that I genuinely want to write with the hopes that there are people who genuinely want to read them. That will include free, weekly, erratically subject-ed “(A)musings” (with an excess of made-up verbs) and monthly short stories for my paid subscribers.
Thank you, as always, for your support, your attention, and your art.
-C
Weekly Recs
☕ DO: Go to Coffeebar and order a croissant.
They were exceedingly average, but somehow managed to taste like the adult version of Pillsbury Crescents. I’m not mad about it.
👁️ LEARN: Take a chance on fun facts about yaks.
The original title for this post was “The Philosophy of Yaks,” I sh*t you not. We live primarily in AirBnB’s, and an outsized number of them have framed prints of wild yaks. I was trying to synthesize something simultaneously wise and clever about why this might be, and somehow ALSO make it connect to my re-launching a Substack habit. It fizzled. HOWEVER I did read a lot of Fun Yak Facts. Did you know that yaks live at the highest altitude of any mammal? Can survive at temperatures as low as -40 degrees C..?
📝 Writer-ly Thought…
“I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.” – Cormac McCarthy
Don’t misunderstand, Wicked and Phantom are excellent when done well (and when not abbreviated to fit the attention span of a Las Vegas audience). But you’re not really allowed to say they’re your favorite, so go ahead and pick something else (if not just for optics). I usually say my favorite is The Light in the Piazza. The hubby and I even had a string quartet play “Love to Me” as my bridal entrance which was admittedly cruel and unusual.
Pretty close, though, I’m proud to say. Got my CPAT, aced the Written and Orals — even made it to the Chief’s Interviews. And, most importantly, I met a lot of incredibly badass men and women. This rabbit-hole, I definitely don’t regret going down, down, down…
Screenwriting, you’ll just have to trust me, okay? I’ll be home by 10 PM. Probably.
Is there a more fantastic word than hullaballoo?
Thank you for this, Grandpa Goldman.