A Screenwriter's Journey #11: The Curriculum

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It’s been a long time, but this series is back. While I haven’t been writing these posts in a while, I’ve continued to write a new screenplay every month and currently have completed a feature or short for 16 consecutive months.

But that’s for another post, today’s post is about how I learned to write screenplays. My professional training is mostly in the social sciences, so my approach to anything is a combination of learning everything I can and then putting that into frequent action. So this post will actually be about that “learning everything I can” process. Here’s what I’ve consumed (and recommend) in order to become a screenwriter.

The first, and most obvious, thing to do if you want to write movies is you need to watch a lot of movies. But you not only need to watch them as a fan, you need to watch them critically and think about the way the filmmakers told their stories. Generally, I watch a movie the first time for pure enjoyment and don’t get too critical and don’t over-think it. I save that for the second or third watch. If the movie made me feel some kind of way, I re-watch it to figure out how the filmmakers did it. If they made me laugh, how did they set up the jokes and how did they pay them off? If they scared me, how did they do it, whether it be intellectually or through a plain old jump scare? If they made me hate the movie, how and why did I hate it? Yep, that means I purposefully watch bad movies, too. It’s important to see both what works and what doesn’t work.

It’s not enough, though, to just watch the movies. Watching a movie doesn’t give you much insight as to how to WRITE a movie. What words go on the page that lead to the images and sounds you see and hear? To figure that out, you have to read screenplays. Tons of them are available for free online and the same process works here, I read the screenplays of movies I loved. I read them for movies that are critically acclaimed. And I read them for bad movies. If I can find them. People don’t tend to post bad writing as often as you might think.

Okay, those are some generalized things to start with, and anyone interested in being a screenwriter has probably already started doing those (although they probably haven’t read enough screenplays. You really can’t read too many when trying to become a screenwriter). But these things don’t teach you the craft of how to actually write a screenplay. The good news is that there are tons of books, videos, podcasts and other things that can really help you. And most of them are inexpensive or free. The rest of this post will be a list of the things that I read, watched or listened to along the way and what was good or bad about them. If it’s listed here, you should probably at least be familiar with it, even if you don’t fully incorporate everything the author has to say into your work.

And that’s a key thing to keep in mind: There is no one right way to do this stuff. Every time someone says “you HAVE to do it this way,” there are many others who not only say you don’t have to do it that way, they easily point out massively successful AND critically acclaimed works that don’t fit that requirement. So my general rule of thumb is to approach this material the same way I would a scientific literature review: Read everything that has some relevance, take everything with a grain of salt, pay more attention to those who have proven their points through actual work and go with the aggregate of what people think and say while also allowing for more obscure approaches to influence me if they fit my process and my writing style.

Books

Here are the classics you have to read to understand the history and present state of screenwriting:

  • Screenplay - Syd Field

  • The Screenwriter's Workbook - Syd Field

  • Dialogue - Robert McKee

  • Story - Robert McKee

  • Save the Cat - Blake Snyder

  • Save the Cat Strikes Back - Blake Snyder

  • Save the Cat Goes to the Movies - Blake Snyder

And here are some that I think are classic, some even better than those in the above category:

  • Actions & Goals: The Story Structure Secret - Marshall L. Dotson

  • The Story Solution - Eric Edson

  • Writing Movies for Fun and Profit - Robert Garant and Thomas Lennon

  • The Great Courses: Screenwriting 101: Mastering the Art of Story

  • Writing for Emotional Impact - Karl Iglesias

  • The Craft of Scene Writing - Jim Mercurio

  • Anatomy of Story - John Truby

And here are some other books I’ve read that have good advice or craft instruction:

  • The Hollywood Pitching Bible - Ken Aguado & Douglas Eboch

  • Script Culture and the American Screenplay - Kevin Alexander Boon

  • The Way Hollywood Tells It - David Bordwell

  • Script Tease - Dylan Callaghan

  • Build Better Characters - Eileen Cook

  • Wired for Story - Lisa Cron

  • How NOT to Write a Screenplay - Denny Martin Flinn

  • Reading the Silver Screen - Thomas C. Foster

  • Fast, Cheap and Written That Way - John Gaspard

  • Writing the Comedy Blockbuster - Keith Giglio

  • The Great Courses: How to View and Appreciate Great Movies

  • On Writing Horror: A Handbook - The Horror Writers Association

  • The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters - Karl Iglesias

  • The Comic Hero's Journey - Steve Kaplan

  • On Writing - Stephen King

  • The Plot Machine - Dale Kutzera

  • The Tenacity of the Cockroach - The Onion A.V. Club

  • Making a Good Script Great - Linda Seger

  • Creating Character Arcs - K.M. Weiland

Podcasts

The Gold Standard is Scriptnotes and if you aren’t listening to this show AND going back into the archives, you’re missing out on the best recorded discussions about both screenwriting and the state of the industry.

Other good podcasts that are specifically about screenwriting include:

And here are a couple that regularly discuss creativity and specifics with filmmakers present and past:

Video Channels

These aren’t all explicitly about screenwriting. But they ALL discuss storytelling, story structure and other concepts directly related to screenwriting. Not every video they release is relevant, but many, if not most are.

This is a start. I’ll add more as I remember them or find new ones. If you know of good ones I haven’t included, e-mail them to quinnelk@gmail.com. I’ll also later to a post with specific blog posts, web articles, individual videos and podcast episodes that are particularly helpful for the craft and writing of screenplays.

A Screenwriter's Journey #9: Smart House

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Okay, big time jump forward. The first eight entries in this series were originally sent out by e-mail as I wrote “Beware the Dortches.” They weren’t published here until after I finished that screenplay. But while they were publishing, I kept writing. First I finished an adaptation of the “Alpha Flight” comics and an experimental, almost no-dialog sci fi script called “Shark Road.” I’m about two thirds of the way through “Planet B,” my next feature, but I took a break from that over the last week or so to write my second short film. It’s called “Smart House.”

But what the hell is a short film?

I’m only just now coming to the point where I have an idea what short films are. They really don’t follow the same rules as features. They don’t share most of the structures and many of the tools of writing a feature don’t work here, or lose impact because they aren’t given time to develop.

It’s super hard for a short film to be about characters. You can do a lot of things with ONE character or one relationship, but beyond that, you just don’t have time.

And plot is really hard to pull off in a short, too. You just don’t have time. Especially when the only good plot is one that is based on characters and you have to establish those characters before a plot becomes interesting. You just don’t have the time.

So what are short films about? They certainly have to have some characters and you could do a film that focuses really specifically on a character’s daily life or one really quick moment that serves as an important point in their life. You could certainly do a slice-of-life kinda thing that points to some bigger truth.

You could also go more intellectual and use it as a way to comment on society or on film or on some other specific subject. A quick impression that makes you think about bigger things. A doorway to learn more or examine things more thoughtfully.

Or you could could lean more towards a quick-but-clever plot device. This is what I did with my first short film, “Wish I’d Never Met You,” which is currently in post-production. I had a producer who likes my writing request a short script she could shoot quickly and inexpensively. I had an idea that I had been toying with about the victim of a hitman who was caught in a time loop and had starting developing it originally as a text-based game. But the idea hadn’t really worked out as a game, so it had been lying around waiting for another avenue. I wrote it as a short in a day or two and the time-loop plot device fully created the plot and structure, so I didn’t really have to consider what to write.

I’d been looking for a good idea to develop into a short, but I hadn’t thought out what that meant like I just did in this post. I was still loose on the very idea of what a short could be. I knew I wanted it to be one of the types of short films that comments on society and such, but didn’t have an idea at first.

And then I thought back to my most prolific fiction writing period before 2019 and it turned out to be a two-year period in the early 2000s where I wrote more than 30 short stories. And the short stories that I liked the most and wrote about were largely horror and sci fi that was influenced by the likes of Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Twilight Zone, Amazing Stories, EC Comics (Tales From the Crypt, etc.), various horror anthology movies/shows (Masters of Horror, TFtC, Tales From the Hood, etc.) and the DC horror titles of the 60s-80s (House of Mystery, Weird War Tales, Unexpected, etc.). So many of these stories were based on the ironic twist or a horrific take on karma. People who did bad things got their just desserts in horrific ways.

I’ve always loved those kinda stories. And they’re making a comeback with shows like Black Mirror and the Creepshow revival. So that’s where I landed for short films, that I want to write them in that vein. They don’t all have to be horror or sci fi, but they would have that kind of structure. You give a brief setup of the character(s) that are important, you put them in a singular situation that involves conflict and you get them out of it or you don’t. Short films don’t have as strong a need to have happy endings, so this form does lend itself more towards sci fi/horror, which is fine, since that’s what I tend to write.

I always have a ton of ideas right before I go to bed. If they’re good enough, I’ll write them down, and sometimes they develop into something really good. That’s what happened this time. I had a near-dreamlike thought, just an image, of a smart house that somehow became aware and killed its owners. That’s where “Smart House” started.

It’s a short, so it basically came down to developing that premise and writing it. I won’t spoil too many of the details, since I already gave away the ending, but here are a few thoughts that influenced the story.

-If the house is a “smart house” that has the potential to kill people, how would it do that? What form would its killing ability take?

-Who are the family? Do they deserve to be killed? Will anyone care if they are killed? Is anyone else killed?

-What is the smart house’s motivation to kill? And this one I’ll actually answer, because it’s the basic premise of the story, the family goes on vacation and gets stuck away from home for a long period because of COVID. When they come back, the house doesn’t recognize them and thinks they are a threat.

-But why would the house think they are a threat? Race is the obvious answer. It’s both very much of the moment and tied into COVID, but it’s easily tied in with technology, too. The stories of how facial recognition software designed by white people can’t recognize black people provide a pretty pointed cause that helps fully develop the theme of the film.

I didn’t start with a theme of race, but as I developed it logically and in context of the real world, that’s where the story took me. Once I got going, it just immediately felt like that was the obvious way to take the story forward and tie it in to the two biggest things going on in the news right now.

Once I answered those questions, the film basically wrote itself. I needed to establish the family, so I had them interacting over breakfast as they pack to go on vacation. Then they leave and the rest of the story develops in their absence before they return. I knew the ending, so I had to make sure to include all the details that would make that ending work and write them in a fashion that feels organic, like, “of course that’s the way things happened.” That cause led to that effect, that action led to that reaction.

In all, it worked out to be about 20 pages. I’m not sure how to pitch short films yet, so I’ll have to work on that, because this one is pretty good, I think. Could also work as an episode of a horror anthology series, too, although it may be a little short for an hour-long show.

Anyway, that’s for another day, but you can read “Smart House” now.

A Screenwriter's Journey #8: Farewell to Beware the Dortches

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"Beware the Dortches" is done. It clocks in at a lean 84 pages. That's actually the shortest feature script I've written, BUT as it is an action-oriented movie, there's less dialogue and more action than my other scripts, so it being the shortest is fine. I was worried that it would come in under 80 pages, and that would be too short (although Mad Max Fury Road was apparently under 70 pages because it was so action-oriented).

Like I said before, finishing up the rest of the script once I had all the scenes set in place was easy. Just filling in details and dialogue at that point.

Once done, here's my process...

First up is spellcheck. I use the WriterDuet software for my screenplays and it has a pretty bad spellcheck. Everything else is great and it's free, but the spellcheck is really annoying. It wasn't until while writing Dortches that they added in-document spellcheck (the little red squiggly line under misspelled words). I found this out the hard way on one of my early screenplays. I thought it was auto spellchecked and it was not. The reader complained about the typos. She did not buy the script.

So, I run the spellcheck (which is slow and will take like an hour for an average screenplay). After that, I do a full read through and fix any typos that weren't caught, examine sentences for logic and clarity, try to remove as much passive voice as possible, and make sure that the whole story fits together. Most importantly, I follow up on all the setup/payoff combinations. If I set something up, did it pay off? If something happens, how did we get there? Does it all fit together, make sense and is it a coherent whole.

When I finished the first draft, it was like 81 pages. Going through that process got it up to 84. Clarity sometimes adds words. And I found a set-up that didn't pay off (I added the pay off in later). And I found a continuity error, a character that was killed alone was last seen in the company of other people, so I had to circle back and split them up so that scene worked.

And once that was done, one last spellcheck and export PDF.

And that's the end of "Beware the Dortches." For now.

I am not someone who goes back and tinkers endlessly on old scripts. I tend to leave them alone. Unless some good idea comes through that would make it better (this happens from time to time, where entire subplots are added in to make it better). Other people like to tinker, but I figure I'm better off leaving heavy revisions up to when someone is paying for those revisions. If not, I figure I'm better off working on something new and expanding my skillset and practice, practice, practice.

Now I'll try to sell it. I have a producer who has purchased three scripts previously and she said she'll read anything I write. So I've already sent it to her. If she's not interested, I'll start pitching on VirtualPitchFest, but that's a story for another day.

A Screenwriter's Journey #7: Killing Writer's Block

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Now things are really starting to roll. With the beginning of the structure in place, it was time to further develop things. I have all the existing pieces arranged as best I can. To solidify that, I go through and start giving each chronological idea a scene header. For those that don't know, these tell you whether you are inside or outside, the time of day and where things are taking place.

As I go through and make these scene headings, the locations quickly solidify and once a choice is made about a location in one scene, that informs other locations for other scenes. And if I have notes that don't have a home (like Ahmed is a football player), I find a place in the story to show that and not tell it. Going through each of those things leads to not only more scenes and more locations and more characters, it helps organize the script more. Things shift to more logical places, things that don't make sense anymore are eliminated and new things have to be added.

All the set-up ideas for characters, motives, personalities, kills and any other outcomes have to be created here. Every set-up has to be brainstormed and every payoff has to be thought out. This is easy since I already know who is going to live and die. I have to pick when and where each death takes place and find ways to set-up the deaths, fears and obstacles that the characters can overcome or fail to overcome.

So, at about 35 pages, I had most of the scenes set. The next thing was to figure out the rest of them and over the 5 pages after that, I came up with every scene that I think that I need in the story.

And that's the tipping point. Once all the scenes are in the document, it's a race to the finish. I don't write the screenplay straight through, I go through the scenes and mark the unfinished scenes with an easily searchable ***.

And this gets to my method for killing writer's block. I take two approaches to this. The first is if I get stuck on a scene and can't come up with anything or I don't have the inspiration or interest in writing a scene right away, I search that *** and go on to another scene that I feel good about or am inspired by. This works really, really well. The document currently has 39 *** points. That means I have 39 scenes to finish writing (and an uncounted number of scenes that I've already finished because of inspiration or previous work).

The second strategy is to methodically go through the script and find each one of those *** and force myself to write one sentence for each. The first sentence in the scene that hasn't been written. No matter what it is. It doesn't even have to be good, just get a sentence out. I can fix it later. About half the time, this leads to more than one sentence. Forcing myself to write one sentence creates ideas for what comes after that sentence. I write one, if more comes, I keep going. If nothing else comes, I move on to the next ***.

Notably, during this part of the process, if something gives me a new idea or a connection to something else, I write that note down and save it for later, even if for now it's in the wrong place. On a review, I'll move those notes to where they belong, but not while writing is coming out. I try not to get distracted when the words are flowing.

One last note on this process, and this is super helpful. By not writing things in order and skipping around, it does two important things. First is that it keeps me thinking about the entire script all the time. I'm always seeing every page and every scene and making sure that they tie together. It's very easy to see the connections with all the parts of the story always in front of my face.

The second big benefit is that it really helps with fixing potential errors. Typos, mismatched names or facts. Set-ups that don't pay off. Pay offs that aren't set up. I get to see words over and over during this process so I can find errors easily.

Finally, once I get to this point, it's a quick sprint to the end. I know everything I need to write to finish it. Every existing scene has a time/location/order in the script. The plot is laid out. The characterizations are set up and arcs have been chosen. Who lives and dies and when and how are laid out. Every scene has been started with at least one sentence and a note about what the scene has to accomplish.

With this process, I'm now about a week or so away from finishing this script.

Pages: 40 (looks like it'll be out of 90-100)

A Screenwriter's Journey #6: Chekov's Bullet

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So, this morning I woke up early and got to 30 pages. But what does 30 pages mean at this point?

Included in the page counts before now were notes. Up until 15 pages or so, I had done no explicit writing, it was all just brainstorming and notes and random thoughts and reminders that certain things had to be written.

The first step in turning that into a screenplay is structure. But since I don't have all the ideas and necessary plot points yet, it's a very loose structure. I took each of the notes I had and did my best to put them all in chronological order according to when they appear on screen. Some things I couldn't know where to put them yet, so I had to guess at some. Some of those guesses were immediately wrong. So I put them in "order" knowing that any of those things could (and many definitely would) change. So it's a bit of a guessing game combined with an eye towards film structure.

A word about structure. This is a fuzzy word in screenwriting. Often people confuse it with formula, meaning you're copying an exact page-by-page placement of plot elements and a set of required plot elements. Some screenwriting advice suggests going this direction, but that advice largely comes from people who don't sell a lot of scripts or get a lot of movies made. All of these advice books have good advice in them, but all of them should be a guideline and any time you follow them exactly, you decrease the likeliness that someone will buy the script. They are starting points only.

Structure in a more deliberate sense means how the story is told. The basic rule of this is the simple three-act-structure (beginning, middle, end), but that's so vague as to almost be meaningless. So structure for me comes down to two basic things: 1. Plot (what happens in the story) and 2. Character arcs (how do the characters affect that plot and how are they affected by it. And both of these things borrow very heavily from a stand-up comedy concept, the set-up. For anything to have an effect in a movie, it has to be set up. Things that come out of nowhere take the audience out of the movie and make it less interesting. The "deus ex machina" (machine of the gods) that dominated classical theater has long since been discarded as a primary storytelling element and when it happens in film, people usually hate it.

In theater there's a concept called "Chekov's gun." This is the idea that if you see a gun in act 1 of a play, it had better go off in act 3. I came up with a corollary that I call "Chekov's bullet." It someone's going to get shot in the third act, you have to show the means in the first act. In both of these cases, the gun can be literal, but usually it isn't. This is just talking about anything that has an impact on the story. If you set something up early that seems like it has to payoff later, you have to pay it off. And if something important happens later on, you have to set it up early or it isn't satisfying and doesn't complete the plot loop.

So the first part in structure is to figure out what you want the viewer to feel at the end of the movie. And then you have to figure out how to get them there. It's not a hard concept and genre conventions pretty much do a lot of the work for you. If you want people to be scared, put them in a haunted house. If you want someone to fall in love with a character, you have to show reasons why they should be loved.

In previous posts, I talked about a lot of the feelings I'm going for in this movie, so a lot of that work is done. So, I start laying those things out in order. And, I start making notes of how to set each thing up. So if I want to show that the lesbian character has a crush on the SGA president, I have to both set that up in the early part and it has to have some kind of payoff later on. The fact that she's a lesbian has to either be important to the story or important to the character. Otherwise, it's just biography. Too many movies have made lesbian characters only characterization being about their sexuality, which isn't fair in a story that isn't a explicitly lesbian tale. This isn't, so it is important to her character, but doesn't define her. That means I have to come up with other things about her (she's shy, she has body image issues, etc.) and then I have to set those things up early and give them a reason to be part of the story. If she's shy, then she will have to attempt to overcome that shyness later or fail and be punished. If she has body image issues, she has to face those down or be harmed by them in the story. In good film structure, everything exists for a reason and is connected to something else in the story. Screen time is precious real estate.

Okay, so that's the start of the structure and I'll go into that more next time. Structure and character are the things that give you all your scenes, dialogue and whatever else you are going to write. In a novel you can just start writing and come back to the plot and other things at a leisurely pace, but not in a film. Your beginning has to naturally find it's way to your ending and this is almost impossible to do well without outlining your structure in advance, or at least early in the process. I've got most of that done, which is why I'm at 30 pages.

A Screenwriter's Journey 5: Research

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For the next part of the process, I had to do some research.

The first thing I had to research was names. I don't like randomly tossed-off names that much. I'm a fan of choosing names that have resonance with the story or character(s). Not all of them, that becomes too obvious and transparent if done to excess, but if used judiciously, it's a great tool to add subtext.

The Dortches family were the easiest. I just googled a list of common Southern women's names. I ignored obvious and over-the-top names like Bobby Sue or Scarlett. There are a lot of women characters, so I went with names that seemed they'd be given by the same mother. For the mother, I went with Lovie. I've met a few Lovie's in my time and they were all pretty bad people, not as extreme as the characters here, but bad enough. It fits. The oldest daughter, who is kind of the public face of the Dortches (she appears in commercials for the haunted house) is named Dawn. The mother didn't have the blue-skin disease, but most of the children do. She was the first to have blue skin (thus Dawn).

The daughter that is in school with the main cast is named Brandy. The b-name allows for a "Brandy Blue" nickname for the other kids to use to make fun of her. The other daughters are named Misty, LeAnn, Peggy and Tammy. These characters also all have personalities and motivations now, but I'll expand upon those later. There also two big dumb heavyweight sons who are functionally idiots, but do whatever they are told by Lovie and Dawn. Their names are Buck and Cage. Simple one-syllable names that have other meanings, but not that imply any compassion or humanity. Forceful names as they are only brute force.

The main characters also have names now, too. All the kids were born in America, but not all of their parents were. For the characters of international lineage, I wanted to do authentic names. As I mentioned last time, the two international characters are both Asian, but I didn't want their families to be from the same place. I've written Asian characters before, so I like to not repeat things, so I had to avoid China and South Korea. I chose Japan and Malaysia.

I also didn't want to go with overly stereotypical obvious names that people have seen before. The Japanese character is the shy lesbian with a crush on the black girl. I named her Himari Ito. She is proud of her culture and doesn't shy away from her heritage. But, she is basically an outsider even in the popular group. Her parents are from Japan and her mother speaks only a little English. She has pink hair, but not obnoxiously so.

The Malaysian character is the star football player, probably a quarterback. Malaysian names are more complex than American names. Ahmed is a common name, so that became his first name. Most Malaysians use a middle "name" that refers to their gender (equivalent to "son of" or "daughter of"), so for a male, that's "bin." And for last name, I went with Tengku, which helps show the diversity of Malaysian culture, as they are influenced by many other surrounding countries. So Ahmed bin Tengku.

The black kids are brother and sister (with the brother being gay). I gave them the last name Martin (with no real connection to anything). The sister is older, but less than a year so. She is named Rosa, after Parks and the brother is named Jeffrey, which I decided comes from a family friend. So Jeffrey and Rosa Martin.

The tall white girl who plays basketball I named Sarah, common enough name it lures people in with a sense that she is the normal one. Gave her the last name Willingham because it seemed really white.

The last of the six characters is the white nerd. I gave him the name Gordon Stevens. (I liked the idea of his first name being a last name and his last name being a first name).

One final character I named so far is the school principal who really only appears in one scene (so far, that may expand later). When I was thinking of her name, I looked out at the ocean in Puerto Rico and decided to give her a Puerto Rican name. I chose Valentina Casiano.

I also did research on haunted houses, to see what the trends are and to come up with a list of techniques and vignettes to appear inside the haunted house. And I researched a list of the most common phobias, so I can make sure to hit all of them at some point or another in the haunted house.

With all of this info in place, I actually wrote a few scenes, but I'll tell you more about that next time.

A Screenwriter's Journey 4: Characters & Blue People

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First, my friend Aubri sent me some articles about a family that, because of a really rare disorder, have blue skin. That or something like it is perfect. I wanted the rest of the people in the story to look down on the Dortches with contempt, disgust and fear (with the last one growing over time), but I wanted to keep it complex. So the town makes fun of the people who outsiders with a skin condition. The family reacts negatively. Society treats them even worse. They snap and want revenge. That's the longer plot arc that starts years before this story. This story is the climax of that lifetime arc.

The other thing is I really wanted to dig into the main characters. The protagonist and his/her group of friends. I haven't decided on the protagonist yet, because that will come out of the character development. It will most likely be (or at least appear to be) the person with the bad experience in a haunted house that I had written about previously. They'll have a natural fear of going to this place the first time, and will be lulled into going the second time because the first time wasn't that scary. Although, at this point, I think I may make that person a fake protagonist, in the tradition of movies like Psycho and Hostel. When making a horror movie, you HAVE to have nods to your influences. It's required by genre fans.

But I don't know who that is yet, because I haven't figured out the main characters. So I'm doing that right now.

The underlying theme of this movie is class-based, in my thinking. It's not as frequently used in horror movies these days as are things like gender and race and disability. I think the best movie of 2019 was Parasite, which is very explicitly about class. I want this movie to travel in that realm.

That's built in with the Dortches family being poor and more rural and having the skin condition leading to conflict with the rest of the area, which I'm thinking is going to be a wealthy suburb of an unnamed medium/big city and the Dortches live past the suburbs as it gets more rural.

So it's already suburbs vs. country and wealthy vs. poor. Those are the underlying conflicts, but, too many of these movies layer the conflicts in ways that dilute the class critique. And I have to be careful, because this now starts to head in the direction of the themes of "Get Out." Love the hell out of that movie, but don't want to copy it.

I think the solution here is to make the richer kids be diverse as fuck. They're seniors in high school. They're the popular kids. And they look like a Benneton ad. Diverse in terms of race, equal in terms of gender, all from wealthy families, so healthy and nicely-dressed. Because they are a diverse group, though, they aren't as dismissive of different people as their parents are. So while they will definitely have problems with the Dortches and being mean to them, it'll be like in Carrie where all the teens were really mean to Carrie except the one couple who tried to help them out. All of these kids except maybe one or two will be that kind of condescending but caring mean?

So I had previously decided that the main group was going to consist of 6. There will be some other named characters from the school who will also serve as potential victims at the Haunted House.

Of the six, I wanted to avoid the trope of "the final girl" or the ending where it's a couple, so the survivors at the end will be two people, one male and one female, but not a couple, so one of them will be LG and the other won't. Zero chance of this being a couple. BUT each will have other love interests through the story.

I picture this place being Northern, because I want it relatively cold for the Haunted House so that there's nothing in this film that hints at nudity or sex (although flirting and romance and love will be touched upon). So the break down of the characters will likely be something like this:

2 black characters
2 Asian characters (but drastically different parts of Asia)
2 white characters
3 female, 3 male

2 LGBT (but these two aren't a couple, they'll each date other people outside the group)

The very specific diversity of this group is to emphasize that people from any group can be raised to be bad on issues of class and that privilege can be developed by anyone based on how they are raised. Everybody can be an asshole when it comes to class.

And I want each kid to be happy and successful at something that is normally NOT attributed to their race or gender. So one of the boys is Asian and is a football star at a skill position. He'll be straight because of the common stereotype in film of the closeted gay football player. He gets good grades, but not good enough for his parents.

The straight white girl will be a really tall, conventionally pretty basketball player. A center, so closer to 6' tall. Maybe like a white Lisa Leslie. She also likes theater and does the school play. Her hovering mother approves of everything but is overbearing.

The straight black girl is student body president and has gotten into Harvard based on her grades and leadership skills. She also does school plays, but isn't as good at that as she is at politics. Her single father is super supportive.

The gay black boy is awkward and shy. He has a steady boyfriend, but his boyfriend is in the closet, which causes problems. He has amazing grades, is openly gay and is an accomplished rapper who has made the unofficial "school song" and video to support his friends on sports and other teams. But he is timid and easily embarrassed, even by praise, off stage. He is the straight black girl's brother.

The lesbian Asian girl is on the debate team with the straight black girl. She has a crush on the straight black girl. She also runs track and field.

The white boy is a very attractive nerd. He's the treasurer in student government, is another star on the debate team and plays soccer. He also loves horror movies.

Okay, that's what I came up with in this brainstorming session. So I think I have a start on the characters. And as I started writing them up I got to start to feel characters in different ways. I'm thinking that the gay boy is definitely going to survive. I'm not sure beyond that yet. I might even let three survive because these characters are going to be relatively well-built up in the movie. But then again, the more built up they are, they more the deaths have consequences, so maybe it should only be two.

That's not to figure out for now, though...

A Screenwriter's Journey 3: The "S" Word, Structure

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With every screenplay, I try to do something that I haven't done before. In addition to changing genres, I also try to do something different with the structure/characters/settings/plot devices. So my first screenplay had a big twist ending. And my last one was autobiographical. In between I did a superhero movie and a Blade Runner-style sci fi movie. And one about a serial killer couple that is stalked by yet another serial killer.

So I wanted to find something different for this script.

And I decided to employ an old idea from my ideas list. I originally used the short-hand "splattervision" to cement it in my head. Basically the concept is that the movie moves along like your typical modern horror movie, but when I get to a scene where there is a kill, I'm going to switch it to traditional 2D animation, but the animation will be grand and surreal, with the depiction of violence being transformed into something more artistic. After the kill is over, it'll cut back to the final shot of the victim, looking as much as they can after having gone through whatever happened in the animation. This not only gives the movie some kind of unique hook, it allows for more creativity and more commentary on violence and our depictions of it.

So that was the first big idea I had after the last journal.

Next thing to tackle is structure. There's a lot of debate about structure in film, but it's something that has to exist and you have to be intentional about it. Some people talk about there being a specific set of plot points that have to be done in an exact order to the point that certain things have to happen on specific pages. But any working screenwriter will tell you that such strict structure requirements are largely nonsense. You can use one of the various formulas that exist as a starting point, but a rigid adherence to ANY screenwriter's strict formula is a bad idea and while many successful movies have similar structures, they have to be unique to avoid being redundant.

For this script I'm starting with a structure called "Hero Goals Sequences," from the book of the same name by JMJ Williamson. I've used this basic structure before and I find that it has more flexibility than most of the other structures I've seen (just about any how to write screenplays book or website has its' own structure). But I'm also immediately scrapping part of it because it doesn't fit the structure that I already started with my previous notes. So take a structure that exists (even copy the structure of one of your favorite movies) and twist it into something new.

By "structure," we're talking about things like the three acts, inciting incident, plot reversal, rising action, character introductions and arcs, etc. When you look at one of these structure models, they basically take you through the order and common features of each of these things and others. So I go take the structure that I previously typed up from that book, copy it into my script document and start replacing the general terms ("inciting incident") with the existing notes on that topic. As I fill in the structure, I take all the notes I had previously and stuck them in the appropriate place in the story. This will likely change for some of them later, but I try to get them in the best order I can. And each time I write something down, it generates another idea or two.

I'm getting close to starting to write. I have a basic structure and some notes about the story. I still have to come up with characters and start to flesh out the plot, with a particular focus on the beginning and the end. But that's for next time.

A Screenwriter's Journey 2: Beware the Dortches!

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Okay, so I've got a title, a genre, a very basic idea and a few notes. I'm clearly not ready to start writing yet. There's nothing to write so far. Lots more brainstorming to go before writing begins. I don't generally do a formal outline like you would in school. I do some kind of outlining, but that comes later in the process. Now we need more ideas.

Where do they come from?

In the last diary, I said that ideas can come at any time from anywhere. But that doesn't mean those ideas are relevant to the script I'm writing. So I need more ideas and I don't have time to wait on them. Not if I want to finish THIS screenplay. So my next step is to generate more ideas. And the way to get started on that process is to look over the notes I already have.

Looking over the notes I already have shows I have a few things already decided even though I haven't written it down yet. From those notes, I have:

-This is a horror movie in the style of Blumhouse. It's meant to be fun, violent, scary, creepy and emotional. 

-The Dortches are a family that run a haunted house off the beaten track. At least two of the members are really large men.

-As the story starts, this is the fourth annual haunted house for the Dortches. Later in the story will include the fifth annual haunted house.

-The fourth annual haunted house was pretty bad, but the Dortches keep telling people to come back for the fifth anniversary, which will be big.

-The fifth annual haunted house is a lie. It's an actual haunted house where the Dortches will murder people.

-The locals are rude and dismissive to the Dortches.

-One of the characters is a girl who had a bad experience with a haunted house as a kid.

Okay, to start that's all I have. But most of these things immediately lead to other ideas. Let's look a little closer at each of those lines and the new ideas that come out of them.

It's also important to stress at this point that ALL notes are tentative. No idea is so good that it can't be eliminated later on if it serves the story. Everything in the script must serve the story or it doesn't belong. These ideas all seem relevant now, but some of them might not be. That is super important to keep in mind with screenwriting as once you sell a script, it no longer belongs to you. After you get that check, they can do anything they want to it. Knowing that in advance means that screenwriters can't be precious about ideas. No screenplay that was ever turned into a movie was shot solely on the first draft. And few movies have ever been made where other people didn't shoehorn their ideas into the product before it hits the screen. Hollywood has problems.

So, looking at these notes to generate more ideas, keeping in mind that no idea is permanent. Yet.

"This is a horror movie in the style of Blumhouse. It's meant to be fun, violent, scary, creepy and emotional."

This one provides a lot of information about the tone, length, budget and overall style of the film. It's trying to appeal to fans of that type of movie. This one doesn't give any detailed ideas, it's more about how to execute the writing of those ideas.

"The Dortches are a family that run a haunted house off the beaten track. At least two of the members are really large men."

This one is important for character and setting (with a hint at plot). The Dortches are established as the villains. They live away from other people. They run a haunted house.

This leads to a few questions that jump to new content ideas. If we have a haunted house, what's in it? What does it look like? For that, I'll actually do a little bit of research to find out about the state of the neighborhood haunted house and what types of scares they have. That will also lead to one of the key things in a horror movie, the kills. The design of the haunted house will lead to the kills and vice versa.

The Dortches live off the beaten path and they're murderers. A family of murderers. This suggests that I have to fill out the family with various members. Part of the key to working in Hollywood screenwriting is that producers want you to give them completely familiar things that have a new or original twist on them. They largely aren't looking for complete re-inventions of genre or film, they're interested in the evolution of those things, which is a slow process. There are a lot of horror movies about families that live off the beaten path and kill "normal" people. So I have to do something different with the family.

Most of my writing deals with diverse casts and subverting prior tropes with characters that are women, people of color and LGBTQ. This doesn't mean that all of these characters are or should be heroic or "good guys." They should, at a minimum, hint the diversity of people within that group. This leads me to the idea that I want to make the Dortches a matriarchal family. There is no father or grandfather at the head of the family. There's a mother figure. And all the positions of power will be held by women. Evil women. The two big males will serve as muscle, but they won't be smart or in charge.

This then leads to who are the Dortches going to be facing off against. I have some ideas for that, but they'll take some more development, so I'll come back to them.

"As the story starts, this is the fourth annual haunted house for the Dortches. Later in the story will include the fifth annual haunted house."

This cements the plot and locations. Most of the film will take place at the Dortches’ haunted house. They'll go once at the beginning of the story, where it's largely uneventful. They'll complain about how bad it is and the Dortches will tell them to come back next year and it'll be awesome. This is basically the "inciting incident." Going back to the Dortches house for the fifth anniversary is the protagonist's entry into the story of this screenplay.

"The fourth annual haunted house was pretty bad, but the Dortches keep telling people to come back for the fifth anniversary, which will be big."

The fourth annual haunted house is subpar and not scary. But maybe there's a door to the "scary path" that the characters can't take because it's closed. But it'll be open next year. The house isn't a big hit, but people are intrigued by the extra scary door and "wait till next year."

"The fifth annual haunted house is a lie. It's an actual haunted house where the Dortches will murder people."

Here's the story conflict. The Dortches are going to kill (or try to kill) the protagonist(s).

"The locals are rude and dismissive to the Dortches."

One of the big problems with weak horror movies is that the villains have no motivation or weak motivation. They just kill. That's not good enough. Good villains do things for reasons. For human reasons. And just "being evil" isn't a real human thing. Evil is don't in the name of something. Money. Power. Sex. Survival. That the locals hate the Dortches and mistreat them is a big motivator for them to kill (accepting that they are the type that would kill).

This has been done so often it's a cliche, though, so I want to take it further. One of the Dortches is a girl that goes to the same school as the kids who are the protagonists. The group of protagonists are high school juniors at the beginning of the story and go into their senior year in the second act. The Dortch daughter that goes to school will be picked on and made fun of by the protagonists, who will be a diverse set of popular kids. But I don't want to repeat Carrie and other films like it, so I want to make the Dortch girl mean and insulting without being over the top. The popular kids making fun of her should largely be doing so over legitimate things. The girl won't care, though, she'll tell her family about it and exact revenge upon them.

"One of the characters is a girl who had a bad experience with a haunted house as a kid."

This is an individual motivation of one of the protagonists. What bad experience could you have in one of those places as a kid? You could get lost, but that's been done before (even by Blumhouse). The second thing I thought of was that there could've been inappropriate touching of this kid by "actors" in the haunted house. It's a dangerous subject to address, and I will never write an explicit rape scene, so I'll have to find a way to present this that doesn't traumatize victims (beyond the trauma that ANY horror movie would provide) , but is still scary and disturbing. This will likely be one of the harder parts of the script to write well.

Even before this brainstorm, there were actually a few ideas set in stone. They have to be. You can't start writing until you know what you're writing about. So the basic premise of the family and the fake haunted house that turns real, those things have to be locked in now, because otherwise, I can't write the rest of the script. The rest of these ideas will be fleshed out and either expanded or eliminated.

So, that's the next part, figuring out what other ideas and things I need to figure out. Locations, characters, motivations, unique kills.

A Screenwriter's Journey 1: Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

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Okay, where to start?

I think that's the first question with any writing project. How do you get started?

The question that most writers hate the most is "where do you get your ideas?" The reason the question is so hated is because there isn't any secret answer to it. Everybody gets ideas from the same place. Everywhere.

Anything can be an idea. Anything can be useful in the write writing context. What can be useful down the road might not even be on your mind yet. And that great idea that you had yesterday might not find a home for a decade. Or ever.

All writing comes from ideas. But keeping track of ideas until you need them is a challenge.

Luckily for me, I've had a simple system for idea generation and storage that I've used for a long time now. It's so easy anyone can do it:

1. Train your mind to think of new ideas. The easiest way to do this is to write. Any time you write something, it generates new ideas. You can also train yourself when you are watching (or more importantly, re-watching) movies, TV, etc. that you like. Ask yourself, how did they do that? How did they achieve that feeling in the viewer? And what is another way that kind of feeling could be developed? Idea generation begats idea generation.

2. Write all ideas down. All of them. Good ones and bad ones. When it comes to writing, quantity is the primary pathway to quality. You will not use everything you write down. You will also not use everything the way you originally conceived it. What was a brilliant idea when you thought of it may lose all value later and vice versa.

3. When you get stuck on an idea, scan through your old ideas list and see what pops out. See what you can combine. See what creates new ideas.

That's really it. I've been writing down these little ideas, whether it be a character, a plot point, a secret reveal, a title, an ending, a scene, whatever, for as long as I can remember. That leaves me with a book of ideas, some of which can generate new things, some of which can be added to other things and many of which are useless.

So what's the idea for this next screenplay?

Well, it started with a scanning of what producers are looking for. My primary method of pitching screenplays so far (which has led to at least three sales so far) is a website called VirtualPitchFest. Through this site, for a small fee (currently $20), you can buy a "pitch." This pitch gives you guaranteed access to a producer or agent. You send them an e-mail pitch of your story and they have to respond within a week. The responses are basically "yes, I like that pitch, send me the script" or some variation on "no." If you send them the script and they like it, then you move into the negotiation phase.

But before that, you have to figure out what to pitch. For this screenplay, I wanted to basically write in a genre that I haven't done before. By genre here, I'm going more targeted than just "horror" or "comedy." Everything I write has elements of both of those, so I'm think more a specific type of horror movie in this case. From looking at the VirtualPitchFest requests from all the various producers and agents, I found that one of the most in-demand types of screenplays are low-budget, high fun horror movies like those made by Blumhouse (one of the most popular and profitable studios of the last decade, so movies like Paranormal Activity, Sinister, Insidious, The Purge, Get Out, Happy Death Day, etc.). I like a lot of these movies, even if I don't love them, and the best of them are among the best movies made today (Get Out, Us).

I haven't written a low-budget horror film like this yet, but I've written quite a bit of horror. So this type of movie will be what I write. Something I like plus something that is easy to produce plus something that the market is good for.

Next step is to go into the idea book and I came up really quickly with an idea. The first step in this case was the title: "Beware the Dortches."

Crazy title, yes, but crazy titles get read more than boring ones.

Here's where this one came from... I drive I-95 from D.C. to Fla several times a year. Somewhere along that road, probably in the Carolina/lower Virginia area, in the median of the split highway is a sign that says "The Dortches." That caught my attention. Particularly since one of these times it was dark out and that sign sat in front of a really dark grove of trees and was spooky. My brain immediately did a creepy voice and said "Beware the Dortches."

So then I had to think of what in the world that phrase meant. I immediately thought of one of those community haunted houses. You know, the kind that are put together in someone's yard or in a neighborhood park or whatever? Not officially sanctioned by the city, not commercial, just a family and neighbors having fun for the holiday. so it became that the Dortches were the family that put on one of these haunted houses. And that immediately brought to mind several influences and prior texts that would inform this film. Obviously the other Blumhouse-style movies are an impact, but this also traces back to the "we've turn off the main road and have found the really scary people's house and they're going to kill us now" films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and it's infinite children.

So that's the basic premise, but that's far from a movie or a plot. I looked at the rest of the notes and really only had these notes:

-Beware the Dortches
-Dortches are a family
-Do a haunted house
-Live off the beaten track
-annual haunted house for four years
-locals being rude dismissive
-not that good a house
-come back next year for the anniversary
-fifth year, everybody comes back for the big surprise
-Two big giant male family members
-Fifth year, everybody dies because it's all real
-Girl who had bad experience in a haunted house as a kid

And that's it. That's all I have as of today. This is where it starts.

(That's it for this time. Next time will pick up with the next steps after the basic premise).

Recording

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So in my attempts to be an actual musician, I have to create and record music, not just perform it live. When I started the process of becoming a musician, I literally had no idea how to record and create music. I had hosted podcasts and such before that, but those were using dummy-proof software that made it so easy a state legislator could figure it out (if you don't get that joke, trust me that most state legislators are pretty ignorant people when it comes to technology).

In my earliest days, I was part of a group called the Cap City Mob (starting in approximately 2007), led by an old friend. I won't rehash what happened there, but let's just say he was difficult to work with. But starting the group and including me in it was his idea (as was my stage name). Once I was invited to participate, he handled all the composition of the music and all of the entire recording process. He was talented and creative, but he didn't want to create original sounds (everything was created from copywritten material), he didn't want to work often enough (which is fine, because he had a life), and he refused to share any of his knowledge. These things bothered me enough that they added to an environment where other interpersonal issues led to me leaving the group and we haven't talked since.

After that, I really wanted to ramp things up, but didn't know how. So I did what any responsible person would do, I bought a microphone, grabbed my laptop and started figuring things out on my own. That was in early 2012 or so. By the time I had left Tallahassee permanently later that year, I had created a handful of beats, done some well-received solo live shows, and had recorded songs for each of those beats. None of those early recordings still exists, because as I improved at what I was doing, I rerecorded songs over and over again until they were better and better. So it isn't song ideas or concepts that was deleted, just early takes that weren't as good.

Since then, I've spent more than 150 hours recording songs and while I have figured out quite a bit of stuff, a lot of it is just from repetition and there almost certainly things that I'm doing the hard way that I could do easier. But, most of the time, I am happy with the way my voice sounds after recording, so I'm sufficiently happy with my skillset for now. I don't really have much interest in being an engineer or mixer or any of those things, I'm more a writer/vocalist, and I've only taken on these other roles out of necessity.

So my goals with recording are a bit varied. First and foremost is to create good music that will entertain or educate others. That is always at the top of my mind. My musical tastes are varied, but start with hip hop, punk, post-punk, new wave, indie, alternative, and the like. I want to create music that derives from those genres, even if I have some pop sensibilities that might also make their way into the songs. And, in no uncertain terms, my music always has some kind of message. A lefty political/social message. Even the party songs have something in that realm. And all of the songs are meant to be entertaining on some level, too. So creating music that fits that general concept is first.

I have two other related goals with recording. The first is to learn the technical stuff more, so that I can create the sounds I have in my head more easily. The other is to learn what my voice is, what it can do, and learn how to improve and expand upon it. That becomes a lot easier when you record the same lines over and over again, trying to perfect the line readings and try different approaches, enunciation, voices, etc. This is one of the reasons I post raw demos pretty frequently, it not only leads to feedback, it provides a strong incentive to continually improve and rework things. If I make a shitty recording and it's out there, someone could hear it unless I work on it and make it better.

I am a prolific songwriter. I have written more than 100 songs in the last three years and I have many, many more ideas that are in various stages of writing. But it can become an echo chamber when I write and record by myself and don't have to interact with the ideas and artistry of others. So I have made it a goal to not just record my own material, but that of others, too. I really like the idea of the artist, such as Prince or 2Pac, that spends massive amounts of time in the studio recording their voice, their songs, their inspirations, and leaves a lot behind for the world to listen to. The idea came from an article I read once where some semi-famous rapper started recording himself doing a bunch of other people's songs and posting the videos on YouTube. For some reason, I haven't been able to find that article again and I'm not sure who it was. I want to say Action Bronson, but I can't say that for sure since I can't find it. But it really made me think a few things. One was that doing a bunch of different rappers, with a bunch of different styles, in recorded fashion, would make my ability to perform and vocalize much better. And that has certainly been true as I've done it. The other was that if I had interesting takes or good performances of songs that already had fans, I would, in the great cover song tradition, obtain more fans. That has also been true, too, although to a lesser extent.

So in addition to recording more than 70 original tracks, I also started recording various cover songs. The first goal was to record 200 different rappers. Not just different songs, but 200 songs each by a different artist (I'm well past 50 on that goal now). But after recording a few songs by artists I really like, I quickly found that I wanted to record more songs by those artists, so I expanded my recordings to allow for that. A third approach I took on was to take songs that weren't strictly hip hop songs, but contained relevant elements. Songs that might not be rap, but sounded pretty close. For this series of "Almost Hip Hop" songs, I decided to take those tracks, and make them more hip hop, more in my own voice. It quickly became an idea that I didn't just want to copy the songs, doing all the exact same words and exact same line deliveries. Some songs I did relatively straightforward takes on, others I made some pretty significant changes to. My version of "Parents Just Don't Understand" is a pretty faithful Fresh Prince imitation, while my cover of Nirvana's "Downer" is so radically different than the original, it's a post-punk hip hop poetry reading kind of think, almost like a Butthole Surfers song.

A few guidelines I have for these variant takes:

  • I never, ever use the N-word. No matter what. I'm a guest in hip hop and I understand the history from where it comes, so regardless of the original, I change the word to something else. I've even been given permission to use the word by numerous African American performers and fans and I will never use it.

  • I rarely use words like "bitch" or other slurs that denigrate women or homosexuals. I don't fully eliminate them because at times they are being used by a character in the song. Robert DeNiro doesn't refuse to play sexist or homophobic characters because he can say something important through those characters and it isn't necessarily an endorsement of a character that you play them. I refuse to record lines, though, that are explicitly me using those slurs to denigrate anyone, unless the point is ironic (such as a recording of a 2 Live Crew song). Yes, I get the inconsistency between #1 on this list and #2. The reason for that is that the artform I'm using, hip hop, is an African American form, so I'm showing my respect for that by not insulting the innovators of the form I'm using. I try not to insult anyone based on such characteristics, so it's safe to assume that if you hear a word like "bitch," it isn't meant as a literal, unironic use of the word to denigrate women. I understand some will still reject my take on the topic, but that's the path I've chosen.

  • I do my best to remain true to the spirit of the original track. I may change things around a bit, but the goal is homage and respect, not just the repeating of words that I like.

  • As with most hip hop cover songs I've ever heard, when I choose to, I change references to the original artist's name to some variation of my own. Think Snoop Dogg's cover of "Lodi Dodi," which is true to the original, but has many Snoop-ified changes in the lyrics.

  • I literally want to record at least one track by every hip hop artist for whom I can find an instrumental. Since none of these songs is meant for commercial release, I have no problem using other people's music and lyrics to make interesting sounds of my own. And since my goals involve diversity and technical skill, I will record versions of songs from artists I don't like, although I will note that when I have done that, it has increased my appreciation of those artists at times. At some point, I'd like to be able to say that I've recorded cover versions of more rappers than any other person on the planet. I assume that I'm already well on the way to that goal, considering I've now done 57 different rappers by my latest count.

  • I want to add new things to songs. I like adding subtext, making cultural references, and tying different forms of art together. When I have an idea that serves that purpose, I pursue it.

  • I want to make the songs work for my voice. I have a pretty good ability to mimic other voices, I always have. But in my efforts to perfect my own voice, it's important not to bite anyone else's style for the purpose of a recording. So while some of my recordings are pretty imitative of the original, others make pretty significant changes to line deliveries, particularly with rappers like Jay-Z or Kanye who, at times, eschew traditional melodies or pronounce or say words in ways that I wouldn't. I'm absolutely not interested in doing a Iggy Azalea and adopting speech patterns and slang that aren't authentic to who I am. I grew up in the Deep South, lived in mostly black neighborhoods much of my life, and from an early age was deeply immersed in hip hop and basketball culture. And you likely wouldn't know any of that from my recorded voice, since I'm not trying to adopt the patterns and culture of others, I'm trying to forge new ground in my own voice. On those rare occasions where you hear me use black slang, it's black slang I use all the time as part of my daily life, it's not an affect taken on for the purpose of a recording.

  • (I may think of more of those that I have used later and will add them to the list if I do.)

So, to give you all an example of these principles in action, I present to you, my most recent recording, an interpretation of Beck's song "Loser."

Here are the above principles in action for this song:

  • Beck doesn't use the N-word, so not relevant.

  • Similar to #1, not a concern here.

  • I certainly change the vocals quite a bit here. Beck's original is laid back and almost indifferent to what is going on in the song. I use my more natural rapping voice, which is a bit of a hybrid of Beastie Boys and Chuck D. The original is just Beck singing, too, while I felt that my version was better served by having backing vocals for emphasis on certain parts. I also changed some line deliveries by adding a little delay here and there and having the rest of the line in question be rapped in double time. I think it creates some really interesting moments. I also radically reworked the chorus, going for a specific Rage Against the Machine feel and reference which I think add an layer to the song that, while not in the original, are in line with the original's mood, if not tone.

  • I didn't do this a lot on this one, although I added a "motherfucker" to a spot where I couldn't get a good read on one of Beck's deliveries.

  • Beck's not a rapper, of course, so this one fits the "Almost Hip Hop" approach, but he is an artist I have never covered before (and rarely sing in public), so it is in line with the spirit of trying different voices.

  • There isn't much new subtext here (although there is some in the reworking of the chorus and the change in the vocal style from apathetic to aggressive), but the tie in to other cultural points is pretty extensive. In addition to the Rage-style chorus, the end of the song includes an explicit Rage line that is added, much of the vocal presentation ties in to artists like the Beastie Boys, and the added backing vocals have a wide range of influences from Beasties to Afroman to Eminem and others. There are also some attempts at sophomoric humor (emphasizing the word "balls," a Cartman reference on the word "beef") and to the sing-songy nursery rhyme styles of early rap songs (which is done on the actual nursery rhyme that Beck included in the lyrics). And these are just the conscious references I made during the recording, there are certainly likely to be subconscious references or things I forgot.

  • I've already addressed this one, but needless to say, there are very few points in this song where I sound anything like Beck, either in my voice or in my line deliveries.

One last thing on recording. I have literally no patience or skill for rearranging and editing and punching things in. My process begins with the beginning of the song, I hit record, and I go forward from there. I generally record the song chronologically and do my best to do entire verses without a break. I've not always done that in the past, but I think discerning listeners can tell when the songs are edited, so if a song has a 16 bar verse, I try to record that interrupted before moving to the next part, and will try the same part over and over again until I am happy with every word (or nearly every word) in the segment, only breaking things up when it is naturally part of the song. The first verse of the Beck song above is one take, although it was far from the first take. I particularly have to pay close attention to improper breathing, which often shows up, sound levels (although those can be adjusted after the recording, it's better not to have to adjust them, it just sounds better), contact with anything else in the studio, etc. Ambient sounds usually aren't picked up by my mic, so that's fine, but if I bump the mic during a recording session, that take is a wash. I have a screen in front of the mic, so I don't get too many "P" sound problems, although there are still some other sounds (like "S" at the beginning of a word) that can be very problematic in recording. For a song like this with backing vocals and such, I will record the main versus and chorus first and come back in on a separate track and add those. I don't generally rehearse a lot before the song, unless it's new, although I'm generally recording songs I've heard many times, and usually songs I've performed at karaoke, so they have been practiced. Mass transit in a big city also gives ample opportunity to run through songs in your head before a recording session, so it's not exactly like I go in unprepared. Part of this is that I don't want to overdo a bad line and get it stuck in my head, so I like to be able to listen to what I've rapped to see if I'm doing it in a way that I'm happy with. I can only do that when recording and listening to the playback.

Okay, that's probably way more than enough for this post, although I'm sure that I'll talk more about recording when introducing other songs in the future. My next post will be about karaoke and why that's important to what I'm doing.

Goals

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So for this first post of the new direction, I wanted to briefly talk about my goals as a musician, to provide a bigger context for what I'm doing and what I'm writing and creating. It won't be the most in-depth examination ever, but will give you a basic idea for what's to come...

So, my ultimate goal as a musician would be to become a worldwide superstar who performs for millions of people while retaining complete integrity in my music and voice, making people dance and sing along to my radical politics. Basically to be at the level that Kanye and Jay-Z are, where they can kind of do and say whatever they want and people are along for the ride in big numbers.

I realize that goal is totally unlikely to happen for any number of reasons.

A secondary goal, and a much more realistic one, would be to forge a career that lasts a few decades where I get to make whatever music I want and I build a fanbase that wants to hear what I want to make, wants to see me live, and where I can be a respected musician among other musicians for creating art that is true to my vision and values. In this scenario, I would get to tour, get to perform at festivals, collaborate with other great musicians, maybe even get on the radio or TV a bit as a feature on other people's work, and get to create art that people like and learn from.

I realize that is a lot of hard work and that most people who attempt to go down this path don't stick with it. But that's one of the great things about having asperger's, I'm obsessive enough about the concept that I'll stick with it as long as it takes, regardless of what other people think. I've been doing it long enough already to know that there will always be haters, including people that are friends or people that, by any logical though process, should enjoy what I do. But art, and people's reactions to it, is not logical and I understand that doesn't always happen.

The old saying about it taking 10,000 hours to become a master of a particular skill may not be particularly accurate, but you have to learn a lot by putting in those hours. I haven't done that yet, but I am closing in on 1,000 hours of activity related to becoming the best writer and performer I can be. I still have a long way to go, but I'm really happy with the progress I've made.

And while I know that a lot of artists like to only present the polished, fully-developed product to their fans, I've always thought a little differently about that and prefer to open up the door and show people what I'm doing, even if I make mistakes, even if I fail. I can handle the feedback and it all helps me develop my knowledge and skill towards being better, so I'll keep doing it.

One Million Pieces of Perfect Pop Culture

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I came up with a new theory this morning that there are at least one million pieces of perfect pop culture. If you're saying to yourself "that can't be true," then 1. you shouldn't be talking to yourself while reading a blog and 2. you're probably defining "perfect" in a different way than I am.

The way I'm using "perfect" here is NOT in the dictionary usage. I know you're saying to yourself "but that's the correct way to use words," but at this point, I'm getting a little annoyed with your little internal self-conversation thing and I'm moving on. By perfect, what I mean is that, at the right moment, if you're in the right mood, these things can be perfect. Songs, albums, movies, items of clothing, food, TV episodes, comic books, or other pop culture artifacts. And I'm just talking about things that are in English or can appeal to someone who only speaks English (and isn't a douchebag. Non-douchebag English speakers can appreciate things that aren't in English).

Yes, I truly believe that there are at least a million of them. Whatever it is you like, there is so much more of it out there (and a lot of it is probably better than the things you DO like). I don't at all mean that in a judgmental way, I mean that in a "if you like X, you'll love Y" kind of way. There are millions of people (over the years) who have created millions of awesome things. And most of us don't know about most of them.

So I think I'm going to work on changing that part about most of us not knowing about most of them. Over the next million days or so, I'm going to post a series of those things, some well-known, others so obscure the people who made them don't even remember them. I'll post them here at the RevEx blog with some kind of explanation as to why I think they are perfect. Those explanations will be totally inconsistent and some of them will piss off some people. Who gives a fuck? This is about things that people might like. This is about saying "Hello, cynicism about the world and art and music, you're a douchebag who should go back to the Kappa House and talk about tits or something like that while the rest of us get happy and enjoy life outside of your dumbass mindset." Or something similar that can be said in fewer words. I don't do fewer words. I like words.

If YOU are interested in adding to the list of one million pieces of perfect pop culture, message me on Facebook or at quinnelk@gmail.com and I'll add you to this blog and you can post whatever you like that adds to the list. No filters, no judgment, no censorship (well, unless you're a douchebag, but then I probably won't let you post anyway, so whatevs).

Whattup?

Entries in the series: