New to the blog? Welcome!
Here you’ll find over a hundred deep-dive essays on the subject of storytelling—shared wisdom from my experiences as a former Hollywood screenwriter and now as an author of supernatural horror and magical realism.
Seeking random writing tips? This is the wrong place, then. You can find those elsewhere—and, between us, they’re more or less useless, anyway.
Instead, I explore the way narrativity gives shape and meaning to our lives, how it’s been corrupted by corporate “mega-franchises” that leverage Gen X nostalgia to nourish neoliberal consumerism, and how it can be reclaimed as a powerful force for positive sociocultural and -political change.
But where to start? I’ve curated a handful of posts in four subcategories—Narrative Craft, Socially Conscious Storytelling, Commercial Adolescence, and Personal Essays—that I submit offer the most value in return for your time and attention. The reader-comment sections never close, so feel free to leave feedback if inspired; I will reply.
For those seeking a summary overview of the blog’s content—a contextualized recap of its creative evolution over its first eight years—I refer you to “A History of the Blog (So Far)—and a Programming Update” (September 26, 2022).
Narrative Craft
There are two components to creativity: talent and skill. Talent is congenital; skill is cultivated. I could practice the guitar for a thousand years, dutifully studying chord progression and constructing pentatonic scales, but I’d still never be a great guitarist—because I wasn’t born with a talent for music.
But if you are born with a talent—like, say, for writing—the path to best fulfilling that potential is through mastering your discipline by developing your skills. Build your toolbox. Study and practice your craft—the artful application of exact technique, to quote an old mentor—night and day for the entirety of your life. Because an artist with talent and skill is the closest thing to an actual magician.
Here are several articles that cover key facets of storytelling craft:
“The Case for Craft” (June 26, 2014): My very first post. Here I suggest a curriculum, compiled and customized from several different proven storytelling programs, that will teach any aspiring writer the fundamentals of narrativity: structure, genre, and characterization.
“Foundations of Storytelling, Part 1: The Logline” (March 23, 2017): The most basic unit of narrativity is the logline—a one-sentence summary of a story that conveys its protagonist, antagonist, conflict and stakes, setting, and tone/genre. Composing an effective logline is an art form unto itself. Here’s how to do it—and why you should.
“Some Assembly Required: Why Disciplined Creativity Begets Better Fiction” (March 19, 2020): I never actually developed “Foundations of Storytelling” into the ongoing series I’d intended, but this post serves as a next-step sequel to my lesson on the logline. Here I talk about “breaking the back” of a story by identifying its genre, plotting it on a “beat sheet,” and—most crucially—scrutinizing its unconscious messaging. (There’s a lot more on that last point under Socially Conscious Storytelling below.)
“Writers Groups—the Pros and Cons” (November 28, 2017): The best way to improve your skills? Learn how to give feedback. Here are some war stories from my own critique group of then-fledgling screenwriters, many of whom went on to write for television shows including The Handmaid’s Tale and Ted Lasso.
“The Road Back: Revisiting The Writer’s Journey” (September 28, 2020): An in-depth look at the Hero’s Journey, Western culture’s most durable storytelling schema, how it is all but irrelevant in our Digital Age of “storyless” fiction, and why its narrative principles and archetypes are worth relearning.
“Saving the Cat from Itself: On Deconstructing Game of Thrones—and a Troubling Pattern of Misanalysis” (June 17, 2016): Ah, Save the Cat!—the screenwriting manual some swear by… while others forswear altogether. Here are my thoughts on why it is a worthy—even indispensable—storytelling program that has been irreparably corrupted by the very people who teach it. Still one of my most frequently visited posts.
“Artistic Originality: Is It Dead—or Was It Merely a Fallacy to Begin With?” (February 27, 2018): Is there a way for us as artists to codify, or at very least comprehend, the concept of originality as something more than an ill-defined abstraction to perhaps consciously strive for it in our own work? I examine a pair of culturally defining movies—Star Wars and Ghostbusters—as well as their latter-day remakes to crack the code as to what precisely constitutes “originality.”
“There He Was… and in He Walked: Lessons on Mythic Storytelling from the Mariachi Trilogy” (November 19, 2021): Here’s an analysis of and appreciation for the idiosyncratic storytelling in Robert Rodriguez’s Mariachi trilogy—El Mariachi (1993), Desperado (1995), and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)—a neo-Western action series that emerged from the indie-cinema scene of the 1990s and can only be deemed, by current Hollywood standards, an anti-franchise. The movies, and the unconventional manner in which they were made, have a lot to teach us about what it means to be creative—and how to best practice creativity.
“Scream at 25: Storytelling Lessons from Wes Craven’s Slasher Classic” (December 20, 2021): In his celebrated screenwriting instructional Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (1997), Robert McKee writes: “Powerful revelations come from the BACKSTORY—previous significant events in the lives of the characters that the writer can reveal at critical moments to create Turning Points.”
Scream’s masterful use of backstory, studied here, is but one of its numerous virtues. This post explores how the movie revived a subgenre, previewed a defining characteristic of Generation X (more about that under Commercial Adolescence), dramatized the psychological toll of trauma with uncommon emotional honesty—and how it even offers a roadmap out of the prevailing narrative of our time: neoliberal capitalism.
Socially Conscious Storytelling
In 2018, I trained to be an environmental activist under former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who introduced me to the concept of moral imagination: i.e., how getting a handle on the climate crisis would mean more than just drawing down emissions, but expanding our very sense of what a post-carbon future should look like—a more just and sustainable world for all—and then actualizing that reality through deliberate, sensible choices.
That got me thinking about how, as screenwriters, we are encouraged to develop our commercial imaginations, but without consideration for—often at the expense of—our moral imaginations. In the interests of mass audience appeal and maximal entertainment value, we (unwittingly?) embed dubious values into our stories by, for example, promoting neoliberal consumerism; supporting patriarchal mores; misrepresenting feminism; mythologizing Randian individualism; glorifying violence; affirming conspiratorial thinking; exploiting and vilifying things we don’t take care to understand, such as transgenderism and environmentalism.
Interrogating the stories we have long taken for granted is healthy, especially the comforting ones. When the narratives and mythologies still feel helpful and true, resolving to do more to live up to them is also healthy. But when they no longer serve us, when they stand in the way of where we need to go, then we need to be willing to let them rest and tell some different stories.
Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 173–74
Craft must always be in service of conscience. In an ongoing series of essays, I have explored ways in which the storytellers—particularly Hollywood filmmakers—have both shirked and sometimes honored their social responsibilities:
“Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown: A History of Hollywood’s Hero Detective” (June 15, 2020): I consider this the best essay on the blog, IMHO. An exhaustive 5,000-word piece written in response to the murder of George Floyd, this post takes a hard look at the way police have been portrayed in popular culture—from the hardboiled whodunits of the forties, to the urban thrillers of the seventies, to the action comedies of the eighties, through the ripped-from-the-headlines police procedurals of the nineties.
I examine how these stories have promulgated a worldview whereby (mostly) white men with badges are free to act without even the smallest measure of accountability, and how if we’re going to reform policing in America, Hollywood has a substantial role to play in that effort—by initiating a page-one rewrite of its most lionized archetypal hero. Raised on Lethal Weapon and NYPD Blue, this was the essay I’d unwittingly spent a lifetime preparing to write.
“Patriarchal Propaganda: How Hollywood Stories Give Men Delusions of Heroism” (October 6, 2021): Movies and TV shows—from the anti-establishment meatheads of Fast & Furious to lovable-lout sitcoms like Two and a Half Men; from the divinely wise and courageous Catholic priests of The Exorcist to the stunted-adolescence slackers of the View Askewniverse—mostly exist to remind us that ours is a man’s world. Popular entertainment in general, regardless of medium or genre or even the noble intentions of the storytellers, is almost invariably patriarchal propaganda. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
“The Ted Lasso Way: An Appreciation” (August 2, 2021): Speaking of patriarchal propaganda, as someone who grew up on—and, in a vacuum of positive male role models, fashioned his behavior after—the go-it-alone tough guys of Hollywood action movies, Ted Lasso is the anti-antihero I’ve been waiting for my entire life: a straight, white, cisgendered male who unironically exemplifies big-heartedness, open-mindedness, kindness, courtesy, chivalry, civility, forgiveness, wisdom, teamwork, cultural sensitivity, and prosocial values—all with good humor, to boot.
“The End: Lessons for Storytellers from the Trump Saga” (November 21, 2020): The election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 offered the very thing our open-ended movie franchises and dystopian television series have denied us for two decades: catharsis. We yearn for new visions, for noble goals, for forward motion again—for an ethos of decency and a quickened regard for scientific expertise. And it isn’t merely the federal government that’s been handed a mandate to espouse those values; so have the storytellers.
“What Comes Next: Lessons on Democracy and Narrative from Hamilton” (August 18, 2020): Even though both Enlightenment democracy and cathartic storytelling are endangered right now, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton reminds us we shouldn’t give up on either.
“Challenging Our Moral Imagination: On Hollywood’s Crises of Climate, Conscience, and Creativity” (May 25, 2020): An examination of the way environmentalism is portrayed in Hollywood cinema, this post introduces the recursive concept of moral imagination—and why scribes need to learn to write with as much of that as they do commercial imagination.
“Too Much Perspective: On Writing with Moral Imagination” (June 7, 2021): Practicing morally imaginative storytelling means scrutinizing the values and messages encrypted in the fiction we produce—but it does not mean passing a “purity test.”
“Sorting through the Clutter: How The Girl Before Misrepresents Minimalism” (August 29, 2022): Commercial storytellers have a long and lamentable history of exploiting and vilifying things they don’t understand, from borderline personality disorder to transgenderism to environmentalism. The current trendiness of minimalism, alas, makes it a prime candidate for narrative exploitation under the disingenuous guise of “thematic exploration.”
To wit, the BBC One/HBO Max miniseries The Girl Before (2021) depicts minimalism as an obsessive-compulsive symptom of emotional instability, in contrast with what I can attest it to be from years of committed practice: a versatile set of tools/techniques to promote emotional balance—that is, to attain not merely a clutter-free home, but a clutter-free head.
Popular entertainment—particularly but not exclusively television—could through unobtrusive example normalize minimalistic living, much the way it normalized, and continues to normalize, the unchallenged acquisition and custodianship of material goods, through its thematic messaging, its production design, its embedded product placements, and its sponsored advertisements.
Commercial Adolescence
From Star Wars to Super Friends, Transformers to Terminator, Ghostbusters: Afterlife to Granny Laurie Strode, Willow to Wyld Stallyns, Cobra Kai to Keaton Returns, Generation X has turned the entirety of our pop culture into a teeming, bottomless toy box of 1980s novelties we can’t seem to retire.
Why? What’s behind our pathological fixation with all-things eighties? And is it, as Watchmen scribe Alan Moore suggests, “culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times”?
Such is the question I’ve explored in a series of essays critical of my generation’s puerile refusal to put away childish things:
“In the Multiverse of Madness: How Media Mega-Franchises Make Us Their Obedient Servants, Part 1” (April 26, 2021): Transmedia “mega-franchises”—from Star Wars to Star Trek, DC to Marvel, Harry Potter to Game of Thrones—continue to expand exponentially, demanding an ever-greater share of our money, time, and attention. Whereas popular entertainment once simply requested our intermittent audience, now it demands our habitual obedience. Whether or not we still actually enjoy Star Wars and Game of Thrones is at this point entirely irrelevant; we’ve all become institutionalized “hostage buyers”—lifelong subscribers, with no apparent choice, inclination, or means to “opt out.”
But once you’ve been shown the manipulative engagement strategies corporate brand managers use to keep us consuming each successive offering in a multimedia initiative—by leveraging FOMO via “spoilers”; by encouraging “forensic fandom” with Easter eggs and puzzle-boxing; by exploiting nostalgia through figure-ground reversal—you can’t unsee them, and you’ll be empowered to finally liberate yourself from the wallet-draining, soul-crushing slavery of super-fandom, to permanently let go of a once-favorite franchise and escape from the Multiverse of Madness.
“In the Multiverse of Madness: How Media Mega-Franchises Make Us Their Obedient Servants, Part 2” (May 3, 2021): Why is it, exactly, that middle-aged men are so immedicably addicted to superheroes and Skywalkers—that we yearn to live in a 1980s time capsule à la Ready Player One, Ernest Cline’s despicably evil ode to arrested development?
Well, it isn’t accidental. Here’s why Generation X has been particularly susceptible to the narrative gimmicks outlined in “In the Multiverse of Madness, Part 1”—spoiler alert: Ronald Reagan is directly and demonstrably culpable—and how the nostalgia–industrial complex systematically trained us, starting in 1983, to be lifelong subscribers to the cartoons and comics and pop-cultural ephemera of our youth. Let’s better understand how Hollywood consigned us to a state of “commercial adolescence”—and why being a superfan of a multimedia mega-franchise is a lot like being a Scientologist: All it requires is a billion-year commitment and an open wallet.
“Tim Burton’s Batman at 30—and the Cultural Legacy of the Summer of 1989” (June 23, 2019): I was thirteen the summer this movie was released, and though I didn’t know it then, both Batman and I experienced our last season of innocence together, as I matured from wide-eyed boy to disillusioned teenager, and he fully transitioned from the Caped Crusader to the Dark Knight. Here’s why everything changed after the Burton blockbuster—how it incidentally provided a blueprint to reconceptualize superheroes from innocent entertainment meant to inspire the imagination of children to hyperviolent wish-fulfillment fantasies for commercially infantilized middle-aged men.
“Superman IV at 35: How the ‘Worst Comic-Book Movie Ever’ Epitomizes What We Refuse to Admit about Superhero Fiction” (July 24, 2022): Unanimously reviled for both its unconvincing visuals and cornball story, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace inadvertently accomplished the theretofore unrealized dream of scores of nefarious supervillains when it was released in 1987: It killed Superman. (Or at least put the cinematic franchise into two-decade dormancy.) But a closer examination of the film suggests its objectively subpar storytelling might in fact be far more faithful to the spirit of the source material than today’s fanboy culture would care to concede.
“Won’t Get Fooled Again: The Last Jedi Incites a Fan Rebellion against Disney’s Star Wars Empire” (January 29, 2018): After the diminishing returns of The Force Awakens and Rogue One, I’d sworn off Star Wars forever… until the diametrically polarized response to The Last Jedi (critics were hailing it the best of the series, audiences decrying it as the worst) pulled me back in to see for myself. Here’s an apostate’s take on why this franchise will never—can’t ever—give aging Xers the one thing we truly want from it: to feel the way we did when we first saw Star Wars at eight years old.
“Oh, Snap! The Nostalgia–Industrial Complex—’90s Edition” (July 29, 2019): Catering to Xers who ache for the eighties has become a billion-dollar business, so it was only a matter of time before the nostalgia–industrial complex turned those same strategies on Millennials who came of age in the nineties—to purposefully and systematically circumscribe them, as it did us, in a state of “commercial adolescence.” Here’s my plea for Millennials to learn from our cautionary example.
Personal Essays
Few of my posts are strictly analytical; most are laced with personal experiences and/or insights, even the more critical or scholarly ones. Sometimes I even publish anecdotes that are almost entirely personal, though always, in their way, about storytelling. Here are a handful that have resonated:
“A Hollywood Ending: Hopeful Reflections on a Failed Screenwriting Career” (January 24, 2022): My essays don’t come any more personal than this. A college graduate ready to take on the world, I moved from my hometown of New York to Los Angeles on September 11, 2001—yep—in pursuit of a screenwriting career. Over the next decade, through one trial after the next, I networked my way into the entertainment industry and forged meaningful relationships…
… until the day my career was gone—overnight—and with it most of those friends. Here’s the story of how I picked up the pieces, made a midlife career pivot to “author/blogger,” and finally found my way back home. (This is the first of a trilogy of essays that continues in “You Can’t Go Home Again” and concludes—for now—in “EXT. LOS ANGELES – ONE YEAR LATER.”)
“The Lost Boys of the Bronx: A Tribute to Joel Schumacher” (July 4, 2020): The passing of filmmaker Joel Schumacher inspired me to reflect on my screenwriting origin story: a comically ill-fated attempt to produce an amateur sequel to The Lost Boys during the summer between high school and college.
“One Good Idea: Reflections on My Longest-Running Project—and Most Successful Creative Collaboration” (February 15, 2021): I used to live in fear of becoming one of those writers known for but one good idea—Kevin Williamson (Scream), Eleanor Bergstein (Dirty Dancing), Chris Carter (The X-Files), Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary)—though nowadays I mostly just envy them. Good ideas are hard to come by; harder still is good luck. A long time ago, I had the good fortune to meet a great girl, and somehow the wisdom to recognize that we were a good idea—one built to last. It’s carried me through the intervening two and a half decades, and made this life—our life—one worth living.
“State of Grace: How a Movie No One Saw Heralded the Last Days of Old New York, Old Hollywood—and Even My Own Innocence” (March 28, 2018): Here’s how a movie no one’s ever heard of—a long-forgotten Irish-mob thriller set in Hell’s Kitchen, New York—exerted appreciably more impact on my personal and creative evolution than I’d previously considered, and how it had something profoundly meaningful to say to me, both at fourteen and forty-two.
“Through the Looking Glass: How Johnny Depp’s Reclusive Tendencies Are a Funhouse Reflection of Our Own” (August 31, 2018): From his days on Jump Street when I was in junior high, to his offbeat movie roles during my time as a “serious” film student in college (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Ed Wood, Dead Man), to our shared penchant for supernatural cinema (Sleepy Hollow, The Ninth Gate, Pirates of the Caribbean), Johnny Depp has steadfastly remained the most exciting actor of his generation. But his apparent withdrawal from reality in recent years is the role I’d most come to identify with after my screenwriting career catastrophically imploded. Alas, Mr. Depp—this is where I leave you.
“Home for Christmas: (Not) a Hallmark Presentation” (December 15, 2017): Memories of Christmases past in the Bronx, New York—the most romantic place to spend the holidays. Seriously.
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