The Kid Stays in the Pictures
by Andrew Auseon
INT. DINING ROOM – MORNING
A man enters. Propped on one hip is a baby, on the other a laptop. This is ANDREW, 32, ninja author, and fan of robots, waffles.
He sits down at the cluttered table, powers-up. The baby needs a change.
Babies, routine, work: Hardly the stuff of movies; yet, despite the apparent banality of my daily existence, I’ve found the last year of my life especially dramatic. Thanks to the movies—the exhausting, confusing, pride-swallowing tease that is the promise of tinsel town.
Right now, all three of my published novels are in the early stages of development as motion pictures. My experiences on these projects have been as unique as the books themselves. (And this is just the beginning!) So what have I learned from these months of conference calls, outlines, script revisions, and sleepless nights? Let’s sum them up in catchy movie elevator pitches, since that’s a universal language we all understand….
Alienated
A naïve young upstart must learn to work as a part of a team to save his sanity… and the world.
For eight months I worked tirelessly with David O. Russell, a writer and director I have always greatly admired, on writing Alienated, a middle grade science fiction novel that will become a stand-alone film. Alienated was his creation, and I was brought in to help him make it work as a book for young people. David is passionate and does things his own way, a true artist; I like to think of myself in those very words. Therefore a smooth ride was not in the cards.
Collaboration is something that many writers don’t often experience outside the relative safety of an editor/author relationship. I’ve never had the luxury of writing novels for a living, and as a rat-racing creative professional my work is constantly subjected to the wrath of non-writers. I’ve learned to take criticism with a grain of salt, to drink the whole shaker down without so much as a shudder. But Alienated taught me how far my thick skin could stretch.
True collaboration emerges from a mutual trust—that you’re qualified to be there, that your ideas will be listened to, and that decisions will be made in the best interests of the project. Working with large, powerful teams has left me more aware than ever of the fact that, yes, someone else does have better ideas than me, and yes, I can learn a lot from them.
Jo-Jo and the Fiendish Lot
A boy, coming of age, searches for answers to life’s questions only to find he knew them all along.
I am currently finishing a new draft of an adapted screenplay of my second novel, Jo-Jo and the Fiendish Lot. The news that a hot up-and-coming director was excited about filming the book was enough to make me swoon, but the whipped cream was when he asked me to write the script. Talk about dream fulfillment. I could be the next Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, only combined into a single superhuman screenwriting machine. Ha. Not likely.
It takes me several years to write a novel. My first drafts are immense, jagged things of mystery, unearthed artifacts. These are the drafts I hide, for they whisper terrible secrets about me. The most notorious of them: I write lazy. What I failed to appreciate, and what I’ve learned in the last few months, is that screenplays are the storytelling equivalent of a hard body.
Writers by nature are overindulgent. We like to show how clever we are. More often than not this tendency ends in bloat, in superfluous flair. Movies, however, live and die on motion, and when the story machine breaks down everyone notices. There’s nothing quite as humbling as having a group of readers look at your 150-page script that should be 100 pages, and having them say, “Every novelist does this.” And you thought you knew how to write.
Funny Little Monkey
A stubborn old curmudgeon discovers that to hold on to what he cherishes he must first let it go.
In the last few months I learned that a talented writer/director team is adapting my debut novel, Funny Little Monkey, for the big screen. They are doing this with my creative input, and with my enthusiastic blessing. A story that I thought was behind me has suddenly come back into view. Only now it looks a little different… and that’s okay.
Writers can be overprotective. They stop bullets for characters. They cling to turns of phrase with whitening fingers. They say “I MUST keep that scene!” way too often. On a higher level, they can often be convinced of their own ownership. The wonderful thing about writing is that nothing you do is true. At the moment of creation it’s yours, but before long it means a thousand different things to a thousand different people.
Nothing is more flattering than when a fellow writer alters your work. It’s unlikely I would have said this just a year ago. Back then I’d never discussed overhauling one of my stories with a whole different goal in mind. As soon as I did, it came to me: Your original work has inspired an entirely new creation, birthed a baby story. The act of conception is worthy of the celebration, regardless of the artistic outcome.
***
More often than not, writing is an act of complete isolation. But it pays to step outside of that comfort zone once in a while. You might learn some new tricks, remember old ones, or even find that there’s still some fertile ground in an idea thought long dead. Working in the movies isn’t about glamour. Whether you’re in a studio in Los Angeles, or a cluttered dining room table in Baltimore, work is work.
INT. DINING ROOM – NIGHT
We see Andrew asleep on his laptop, complete with looping LOL CATS screensaver. Somewhere in the house a BABY SCREAMS.
Andrew will not be roused. He is dreaming. Of lights. Of cameras. Of more sleep.
FADE TO BLACK
