DIE TRYING 001

Not too many years ago, former Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh announced that he would beat arch-rival Ohio State or die trying.

People laughed at him. The Wolverines had been unable to beat the hated Buckeyes for many years. Until they reeled off four consecutive wins in The Game after Harbaugh’s war cry.

As an obsessive Michigan fan, I adopt Harbaugh’s do-or-die proposition. I’m not trying to win at ball. Instead, I’m a plucky writer trying to sell my latest screenplay, publish it as a novel or die trying.

This newsletter charts my journey in a disintegrating entertainment industry and publishing empire increasingly at risk of irrelevance.

Can my story about an existential hitman get published or projected on a screen?

Read on and join me on the quest!

I sit in the disintegrating faux leather chair, eyes closed, and thank God for letting me share my writer’s journey…

…so begins my morning meditation of an aging Gen X male, aiming to sell his screenplay to Hollywood or publish it as a novel.

The falling-apart relic from Costco shifted under my weight. The cradle of the chair was unbalanced on the base stand, and I was lopsided.

So seeped in the bad vibes. The doom scrolling windows. It wasn’t a screen but a window. A Windows XP smudged nightmare.

Memories of Overdevelopment emerged in the doom window of Ben Stiller telling Prof G how “hard” it was to get a project moving in Hollywood today.

Really? If it was hard for a legend like Stiller, what was it for me? An in-the-cold wannabe with the story of an existential assassin banking his luck on one last hit?

Impossible.

I shift my weight. The leather chair, missing one arm, shifts. I am balanced. My Bupkis less pole-vaulted. Calm down. Take a few breaths.

Another window doom scrolled into the precarious attempt at mental agility.

I had sent out my Going Perm to a coverage company that gives you notes and gives you a grade of “Recommend, Consider or Pass”. 

I got a Pass with the generic note that “the audience could also use a stronger sense of what [the protagonist] is trying to accomplish, both on a concrete and poetic level.”

Buckle down. 

My hero is a temporary citizen who wants to become a permanent one by pulling off one last hit. But what of the writer trying to gain permanent footing in a world that is not hostile but indifferent to unbankable neophytes?

Ok. Focus on the noir aspects of the story. The Hero is down on his luck. Trying to pluck some light feather of hope from the depths of bitterness.

There’s a motif of birds in the story. Maybe introduce the concept of a brightly colored feather falling in shafts of low-key lighting…?

BOOM!

Another window. Another podcast. 

Tom Brady complained to Joel Klatt about the current state of college football. Collegiate gladiators today are pampered by the NIL money and don’t know how to absorb defeat. No college player from the post-Indentured Servitude era will ever go on to win seven Super Bowl rings on hard-won wisdom.

The nagging window ebbed away, taken over by an epiphany that seized my frantic mind

NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR DISCOURAGEMENT

The citizenry has bills to pay, mates to impress, Final Bosses to be video gamed over.

Everyone’s got their own shit.

You’re an overeducated, entitled and greying creative raging in the age of artificially inseminated mechanization.

So put your head down, crawl under the gunfire and…

STEEL UP.

I am Sergeant Alvin C. York. Born in sleepy Pall Mall, Tennessee, in 1887.

In the current incarnation, I am pliantly soft-bellied. I will complain why they don’t hang me from a new rope…

Be my hero, THE ASSASSIN.

“Rope? Is that all that you got?” The Assassin asks as he laughs at The Executioner. “Why don’t you hang me from a metal noose?”

Meditation OVER.

I was on a call with a writer who transitioned from screenplays to novels. 

She’s opening a publishing house with her business partner. She says she gets submissions that are obviously written by AI. They get dumped straight in the trash.

That got me thinking. How can AI slop be useful to a new or experienced storyteller?

Months ago, I worked with a Hollywood development executive in shaping up my current screenplay, Going Perm. He liked the second draft but thought the logline (or one-sentence description of the story) needed work.

I plugged the logline into Anthropic’s Claude and asked how I could punch it up:

AI is good at inserting its own hackneyed bones into your story skeleton. 

Many screenwriters get halfway through their story and flounder in Act II — the massive middle of your two-hour movie. 

If you’re running out of story halfway through,  it might be helpful to condense your story into a logline and insert it into AI. ChatGPT or whatever will serve as a bumper for your pinball to bounce off of. Your thoughts might ricochet —your creative juices brew—and you’ll have more meat to finish the meal.

Just don’t use actual AI suggestions unless you want to be Captain Clique.

  “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”
Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

Reply to this email and let me know if you’re the matador or bull wherever you are in your seeking.

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