Giving birth, my way
July 8th, 2008 by screenwriterguy
So I spent the weekend at a good friend’s wedding in Yosemite. After a few hours of tutoring on Thursday, I made the drive up, leaving Los Angeles at precisely the wrong time. Not that there’s a right time to get stuck behind an accident in L.A., but the beginning of a summer holiday weekend is definitely not it.
It was fantastic to see old friends, although all the baby-having that they’re doing is tough to deal with. On some level, I have to liken it to a horror movie in which your friends get replaced by pod people. They’re almost exactly the same as the person you remember, and yet now they are capable only of bleary communication about the temperment of their little poopmaker.
Don’t get me wrong; I love kids. Babies, on the other hand, are useless.
I know I’m supposed to coo and, y’know, care, but it isn’t in me. And I feel badly, because I’m sure my friends can tell. I’m not a good faker. I guess I’m missing the gene that makes one want to talk all goobly when they see a fat little face.
And, have you ever noticed, there are these moments when people who have babies will end their conversation and all stare at every last thing the baby is doing—which, by the way, is nothing—and this is somehow entertainment? I sorta want to scream, “WHAT?! What are we looking at? The baby isn’t thinking anything. It has an IQ comparable to a house cat’s.”
Maybe one day the pod invasion will get to me, too. People do ask. But I explain that I don’t even date, as writing is my everything, and they don’t seem to understand me any better than I understand them. Having kids, it seems, is what all the cool kids are doing.
Thankfully, while they deliberate their baby schedules and their baby lives, we unencumbered get lots of extra minutes in the schedule of an event like a wedding. One of the nice things about being a writer is that you can do it anywhere, and need very little equipment.
My first full day there was the best. I followed a river for a while till I found a rock in the shade where I could sit without any signs of human beings. After only a little time away from all distraction I had an epiphanous moment, and out flows one of the better ideas I’ve had in quite some time. (I hate when screenwriting bloggers tell you they’re working on something but don’t give you any details, but it’s far too early to describe this project. Let me offer you this: It’s a project that I think I can sell as a series of webisodes that pretty organically come together to be the length of a TV show. Plus, I think the central story naturally lends itself to a very low production cost. Like, I could probably shoot the pilot myself for about $2K and have something decent. Plus it has that combination of unlike-what-we’ve-seen-before and yet far-from-revolutionary that executives like so much. Sweet.)
My productivity was interrupted somewhat when this walrus of a man and his Dudley Dursley-esque son found my corner of the river and went for a swim. There was, however, a positive side to the interruption. The kid, upon seeing me with my little tablet, asked, “Do you take notes?”
“I’m a writer,” I explained. It was one of the first times I didn’t feel the need to explain myself, but instead went with such straight self-description. It probably helped that I’d had my best idea of the year only an hour or so before.
“You’re a writer?” the kid parroted, “Oh, that’s cool!”
Indeed, kid, it is cool.
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