YOUNGO'S FIELD NOTES

But sometimes, it’s necessary.

Sometimes it’s only through failure that you’re able to have the wool pulled from your eyes, see the writing on the wall, and start wondering how to be better.

I know in my own life, especially over the past few years, some of the most profound and wonderful and truly course-correcting changes — the big rethinks, the difficult realizations that freed me from an old way of being, inspired me charge forth into a new adventure, and made my soul come alive again… they came out of moments like this.

These dark nights of the soul are painful, yes. Frightening, definitely. But more crucial than anything to bring about big change… to inspire true repentance.

That’s a complicated word these days, one that conjures images of self-flagellation or street preacher guilt-trips or evangelical meltdowns about the depravity of our world… eye-rolly fear-of-God stuff that totally misses the essence of grace.

But the word’s true meaning is simply gorgeous: It means “a change of mind”. The act that follows epiphany.

And one of those is desperately needed in the world of politics.

My heart goes out to all the people who today are disenchanted… who today look ahead to a turbulent and uncertain future with dashed hopes and rattled convictions and confusion and fear and rage.

But I’m excited for us. This is the beginning of something good. I can feel it in my gut.

Because I know good things don’t always look like good things. And very often good things don’t feel like good things. Maybe this is the precipice of an electrifying rebirth.

I’d seen photos from friends in the UK, then back home in Ontario, then Alberta . . .  It was a crisp, clear night here in Chinatown, but even though I kept my eyes turned skyward, I couldn’t see anything. Blasted light pollution, I thought as I went to sleep. If I still lived in the country, this wouldn’t be a problem. There should be a city ordinance to shut off all the streetlights whenever something like this is supposed to happen. 

Then around midnight, the roommates came home and their clamor woke me up. I had a smoke and looked out the window. I thought I saw a faint green glow coming from the north, rising above the trees and buildings of Strathcona. At first I thought my eyes were just playing tricks on me — I’d been hoping to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights for months, and this was so subtle I wondered if I’d simply overturned my senses to catch any glimmer in the skies . . . was this a sleep-haze feat of the imagination? Mine has played bigger tricks on me before.

Then a tide of green beams rippled across the twilight sky . . . it pulsed brighter and brighter until I could no longer write it off as imaginary.

My heart filled with wonder. That giddy excitement of childhood marvels came over me . . . Tomorrow is Christmas morning, are those Santa’s footsteps on the roof? . . . the snowflakes are enormous, they look like falling stars . . . Some just tugged at my fishing line, I’ve got one! . . . and now, I’m seeing one of the seven wonders of the world! 

Something magical is happening . . . pay attention!

It was way past my bedtime, but I was energized. I tossed on a hoodie, forgot my phone, and took myself out for a midnight walk. The best place to see this would be Strathcona Park, where the light pollution would be weakest. As I came to the clearing, the entire skyline erupted with a light shone through a cosmic prism. The bands of radiation from a sunstorm danced across the atmosphere — reaching higher and wider and brighter and brighter . . . streamers of pink formed at its edges . . . a great neon watermelon shimmer coming from the heavens . . . I was struck by how little the scientific explanation seemed to matter once you were witnessing it.

My mind was overwhelmed with awe. My spirit, perhaps inspired by the dazzling display, came alight . . . Wonder of wonders, I prayed, what awesome feats of beauty God has made . . . what a breathtaking miracle is this creation . . . how can this be? Did David see this light when he wrote “I lift my eyes up to the heavens. Where does my help come from?” Did Saul see something like this before the scales fell from his eyes and he became Paul? Does it matter that there’s a rational explanation for something so irrationally gorgeous?

And all at once, the light show ended. 

Today, I think about those early moments in this midnight adventure — how that same question of whether you’re fooling yourself rises up so often in the walk of faith. Glimmers of holiness — this awesome majesty — can be found everywhere when you’re inclined to look . . . and they often feel like the eyes of your spirit playing tricks on you with mad crazy irrational hope . . . But every now and then, the heavens come alive and you realize it’s no trick at all . . . that you’ve fooled yourself into thinking you’ve fooled yourself. 

Everyone's born with an innate understanding of this. But then we grow up and get tangled in the straitjacket of what you might call conventional wisdom: The world is a big, ugly, dangerous place, with serious problems that require a serious mind to navigate. So we learn to fear mistakes and stop trusting our gut. We become prisoners to dogma and reason — jaded enemies of naiveté — and before we know it, we die long before we're buried.

That's probably why Jesus taught us that if we want to see Heaven here on Earth, we have to make ourselves like little children. Why the Eastern philosophies echo his words: Taoists point to the Uncarved Block as the way and Zen masters see children as "little Buddhas".

It almost seems too easy, but living isn't about becoming, it's about being.

Where are my fellow Jesus freaks at? I really think now is our cue.

We’ve got earthquakes and fire, wars and rumors of more… Civil unrest and turmoil up the wazoo.

I feel this present darkness trying to harden my heart. C’mon, fam. I know you feel it, too.

Yes, it’s prophecy fulfilled. It’s all in the book. But should we really just sit back and take in the view?

If it’s the endtimes indeed… if this is truly the moment… shouldn’t we roll up our sleeves, wade into the muck, and preach the message, loud and clear?

I might fail, but I’ll try. I can’t contain it any longer.

So if you’re reading this, here’s the Way:

It’s not resentment, but love.

It’s not war; it is peace.

And it’s joy in the face of despair.

It’s not divisions, but tolerance.

Not our wounds, but our kindness —

paying the cost, no matter how unfair.

That’s what Jesus did for us, after all.

You can’t be cynical; be faithful.

Be not vicious but gentle.

Sacrifice your anger for self-control.

Because while it feels right, anger is an ephemeral foundation. Houses built on it always fall.

We are all flawed and wounded, temporary creatures…

Worthy of nothing.

Yet God loved us so much that he died for us all the same. And wise Nietzche was wrong — God didn’t stay dead. I don’t care how it sounds. I am certain he rose again. And what he brought back is a gift we call grace.

Besides…

What kind of God would I believe in if they can’t conquer death?

Why should God make me comfortable?

Can I really worship something I know better than?

Dear friend, I don’t think that’s any faith at all.

It’s just too convenient.

But forget my opinion, and forget what you know.

The point is, God loves you and he’s calling you home.

Until we answer this call, all other revolutions are sandcastles — waves will rise and wash them away.

However, a light still shines in the darkness. It is not overcome. In the end, this light is all that will remain.

And whoever you are, whatever you stand for, I don’t want you to miss it.

If you already know this, then be salty; shine bright, and stand with your armor on:

Truth, righteousness, the peace of the Good News above, a shield of faith, a sword made of words, salvation… Set aside all the hate, shame, and scorn.

If the world needs a revolution, it’s a Jesus revolution.

Since history’s repeating itself, why not now?

So get out in the streets, start raising your voices, be the people he called us to be: not riotous, but meek. Not embittered but sweet.

Anything but subtle.

We can wait on the Lord and still act for revival.

I’m going out there.

My roommate and I had just gotten off the Skytrain in Chinatown when we spotted someone OD-ing. Suddenly our compassion stirred us both up, and we made it our mission to do something. They didn’t have any NARCAN on them, so we ran to the first establishment nearby, which was a Subway chain, but when we asked them if they had a kit, they looked at us like we were crazy.

Then we ran across the street to the Ivanhoe Tavern, a local establishment that’s served the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the misfits and castaways of Vancouver for over half a century… and the second we got inside and told the bartender what was happening, they popped into the back room and came back with a NARCAN kit — no questions, no raised eyebrows or comments… just, “Take it. Go save the life.”

So we ran back across Main Street, were people were gathering, and we got the stuff into their veins. Soon the ambulance arrived and took them off to hopefully live another day. A good deed done.

In the aftermath, we went back to the Ivanhoe to let the bartender know how it all worked out, just so they wouldn’t have to wonder about it for the rest of their shift… and after letting out a relieved sigh, the bartender told us that if we hadn’t gone in there and asked for the kit, they wouldn’t have noticed that they were down to their last one and needed to stock up.

I.

“I’ve realized that I used to be an explorer, but now I cannot be.” 

We sat with the open line hissing for some time. My buddy’s a musician who’s border-stalked the music industry for more than a decade. He’s as talented as they come, but he’s never managed to find his breakthrough. 

I know this defeat all too well myself. The path of a writer isn’t much different from the path of a musician — we just use different instruments. No matter your chosen art, the longer you shout into the void—however beautifully—the harder it becomes not to lose your voice. 

Something inside told me not to let him give up on his quest just yet. It’s a hard game to play, but a worthy one… and he’s too good to quit. We stewed in that silence we have both become accustomed to over the years of our monthly chats, and I prayed… 

Then suddenly I was hit with a pressing need to tell him, “Your music might never get where you want it to go, but it’s brightened my days, comforted me in my sadness, and has made my life a better thing to live. Maybe it won’t get you rich, but for what it’s worth, it’s made me rich.”

Like usual, what I expected to serve as a kind of spiritual chiropractic instead begat more silence. “I’m just tired, you know? I’m making my best stuff and it’s going nowhere. I don’t know if I can keep at it.”

We talked for a while longer, eventually coming to our usual ending point where we share our mystical experiences; our encounters with the divine… “We always end on the light,” he said. “And that’s what I love about these talks.” 

Then we hung up and I took myself out for a walkabout, hunting for some more of that light. 

II.

When I got sober, I found myself in a similar position. I had reached a dead-end, both in my habits and in my creative pursuits. I looked back on the reams of paper I’d inked-up and saw that none of it had amounted to very much besides some awards that never moved the needle and hundreds of TV credits for shows I couldn’t even remember writing. I had emptied myself out for a dream only to realize I would rather be full. This was especially disheartening because I’d developed an embarrassing addiction along the way, and the cultural promise that “if you suffer, you’ll make great art” had turned out to be a lie. 

Healing from my reliance on the green stuff turned writing—once my place of solace and the thing that gave my life purpose—into a grueling act of frustration. I pushed and pushed and found the pieces I wrote getting worse and worse. I stopped knowing who I was. After a few months of this, I came to the terrifying conclusion that maybe I wasn’t a writer at all… that I’d spent the past decade of my life chasing an invisible cat up a Jack-in-the-Beanstalk-sized tree… and that very possibly, my best words were behind me. I had set out to be an explorer, and here I was, shipwrecked…. “Now I cannot be.” After a few relapses, I found myself taking root in the community of my local church. There, not by intervention so much as dialysis, the addiction began to wane. Once I found the freedom I was looking for, I was suddenly okay with losing ten years of art if it meant my next ten would be clear-headed. I remembered something I used to muse upon earlier in life: The real art isn’t what you get on the page… No, no… the real work of art is your life. 

But in a world where value is everything, where is the place for the kind of art that cannot be bought or evaluated…  the thing Greek translations of the Bible refer to as “God’s poetry”…our lives? I think one of the reasons we see Western civilization crumbling is because we’ve lost our understanding of the worth of such poems. 

III.

Now that I’ve let go of the idol of finding my own big break, ironically, my work has flourished… and in directions I’d never have considered while I was chasing the dream. I’m beginning to see that the reason many talented artists can’t find a handhold in the capital-A art world  is because art is no longer truly art — it is content. In the digital age, we’ve lost our attention spans for authentic creativity, and yet somehow we all can sense how starved for it we’ve become. 

In his book, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life, Makoto Fujimura takes my thought a step further. It is not just our lives that are art, but our civilizations themselves. And our civilizations begin to languish when art is no longer valued as something transcendent but rather as an investment that requires a tangible return. Living in a world dictated by bottom lines and materialism, we can already see what it’s cost us: Depressing, 8-bit architecture, cookie-cutter films, dying publishing industries on a life-support system of potboiler fiction and trendy biographies… There is less and less human spirit in the things we make. Content reigns, but the soul has faded.

IV.

I recently got to visit one of the university protests happening over the conflict in the Middle East and I found myself thinking of the ’60s — how on the surface things seemed so similar, but something crucial was missing: protest art. Not just banners to wave or chants to shout through loudspeakers, but art… the kind that gets under your skin and really moves you… that really lasts. 

When I think back on many of the social movements that have popped up in my lifetime, I realize this has been lacking for quite a while… and I think one of the biggest reasons these movements die on the vine without bearing any real fruit is because they have a message but not a melody; a vision but not a picture; a path but not a dance… without the protest songs, aesthetic acts of rebellion and colorful flourishes we saw come to life in earlier generations, I think it’s hard for a movement to really work its way into the deeper parts of us. It reminds me of a parable I often chew on, which asks, “Why wash the outside of a cup or dish while leaving the inside dirty?” On the surface, we’re doing all the right things, but until we strike a deeper cord, it’s all kind of a waste of time.

After all, seeing the bars of your prison cell is not really freedom… And blaming the wardens might feel right, but it doesn’t start digging a hole in the wall behind the Rita Hayworth poster that leads to the outside world. 

V

It’s hard not to get cynical here, but that’s actually what I’m getting at… Slowly, as I talk with fellow artists struggling to find their way or activists trying to change the world, I’m realizing that what the world wants you to do is get cynical and give up. It wants you to stop making art. It wants you to stay on the surface, where change is easily absorbed by the status quo’s forward momentum. Anything that makes you stop and stare or listen in awe is what it’s trying to root out. Because any font of imagination shone into this world’s darkness might make us realize what we always do when we shine a light in the dark: that it never actually existed to begin with – it was merely an absence of illumination. So, that’s all very clever and poetic, but what do we do about it?

I don’t have any easy answers, but I am thinking of sunflowers. One of the pieces of Culture Care that lives rent-free in my head is this:

“In the summer of 2011, a Japanese farmer planted sunflower seeds in the tainted soil of Fukushima, a few miles away from the earthquake-damaged Daiei nuclear facilities. The radioactive leakage had continued since the devastating tsunami on March 11, 2011. Why would he do that? It’s because he learned that sunflowers have a unique ability to take up radioactive isotopes and store them in their seeds. The farmer would harvest the flowers, which contained pods of radioactivity, making the earth less polluted.”

We artists—and if life is the real art, then we are all artists—are those sunflower seeds. We’re currently deep in toxic soil, but we’re actually the source of that earth’s redemption. It doesn’t have to invite us for this to be the case. We simply have to keep making chutes, absorbing the toxic waste, and trusting that one day (with enough persistence) we will blossom and turn the wasteland before us into a dazzling field full of yellow like a living Van Gogh landscape. It’s exhausting work, often without a visible payoff, but like it says in Galatians: Let’s not allow ourselves to get weary of doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don’t give up. 

Here's the thing: hope was made for moments like this. For the days that feel like you’re deep in the hole, out of options, and just staring at the sky.

Believing in what you see is no belief at all — it’s just using your eyes. Belief means nothing when it’s robbed of troubles. Real hope is assurance in things yet to be. Hope is not the substance of what you see; it is the substance of unseen things.

Some days, letting the cold hook of cynicism catch me seems rational, but faith is not a rational practice. The spirit cannot be caught by a hook. So here’s an irrational comfort: 

Maybe when everything feels wrong it’s actually a blessing. Somewhere inside of all of us, there’s still a part that knows right from wrong. Lies like to make a show of their power. We somehow know that what is wrong roars like a lion, while what is right reveals itself in a whisper. It doesn’t have to shout. Truth doesn’t need to prove a thing — it just is.

Truth waits to be invited into our hearts.

The eternal spark, it can’t be extinguished.

It’s where the fire comes from, and the fuel for ignition is faith.

With loving care, this fire can swell into an inferno that overcomes all the shadows — and I know from experience that it will also change you, permanently.

Sometimes, after you’ve carried it a while, the fire dies down. Sometimes it seems like little more than a solitary ember.

Tempting though it is, when this happens, you mustn’t give into despair or let the fire go out.

However you can, scoop up the ember, hold it in your hands, grit your teeth if you need to, and carry it.

Don’t look at the darkness or the desert surrounding you; look for more fuel.

It seems impossible, but it actually doesn’t take much.

Like a single twig or a fallen leaf…

A gentle breath…

A silent prayer…

And the ember reignites, pushing the darkness back.

As the leper says to Prince Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke: “The world is cursed. But still you find reasons to keep living.”

So find a reason. A friend, a sunset, a flash of lightning, the clap of thunder, a falling cherry blossom, or embracing the downtrodden.

Let that tender whisper flow through you when it says: “Live and live fully.”

Appeared in Adbusters #171

The easy thing to do right now is pick a side. To let darkness get me all stirred up, convince me I know who’s right, put up my dukes and deny the humanity of the wrongdoer. But isn’t this line of thinking what leads to all bloodshed?

I’ve done too much wrong myself to be playing this game. How can I make these kind of judgments without weighing my own actions on the same scales?

I am trying to live a different way. One where, even if I find it difficult, I don’t just love my neighbors, I love my enemies, too.

Love is the ultimate revolutionary act — a beautiful paradox. Though it always protects, it does not dishonor others. Though it keeps no record of wrong, it also doesn’t delight in evil. Though it delights in truth, it is also slow to anger. Love is not the feeling TV, movies, or romance novels are selling. That’s just passion, and passion doesn’t last.

Genuine love is not an emotion, it’s an action — maybe the most challenging, difficult action of all. When I see the divisions all around me, I am reminded of the Kintsugi pottery my mother made when I was a boy. The shattered pieces of clay became a new creation held together with silver and gold. What was broken was now healed and made all the more beautiful and valuable.

[A little backstory before we dive in. I had worked for Adbusters as a contributing ed before the pandemic, and last year I had reached a dip into the famine side of a freelancer's feast/famine cycle. I started taking long walks and praying for a breakthrough; to find a new thing to do that might give me a chance to write more earnestly and get out of the performative cycle of showbiz... for some reason I kept finding myself around the Adbusters office, so one day I popped in for a visit. Soon after, I was given a story to write on Oliver Anthony, who I'd seen a clip of ages ago where he read Proverbs on the Joe Rogan Experience. At that point, I didn't catch his name, so he disappeared into the digital ether... And then came this assignment. I decided to take my first leap and write about what God was up to in my own life, and here's what came out:]

Appeared in Adbusters #170, November 2023

What really resonates with me isn't his music, it's what happened before he went viral: He’s depressed. He’s drowning in pot and alcohol. He’s afraid of what’ll happen if he sets his vices down and starts writing the songs he feels called to. Then he reads the Bible, starts talking to God, and his life goes bananas. This is my story, too (minus the becoming an overnight sensation). The difference is that unlike me, Oliver Anthony isn’t afraid of that story getting hated on when he shares it. He’s not playing for the crowd… He’s playing for his dogs.

You could chock it all up to mere authenticity, but I think what's happening in Oliver Anthony's music is actually quite deeper. It’s a holy moment: time slows, the light shifts, the air becomes electric… It’s that look your partner gives you when you crack a bad joke; it’s giving a sandwich to a stranger in need; it’s answering “How ya doin’?” honestly, or someone’s hand on your shoulder when you’re grieving. It’s a seedling reaching for the sun, or an East Van crow dive-bombing you as if to say “Wake up, you ridiculous human! This is life!” 

I've got a real story for you.

It was Christmas, 2020. I was holed up from the great Panda here in Vancouver's Chinatown, with a tiny Norfolk Pine tree I'd bought to brighten my spirits while I spent my first Christmas alone. I was facetiming my mom and sister, opening gifts, and feeling pretty sorry for myself. Turns out, the introvert shell I'd been living under wasn't so great at handling the weight of unprecedented events and novel viri. In one of the boxes was a Bible. My sister—a trained Shaman and yoga teacher who'd adventured through New Age disciplines through most of my 20s—had recently started reading one herself, and was convinced there was more to it than either of us realized.

I love books, and I love my sister, so I accepted the gift and promptly put it on my bookshelf, where I fully intended for it to collect dust until the next time I moved.  But something about this exchange stuck with me. My sister has been sharing books with me ever since I learned to read, but in all that time, I'd never seen her give me one with this sort of apprehension. Perhaps, I thought, she's expecting me to beat her over the head with atheism. After all, soundbites from the new atheism movement in the early 2000s was about as far down the spiritual rabbit hole as I was willing to go back then, and I'd been vocal about my non-belief at many a family dinner through my 20s (too vocal, really, for it to truly be a belief in nothing). When I think back on the sense I got from my sister then, these words aren't quite doing her justice. She's a brave person — I've never known her to be afraid of letting anybody know what she believes in. But there was a change happening in her then that I'm only able to recognize through hindsight. And at any rate, this is not her story. That's hers to tell. And so the bible sat on my nightstand, thoroughly unread, collecting dust as intended.

By the summer, I was thriving. Or at least, that's how it looked on paper. I'd just finished writing a high-profile adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki's Future Boy Conan; I had a couple of kids shows I'd worked on about to start streaming on Netflix; my spec scripts were getting recognition from big-time writing competitions and I had a nice trove of accolades forming on my dresser. I was "living the dream" as my good friend put it: on the fast track to Hollywood, finding my voice, reaching an audience, and generally doing what I'd set out to do when I moved to Vancouver back in 2017...

Off-paper, though, I was quietly unraveling. 

It's not a new story that when you finally get what you want, you realize it doesn't fill the void. You don't need Jesus to figure that one out. But in the process of reaching this vista of success, I'd paid a heavy price. The rapid schedules, the pressure to produce exemplary writing, the desire to keep the little-engine-that-could a-chuggin'... It was unbearable. I found myself unable to talk to my peers about this, since it seemed so ungrateful to have what I had and still be hungry; to not be so impressed with all this impressive stuff. Maybe I'm a malcontent, I'd think. Maybe I should just shut up and appreciate it.

So I did what many an artist has done to cope with these pressures: I got addicted to drugs. I never hit the hard stuff, but the thing about smoking pot is it fools you into thinking it's benign. What started as a habit to get myself to sleep turned into a habit that got me through my weekly script orders. From there it snowballed. This was all as the world was still holding its breath, waiting to see if we'd ever return to a semblance of normal. The pot helped with that uncertainty, too. For every one of my challenges, I could toke-up, turn down the volume, and I enjoyed enough Ben & Jerry's that I still think they owe me a corporate sponsorship. I gained 30 pounds, got diagnosed with depression and anxiety, imploded every ounce of my social life, and withdrew into myself. The reliance on pot to keep the writing going became a self-imposed prison, one I couldn't see a way out of. When I tried writing sober, it felt like pulling teeth, came out clunky, and I couldn't get away with that kind of output and keep a roof over my head... Where else could I go but back to the cycle? This carried on for a long while, and nothing I tried — not journaling, or the Artist's Way, or movie-thons or reading good books or forays into CBT and mindfulness — seemed able to break me free.

Then one day, I eyed that dusty bible, and opened it on a whim. It started as a literary experiment. After all, I thought, these stories have lasted for thousands of years... maybe I can learn something from them. But soon, I was finding myself surprised by what I read – this was not the boring, prescriptive rulebook for a life in bondage that I thought it was. Instead, I found an exceptional account of human nature; our flaws, our fears, our doubts and our weaknesses. It read less like the myths I'd chewed on in my days writing fantasy novels and more like eyewitness reporting. It also lingered with me in a way that even the best literature fails to do. I found myself being changed by it... it was, as they say, alive and active. This freaked me out, and I laid off it for a while. I was finding myself compelled by the stories of Jesus, but I wasn't ready to accept that this could actually be real. So I went back to my old routines, kept smoking up and tossing myself on the hamster wheel of screenwriting. Tried to forget.

Then one day, I was walking past Lord Seymour Public School. It was early afternoon, and I was — as usual — stoned. All at once a strange feeling came over me. Words honestly fail to describe it, but it was as if I'd been asleep for many years and had suddenly woken up. And somehow, I just knew... Jesus was as real as the neighborhood I was looking at. And even if I was wrong, even if this was simply a delusion, I figured I already lived under the principle of an abstract, man-made delusion anyway. It was called a country. So why not change my citizenship and see what happened?

But could I really do that? Was it possible to lay down what I had been so certain for so many years was a rational, healthy skepticism? What would I have to give up? How would people look at me? I'd like to say all it took for me to dive in was this moment, but I needed more proof. So later, I went home and prayed to Jesus. I asked if he was real, could he help me break the substance addiction. I should tell you, even here I was also stoned. And in that moment, as I finished the prayer, I was suddenly sober. I know how that reads. I've told many people this story and I know how it sounds, but it's true. When you smoke as much pot as I was doing at the time, you get to know the sorts of tricks your mind can play on you; the paranoia, the false spiritual peaks, the mirage-like epiphanies that dissipate as soon as the high wears off... This was different. And it was enough to keep me off of pot and even cigarettes for half a year. 

Then, my grandmother died. This opened up a still healing wound I suffered back in 2017, when my other grandmother, grandfather, and aunt all died in quick succession. Before my last grandmother passed, I visited her in hospice on Vancouver Island, where I found her in remarkably great spirits. After a little talking, she noted, “Your generation doesn’t seem to have much use for it, but I’ve found my faith has always gotten me through. Even now, it still is.”

I wasn’t all that close to her, but when I got the news that she was gone, I fell off the wagon, hard. Thinking back on it now, I might have been looking for a reason to.

From there, I ping-ponged between life as I knew it and this new way I’d been invited to follow for a good three years. In that time, I went in so many circles it would make a corkscrew dizzy. But now I’ve been walking this road long enough to see those parts of myself that once seemed hopelessly inescapable fall away, one-by-one. I’ve been sober long enough that I’ve stopped counting the months. Miracles. In fact, these days, I scarcely recognize myself, and all in the good way. You could call that growing up, but to me, it’s supernatural. The more I read of this remarkable book, the more I see my life move in a different direction. It’s become obvious what was missing all those years ago when I thought I was living the dream was Jesus. And now that I’ve I dug into the evidence — the extra biblical accounts that back up how this person actually existed, the nuances of history often swept under the rug of convenience by culture — I find myself with no compelling arguments for him being a mere myth or delusion. Certain truths are undeniable once you’ve caught enough glimpses of them. (And yes, you do have to look for them.)

I have explored the darkness, I’ve reached its limit, and out there amid the specters of broken dreams and hopes deferred, I found the light. That might sound corny, but I can live with that. I will make no attempts to convince anybody of what I believe, but I will invite you… So if you’re curious, if you’re low in spirits, brokenhearted and mourning, if you hunger for justice, for mercy, for peace, if you’re in any way feeling lost… then Jesus is your guy. Pick up the Book of John and try him out for yourself.

This past Christmas, I posted a piece of scripture on Instagram from Isaiah that foretells the coming of the Messiah. A bemused old friend reached out and commented, “If there was ever someone I didn’t expect would become so religious, it’s you.” 

“Same here!” I replied. 

That’s the thing about adventures — if you let them, they’ll take you to places you’d never expect. 

Which leads me to the big “What’s the point of this, Youngo?” 

I’m in need of a place to start working out some new writing — essays, poems, what a friend of mine would call “mind journeys.” This feels like the place to do it, since it’s got a nice sort of full-circle vibe. If you’re not interested in hearing a guy musing on the Bible, sometimes whining, sometimes rambling, and often out of his depth, you’d probably best get off before the boat leaves shore. But if you’re into it, then I guess the next stage of this wild ride is about to begin.

If you’ve never heard of TVtropes.org, you are living under a very joyless rock. Part encyclopedia, part snark factory, and always running rampant with spoilers, it’s a treasure trove of every single trope known in storytelling.

What the squirrel-scrambling shit is a trope, you may ask?

According to one dictionary definition, “in the arts a trope is simply a common convention in a particular medium.”

Tropes are why Game of Thrones is full of epic sword clashing battles with ice zombies; why kids who go to remote cabins die in horror movies; why people who seemingly hate each other fall in love in romance movies; why Jessica Jones is a hard-drinking misanthrope instead of a misanthropic soccer mom.

There's no audience on the face of this earth that approaches your tale from a vacuum. They’ve seen stuff before. Over the years, certain ideas have become traditions in narratives, and these traditions create a sort of literary grammar that fuels expectation from your audience. You might think expectations are the bane of creative existence, but it’s not so with story. With stories, this pre-established language we speak with the audience allows them to predict what happens next — and that? That’s the good stuff. It's what allows you to throw a zag where everyone's preparing for a zig, and that gap between expectation and development cues a lightning strike in the dopamine pathways. It's what makes people lean in.

You can subvert them, or you can play them straight, but expectations are always a storyteller’s best friend.

The conventions of a given genre help you brainstorm the elements your story needs for it to be accessible, and this is by no means a limitation. Case and point? Witness.

No, no... Wrong movie.

WITNESS THIS USE OF TROPES

In Witness, we meet John Book, a city cop who’s on the path to discover some serious corruption within his precinct, and find himself in a life-or-death battle to expose the truth and right wrongs. Sounds pretty familiar, right?

But not if the entire third act (and much of the second) takes place on a farm… in an Amish community… with a freaking barn-raising sequence and everything. The genius of Witness is that it plays a lot of classical film noir conventions about flawed heroes putting themselves on the line to weed out corruption and throws your expectations out of whack by dumping you off in an almost alien world. You know what should happen, but because things go so off the rails from what’s familiar, you’re constantly doubting if a zig or a zag is on its way.

Inside of Witness, we find a lot of familiar turf: whether or not the big cop can trust his superiors, a murder that needs solving, the revelation that there may be no easy recourse when the murderer is revealed, and the need for John Book to take matters into his own hands, wrestling with the cost of violence and the need for justice. The reason this stuff works isn’t because it’s prescriptive; it’s because it speaks to something inside of us — all of us.

Tropes, conventions and expectations of genre, provide a shorthand that helps us see how — much like certain things show up in certain movies — certain things show up in certain parts of life. They are unifiers of experience. They remind us that while it often feels opposite — we all go through a lot of the same stuff as people.

Are you with me yet? Tropes are good. They’re your friend.

Well, either way, they’re my friend. Nestled away in the first draft of the Librarian and use it as the engine that drives conflict and pacing. So now that I’ve decided on a thematic premise and a genre — what does a mystery story require?

THE NECESSARY NECESSITIES

FIRST OF ALL, YOU NEED A MYSTERY. (HOLY DUH, BATPERSON!)

With this one, I’ve got the looming question of “where are all these missing kids going? Who’s behind it, and once we learn the truth, will our leads get to the bottom of it and free them before the curtain drops?”

This is why second drafts are fun: I’ve got all that figured out. The kids are stuck in Hazel West’s cavern lair outside of town, hooked up to her Wicked Witch machine that’s syphoning out their imaginations. I know somewhere near or in the third act, the Librarian is going to offer to give Hazel her substation imagination in exchange for freeing the kids, and Rory will have to operate on her own to save her.

YOU NEED A SLEUTH (DOUBLE-DUH, RIGHT?)

Another checkmark. Some things I’ll have to keep in mind about this are dynamics: Rory and Fiona the Librarian undergo something of a buddy cop arc, and to keep things interesting, their points of view are best served at odds with each other. I’ll do some more focusing on this when I start clarifying my character dynamics, but I’m planting the seed early so I don’t forget this. If I do, I run the risk of losing momentum and tension, and if they don’t start off with some friction, Fiona’s big sacrificial play and the bond these two form will go out the window.

YOU NEED A VILLAIN WITH A MOTIVATION THAT BRINGS THE PROTAGONIST’S INNER DILEMMA TO THE SURFACE

It’s not enough just to have a Wicked Witch doing wicked and witchy things. What’s essential is the element I sketched out when I was thinking about theme — if Hazel’s reason for kidnappings stems from her desire to deny her true nature, it will help Rory to get the perspective shift needed to deliver a satisfying arc. In Save the Cat, Blake Snyder sees mysteries not so much as whodunit, but whydunit. He sums up the overall purpose a story of this nature serves as such:

“…The investigation into the dark side of humanity (read: the crime) is often an investigation into ourselves in an M.C. Escher-kaleidoscopic-reptile-eating-its-own-tail kind of way. That’s what a good whydunit does — it turns the x-ray machine back on ourselves and asks, ‘Are we this evil?’”

THE MYSTERY’S STAKES NEED TO BE IN MOTION; THEY MUST ESCALATE AND GET PERSONAL FOR THE SLEUTH

From Hannibal to Knives Out to Se7en, it’s necessary that at some point the mystery starts getting personal. It locks the protagonist into solving the case: the killer sets their sights on the sleuth’s love interest, a key piece of evidence turns the investigation around and suddenly the hero is being scrutinized. This kind of progression keeps your second act from becoming inert, and it also keeps the audience from asking the ever-dreadful question of, “why don’t they just walk away?”

If things get personal, it’s much harder to walk away from the case. It raises the stakes. It’s a great midpoint to build to that spins the story in a more visceral direction and adds a layer of emotion that keeps the case from going cold.

In my current draft, I’ve got Hazel turning Rory’s parents — whom she’s been resenting for moving her from NYC out to rural California — into flying monkey henchpeople.

Riffing off my guiding principle of “If you reject who you are to avoid rejection by the world at large, you’ll wind up forgetting the value of who you are.” It stands to reason that I’ll expand the world a little and give Rory some classmates who become friends — and if you’re thinking “she’ll wind up stuck with a band of misfits who are ostracized by the school’s ruling class” well, you get a cookie.

I’ll dig more into what else I plan to add in another post — right now, I’m just making sure I know what ingredients I’m cooking with.

A TRAIL OF CLUES AND WITNESSES TO INTERROGATE

You can’t solve a crime without clues. You can’t get to the truth without asking a few people what’s going on. Without a trail for the detectives to follow, your mystery becomes inert. As I’ve harped on previously, a screenplay must have an unyielding sense of propulsion. Unlike novels, which are stories that start and stop and find their movement more from the inner world of its characters, movies are stories in action. They’re moving pictures. Now this is where the real fun and games of The Librarian might live: Imagine interrogating Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, or having the chief suspect being the Pied Piper (hey, he is known to kidnap children…), or how about seeking the help of Holmes and Watson to solve the case in a rapid-fire montage?

A lot of this was already coming together in the first draft, but with the help of knowing my genre and having a theme to guide things, I’ve got a chance of making it pop.

RED HERRINGS — SOMETHING FISHY, BUT NOT THE ANSWER

You know these, yet they always get you off-guard. It seems like the sleuth’s found their lead suspect; or maybe the supposed killer is behind bars. All signs point to Colonel Mustard in the study with a candlestick… But then, the unthinkable happens: another victim appears, an unexpected message arrives or a fresh piece of evidence appears in the mailbox. Great Garbanzo Beans! We had it all wrong, Scoobs! A good red herring isn’t just about throwing in a twist to keep things fresh, it’s there to let put your audience in the detective’s shoes. You invite them to solve the mystery, and maybe even get ahead of the protagonist so that they’re sitting back in their chair with a smug expression, saying: “I’ve got this all figured out. I could be a detective.”

The best way to keep an audience interested is to let them use their desire for predicting the outcome and turning it against them. It’s one of the few areas in life where duping someone makes them like you. Now, it’s essential that you play fair, and that when the real perpetrator is revealed, it doesn’t feel like you just randomly chose somebody to pull one over on your audience… So the trick is having the evidence lead to both the Red Herring and the True Blue Herring.

THE BIG REVEAL/SOLUTION TO THE FINAL PROBLEM

Once all the evidence has been pored over, after every suspect is interrogated, after the stakes close in and get personal with the detective, and once we’ve see the true color of the herring, there’s only one thing to do: bring the truth to light in the final confrontation. Many times, this sequence climaxes with the killer/thief/kidnapper doing a big “Why and how I did it” speech — sometimes with a slew of flashpops showing all the places we missed them at work on our way here. Think of Hot Fuzz when Nicolas Angel finally learns that the town council has been killing off villagers who stood in their way. Think of the tastefully-sweatered Chris Evans when his plot to steal his father’s estate is revealed by Southern Drawl Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas. Don’t linger too long on creep-show Kevin Spacey’s rant about the sins of this world and how Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt are no exception… But you get the picture. It’s, “Okay. You got me, but by the way…”

There’s always an opportunity in this sequence to throw in one last twist; a final explosion of excitement that makes us question whether the hero will find justice or wind up a victim themselves. This is the moment where the dark flaw shared by protagonist and antagonist comes to a head — and it’s their different tactics for wrestling with their dilemma that decide the story’s conclusion.

You can be happy or you can be sad here. Doesn’t really matter. But since I’m writing for kids and am much more interested in doing material that offers hope instead of cynicism, I think I’ll go with happy.

——

And that’s the list. At this point, you might be thinking, “Wow, this is super paint-by-numbers, isn’t it?” Well... no. You can’t subvert something if you don’t know what the thing is. Not to mention, these are all pretty wide bins to start collecting different story elements. They’re not prescribed plot points; they’re tropes that help build gaps between the audience’s anticipation and the results of my scenes. They inform more than they dictate. One of the best ways to play with all of this stuff — aside from altering the setting like Witness does — is to place these elements in unexpected places: for me, I’m loosely planning to have the “big reveal” scene come early, before my “all is lost” and have my third act be a big chase sequence to pay off my original intentions of writing a fun kids’ adventure tale. Yours may be different. That’s the thing about cake: it’s still cake any way you slice it.

Not just a trade magazine, Variety is the spice of life... And waffles. It’s not just theme or character that help you determine what stays in and what stays out of a rewrite. Genre is your other King Kahuna. For me, once I figure out exactly what it is I’m trying to say, the next question is usually “How do I say it?” This is often followed by, “What’s for breakfast?” But since we know the answer to that is waffles and doom-scrolling, “How do I say it?” will be today’s focus.

Blake Snyder — the king of simple wisdom about story that writers like to balk at for his quote-unquote prescriptive nature — paints the scene in Save the Cat! by having you imagine opening up the paper and reading the loglines. What kind of movie do you feel like watching tonight?

At the risk of losing my younger audience who thinks newspaper is just what artisanal salad bowls come wrapped in so they’re #authentic, let’s leap back to this century and update the scenario:

You’ve just ordered your favorite vegan short ribs on Uber Eats and you’re plopping down on the couch with our old pal Netflix. Maybe you just watch the top 20, but if you have any sense of adventure at all, you’re already trying to narrow down your choices. Remember that handy genre drop-down?

Y'know... this old friend.

Just like the categories on Uber Eats, genre helps an audience know if your movie is for them or not. Without having to jump in blind, it gives you a sense of what you’re ordering — a curry is spicy, ice cream is sweet, Japadog sounds crazy but is unbelievably delicious... A funny, a scary, a twisty thing, a brainy independent thing, et cetera.

Once again, lots of writers will balk at anything that forces them to pin down what they’re story is about. They’ll feel like it paints them into a corner, like it keeps them from letting their creative freak flag fly, like it oversimplifies the stunningly original and intellectually riveting expression of the human condition into a two-toned bitmap. They’ll see it as rules — because there are some. The same way you’d be pissed if your Wagyu Beef Taeriyamo from Japadog order arrives and there's a fruitcake instead of a Japanese-American frankenweenie in the bag, an audience feels ripped off if they think they’re going into one thing and get another.

“But wait!” I can almost hear some first year film school students whining, “I’ve been to a ton of movies that I thought would be one way and wound up totally flipping the premise halfway through. Who is this guy? Has he even seen Parasite? I’m writing my own thing.”

Go ahead. I’m not rewriting your script, and I have seen Parasite… And while indeed, things are absolutely not as they appear, you know going into Parasite that you’re in for surprises. It’s not billed as a family drama. It’s a thriller. Yes, it is — it’s right on Google. Look it up.

Or in our case, "Film school kid, hates boxes, makes things that are literally inside of a rectangle."

The book of Ecclesiastes has a big section that tells you there are times for some things, and times when those things are over. So there is absolutely a time to let your creative impulse run amok; and a time to get your narrative in control. Rewrites are that season.

The hot thing nowadays is to do something called an “elevated” version of a genre — that is, exec-speak for imbuing classical models of story with something that provides social commentary, makes an observation about not only our nature but our proclivity to a given type of narrative itself. I don’t think anybody actually knows how to elevate a genre, but I would take a wild guess that the mechanics are the same as with any good story…

Have something to say, not just a situation to present.

You get the picture. So why am I picking at genre next? Well, when we loop back to The Librarian, it’s got a potentially too-big scope. If any character can jump out a book, as the concept suggests, it stands to reason this script can run through movements of multiple genres in the course of its runtime. That’s an interesting notion, but again, it lacks focus. Without focus, you’ve got sweet looking car with no engine block. Yada yada, Youngo goes on about conflict and theme and premise until the cows come home… Remember, I’m still writing these things more for me than for you. Maybe the discomfort you feel can give you perspective on that script you’re writing more for you than an audience.

When I first wrote the Librarian back in 2021, I had pictured it as a sort of Ghibli-esque adventure story. It’s got your typical conventions of “newbie recruited into secret organization, struggles to the learn the ropes, and ultimately the student surpasses the master” but it plods along, exploring different potential characters and subplots in the way that only a first draft is allowed to. It’s a big, everything-in-the-pantry soup, and as a result, it sorta has too much flavor to taste anything. But as I did my margin notes and ruminated on what the central, compelling element of the thing really was, it became clear to me that it’s a mystery.

See, buried under the A-plot, in which Rory and her mentor (the titular Librarian) cleaning up a spill of characters in their town, and ultimately preventing Hazel the Wicked Witch of the West from destroying reality in her quest to become real, there was a mystery. Because one of the “Rules of the World” I established was that Hazel is able to boost her ability to stay in reality by sapping the imagination out of the town’s children. Real, classic Evil Villain™ stuff, but it does the trick and it raises the stakes… And when it comes to my villains, I’m always looking horrible things they do for a reason. If Hazel doesn’t kidnap children and sap their imagination, she has to go back into the book and accept her status as a fictional character. So something about this feels like it sells.

Direct quote from me talking to my second draft.

You may remember how I’m also always hunting for things that stay with me. Well, the image of a bunch of missing persons notices posted on a library cork board is one of those images. It’s nothing revolutionary, to be sure, but it’s sticky. When the time came to start concocting a rewrite plan, I knew this was going to be the element that needed to come to the surface; it connects the personal stakes of the protagonist and antagonist to larger stakes of the story world they inhabit. It’s got a sense of darkness that feels reminiscent of old fairy tales, it’s got a feeling of urgency that’ll give the kids in the audience a thrill and also give their parents nightmares. All that tension and intrigue has the potential to build to a totally satisfying conclusion when I free them — if I do my job right, anyway.

Knowing this, it’s pretty clear that while it’s a big fantasy adventure in concept, in its mechanics, this story is a mystery. And now that I’ve cracked that particular question, I’ve got some expectations on my hands.

Recently, my swashbuckling kids' adventure ESCAPE FROM STARRY NIGHT received the much-coveted score of 8 on The Black List. Here are some choice excerpts from a couple of very flattering evaluations: "There's a lot to like about ESCAPE FROM STARRY NIGHT. This is an exceptionally original screenplay taking place in an extremely creative fantasy world that really takes advantage of the animation medium. The plot remains conflict-rich and engaging from beginning to end too, and the piece has found a nice balance between heart-pounding adventure and comedy. And, the author has done a terrific job writing a story that will appeal to kids while also including plenty of elements for parents (namely, the art references)." "This script has a blockbuster family franchise written all over it. With a deeply inventive premise, a strong cast of characters, and a knack for cinematic visuals and action, it is guaranteed to find devoted fans across the demographic spectrum." Excuse me while I go squee some more over what a great honor this was.

I want the waffle, the whole waffle, and nothing but the waffle, please.

If zeroing in on this big picture stuff seems a little agonizing, it is. So much of writing is pure magic — inhabiting characters, speccing out arcs, running set ups and payoffs and turning a solid phrase in dialogue… But your structure, your narrative spine, your theme? Those elements are much more essential. Without this stuff, all the fun bits and bobs just scramble around like a herd of kittens in a thicket of catnip.

Cute, but so very useless.

Cue the house with no foundation adage. I’ve harped hard enough on that now, and I imagine some of you are thinking, “If what Youngo’s saying were true, would he really have gotten stuck like he just did in the previous entry?”

That’s art, folks — sometimes, you can go down weeklong paths thinking you’re breaking ground, only to discover you’re in that weird loop prison from Thor: Ragnarok and are back where you started. If you can’t hack that, you’re probably not long for this trade. Or, you’re just a genius, in which case — why the heck are you reading my blog?

Am I grumpy? Only because the coffee isn’t doing it today.

The thing is, these false starts and dead ends are all the product of lacking a clear thematic premise. It’s basically your creative GPS. So… how to leap the hurdle?

I started zeroing in on a nearly-working theme last session, and in the time since then I’ve realized it’s probably best to alter my approach to getting this thing nailed down. Last time, I was trying to build one out of a poorly constructed protagonist. I didn’t heed my own advice… And the one key element I forgot to add as the secret sauce when devising a premise is this: As the writer, you have to believe in it, too.

This may seem obvious, but at least for me, with the instinct to get cracking at the page, I’ve got a tendency to slap on something that works well enough and try to smooth over the problems later. In case you haven’t figured it out, this impulse is probably the reason for my shoddy first draft. With this in mind… Now what?

LET’S GET PERSONAL

Instead of spinning the problem solving wheels until burnout, I need to think a little more deeply. In order to control the narrative, and know what elements from Draft One I want to keep, I need to know my Big Why. That is: What purpose does this story serve?

Fame and riches is not a sufficient answer. Cows will fly before either happen.

This question is especially important when you’re writing something for kids. Sure, they’ll enjoy a good old yarn, but remember those vegetables we talked about? Well, this is how you sneak ‘em in. Writing for the general “kid” audience usually cuts people off at the legs — they’ll try to dumb things down, they’ll try to cast too wide a net, they’ll imagine what their idea of a kid would enjoy… And the sad news is, that idea of what a kid is — more often than not — is both patronizing and wrong.

Not a good foundation, huh?

I’ve been writing almost exclusively for kids for a little over three years now. The way I’ve found always works is to write something that you wish your kid self had when they were growing up. So keeping this in mind — is “books are cool, don’t sweat it” really a sufficient theme? Nope. Nope, nope, nope.

To give you an idea of how this works when it’s working, I’ll tell you a story about a little spec-script that could called Escape from Starry Night. With this, I wanted to capture how it felt growing up with my Mom — an artist who was struggling to come to grips with clinical depression while raising the creative rapscallion I described above. I wanted to give kids who might be going through something similar a place to realize that there’s hope for anybody coping with mental illness. I wanted to write something that would give struggling parents hope and give kids a crazy escapist adventure that fed them the vegetables surmised quite simply as, “Love can overcome darkness.” That lit the way for an adventure that’s been serving me very well, and I hope to find a home for on a screen someplace.

Now, I’m looking to break new ground, and to do so, I need to aim for a different set of thematic subjects. Where to begin? We begin, as always, in the past.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD YOUNGO

I was a delightfully weird kid. Anybody who knew me will tell you as much. Fiercely creative, stubborn, who spent a loads of time in worlds conjured from his imagination and seasoned with pop culture. I was the type of kid who would wear his before-cosplay-was-a-thing cosplay to school and face the (in hindsight, unavoidable) ridicule of his classmates. I was an outsider, a “loser”, and if I’m telling the truth, the funny part about it was I somehow believed that if people could see the world as I imagined it, I would gain acceptance. I longed to be seen, but wasn’t ready for the consequences that came with it. It made me feel like there was something wrong with me. Looking back, I’ve come to know that my weirdness was my superpower — and it’s set me on a path that’s been more rewarding than popularity ever could’ve been. That kid still lives within me, and now that I’m blessed with getting to imagine worlds and stories for a living, it’s the driving force in much of my day-to-day life.

If I could time travel, I’d show tell him two things:

1) Invest in medical stocks.

2) That the motley crew of misfits I surrounded myself with were so much better for me than life on the bleachers with the cool kids would’ve been.

No hate to you bleacher-sitters. There’s great value in being accepted and finding your rung on the social ladder, too. But I don’t know what your world was. I know what it was to feel alienated, to fear rejection, to go through the halls of G.L. Comba Public School waiting for a bully to punch me in the gut or make fun of my Dragon Ball Z predilection. Both sides of the fence had their ups and downs.

So I’m going to write something for the kids who felt like I did… And let’s be grown-ups for a moment: Don’t we all feel that anxiety of being left out? F.O.M.O., as they say? I still think there’s a stake at play in there that not only speaks to my inner kid, but to a universal audience. This is the thing I’m after. I want the young weirdos of today to realize that who they are is their greatest asset, and that trying to hide who you are will result in more pain than the price of acceptance is worth.

Hey, did you see that theme emerge right at the end there?

So here’s the thing: because my protagonist Rory is the weak link, beefing up the premise might require a change in perspective. Sometimes the easiest way to define our hero is to look at their antithesis — their force of opposition: the antagonist, the big bad, the villain.

For the Librarian, this arena is a lot more fully formed. I’ve mention that the general hook is that antagonists from classic literature are all trying to escape their covers, but that’s nebulous. Who specifically? Why?

Rejoice, for this element already exists in my first draft. Her name is Hazel West, A.K.A. the Wicked Witch of Oz’s Western hemisphere. Early on, she discovers that water in the land of reality doesn’t melt her the way it does in her pages, so she’s dead-set on escape the pages of L. Frank Baum and enjoy the simple pleasure of a bath. Hazel is much more clearly defined — not just by her absurd goal, but by a thematic element: She doesn’t want to be who she is.

Not so much that she doesn’t want to be evil — although, toying with this may very well make from some interesting character work — but that she doesn’t want to be fictional. She doesn’t want to be defined by her existence in a book, and because in the modern world, we’re reading less and less, she also feels ignored. In short, she is doing everything in her power to become real, to be seen, to be something contrary to her essence.

One of my great mentors in film school liked to say, “the antagonist is the measure of the protagonist.” I know what you’re thinking… Was Daniel schooled by a narrative fortune cookie? Jury’s out on that. But this is just simple math: your antagonist is the force of opposition. In narrative, characters are revealed by how they handle obstacles, and therefore in order for your hero to have a truly worth challenge, they have to meet a force of opposition with its thumb on their Achilles’ tendon. If they’re too easy to overcome, you’ve got no conflict, and then you’ve got no story… New day, same old saw. But it’s a simple and elegant truth.

For my personal brand of story, I like to have an antagonist who is essentially my hero’s inner problem gone totally wrong. By doing this, I set myself up for the villain not just to be overcome, but also be the force that teaches my protagonist to look within and address their own flaw — and by overcoming not just save the day, but grow as a character. It’s pretty classical, but the classics stay with us because they work so well.

And now I’m starting to see a thematic premise that does more than just force-feed the vegetables, and encapsulates more than just the hero’s inner problem. There’s a unit of opposites forming here (more on that down the line). This allows me to get more specific. So what am I trying to say? What will guide all my choices as I reshape this narrative? What is the lesson that will be undeniable by the end of the story that I’ll never say out loud and let the audience gather for themselves?

If you worry too much about the world rejecting you, you’ll wind up rejecting yourself.

Now we’re cooking with gas, right? Well, almost.

Because this sentiment, while being very sweet for outsiders, is still just a little too inert. It suggests consequence, but not necessarily conclusion. That means it gets you to the All is Lost/Dark Night of the Soul beat where your hero sees the error of their ways, but it leaves Act Three too open. How does this conclude? What’s the inevitable destination of this idea?

LET’S TRY ON A FEW OUTFITS, SHALL WE?

If you reject yourself to avoid rejection by the world, you’ll have nothing to stand on when the world turns on you.

If you worry too much about the world rejecting you, you’ll wind up rejecting yourself — and that will lead you to ruin.

If you allow the fear of rejection to cause self-rejection, you wind up surrendering control of your narrative.

Just given the subject matter of literary characters, that last one feels like it’s getting close. I need to dig into this just a little more. So what will help get this focused is weaving my protagonist, antagonist, concept, and genre together. So what do I know that can help inform this and get it just right?

I know that the literary characters are breaching the real world because they feel trapped inside their narratives — with the world around them threatening to leave them behind, they’re losing sight of their value. Not just the Wicked Witch, either. Every character in the Land of Fiction will feel this to some extent. This nicely mirrors a typical, “high school outsider feels like they’re being erased by the social conditions of school” narrative. If Rory is trying to fit in so as not to be erased, then she’s effectively going through the same situation as the fictional characters. Ultimately, the thing that seems to be in question here is how what makes you unique determines the value of who you are.

So I think the bin that catches everything is this:

If you reject who you are to avoid rejection by the world at large, you’ll wind up forgetting the value of who you are.

After all, while we love to hate a villain, don’t they have value? Do they not teach us all the things we shouldn’t do? Don’t they give us a place to examine how good ends don’t justify bad means? Sure, a paper-thin villain may only show us that “bad is bad” but even this can’t be dismissed as totally worthless. What is losing sight of your own worth if not total destruction? Isn’t the fate of being stuck hating who you are and rejected for it even worse than being rejected? And what are the stakes with this? To have nobody — not even your own self — appreciate your value is a state worse than death, right?

So I think we’ve got a take now. This principle suggests a conclusion, packs a healthy serving of vegetables, and life-or-death stakes all at once. It has the potential to guide every decision to follow in shaping the narrative.

Now, it might seem like tremendous overkill to have devoted days of noodling and some five-thousand words just to render a single sentence. But the value of this premise will become clear in every section that follows. So now I’ll write this premise on a cue card and tape it on my bedpost. I’ll keep it in a place I can always see it, so that from here on, I know what this story is really about.

“Great!” you’re thinking. “Now we can get cracking at scenes and payoffs and all the fun jazz, right?”

Our last waffle was a not-too-brief summary of finding a memorable concept and using a thematic premise to control the flow of the narrative. You might’ve noticed, I didn’t land on a solid thematic premise. I didn’t solve the problem.

Welcome to writing — you punch more holes than you patch, even on a good day.

Hop on in to the flying car of rewrite scribbles.

Are you itching for me to just get on with it and rewrite the damn story already? So am I. But if I just dive in without a plan, without a destination for my fueled up David Mamet jet, all I’m going to do is keep making problems and maybe get a solution or two by sheer luck alone. I’d be playing Whack-a-Mole and calling it writing. There’s a reason you don’t see typewriters at amusement parks — they’re not amusing.

You told me all I need's a destination, David.

The problem I ran into while trying to sculpt out a premise was stakes. I found a couple of ideas that suggested an ending and shed some light on a protagonist’s point of view, but it all came up flat. It’s because you could read them all, think of whether or not a character realized them, and ask yourself “Who cares?”

SPOILER ALERT: “Daniel cares.” is not a good enough answer. A film or animated feature requires hundreds of people, thousands-if-not-millions of dollars to produce, and two hours of a stranger's life is not earned by simply saying, “I care.”

It has to matter — but even more than it matters to us, it has to matter to the character we’re following through the story: The Protagonist. The Main Character. The Hero. In case you haven’t noticed, writers tend to come up with jargon when we’re procrastinating. They all mean the same.

If you’re here, you probably know the conventional wisdom that the way to create a protagonist is to find a character with a goal. You might think that once you have that, all you need to do to write a story is chuck obstacles in their way and you’ve got story. CUE THE OPERATION BUZZER. YOU’RE WRONG.

Because while the goal can be nifty, novel, and inspiring, it doesn’t mean a thing unless we understand what this goal means to the protagonist — what it will mean for them specifically if they succeed, or what it’ll mean for them if they fail.

It has to be personal.

This is why even in “save-the-world” narratives (pick your Marvel entry) there is nearly always a secondary character who represents what it would mean for the hero if they fail to save the world. It is specific, it is emotional, and while it looks like saving the world is all that matters, what it’s really about is saving your brother, or your girlfriend or your kid, etc.

Take Infinity War for example: which let you know Thanos was serious more — the dusting at the end? Or when he chokes out Loki and Thor slumps in defeat over his brother’s lifeless body? Duh.

Without stakes, you’re dead in the water. Your reader, your audience, even your chow-heisting dog won’t be able to help asking — “So what?”

Who cares? No, not you. Your protagonist.

GETTING TO THE POINT…

With this in mind, let’s return to Rory: addicted to her smartphone and described as this: “despite her age, the world’s already spinning too slowly for her.”

What’s at stake? What’s life and death for her in worldview?

No, you’re right, stop thinking. There’s nothing at stake here. It’s a nice description, but it ain’t a goal, there’s nothing to lose, there’s nothing on the line. Let’s suppose the general arc is “Rory will come to understand the value of books.” That is more or less the arc in my first draft: She starts off wanting nothing more than to scroll Instagram and return to NYC, but her parents have dragged her to a small town. By encountering the Librarian — who is essentially a book cop that keeps villains on the page and protects reality — she learns the value of imagination over… what? It’s too vague. It’s not specific. It’s the main reason that the first act of the story fell flat, and no amount of polish can fix it.

My thinking here was following another piece of interesting-to-chew-on but useless in execution writing advice:

Make your protagonist be the one who has the longest journey to change.

Thinking this way, you can’t help going, “So they if they’re a bookworm, they won’t learn anything. They have to start off superficial and become hyper-literate by the end… That’s a heck of a journey.”

But ask yourself this: what happens if Rory doesn’t learn the value of books/imagination? Well, she’ll keep on finding meaning in life from her social channels. Will she wind up superficial because of that? Maybe… But does that matter? Well… not really.

So what this all means is that the thematic premise isn’t carrying enough stake. It means it’s time for some massive overhaul — and it means trying to pin down some matter of a dilemma we can relate to on an emotional level, not an intellectual one.

Are you stumped? I was for a bit. But after a few long walks and much noodling, I realized there is something to the idea of teaching a kid to break away from superficiality. There is a possible emotional inroad here: Popularity.

Social acceptance may not be life-and-death in the literal sense, but for a young person, it certainly feels like it is. As a bonus it’s already suggesting a flawed perspective right off the bat: confusion between a group accepting you and being popular. Does it pass the vegetables test? It’s starting to look pretty green and have more at stake than just, “will she learn to like books?”

The longest journey approach would be to have a vapid teenager who’s the Cordelia to her class get stuck in a library and learn to like the “stupid boring books” when the town internet goes down. But that doesn’t feel right. There’s a reason it was Buffy who led Buffy and not Cordy — and it ain’t just the because of the title of that show. Buffy had a secret; it’s our secrets and the things we hide in order to be accepted that creates tension. I’m cribbing something here and suggesting this.

She's asking the right question.

What if Rory was a bookworm, but hid it in order to be well liked, and because of the magical library McGuffin, she finally comes to realize that what makes her “weird” is actually her greatest asset? I know Rory has just moved from NYC to a coastal Californian town, and I know there’s a mystery there she’ll need to solve. There’s potential there to have a classic, “save the popular mean girl using weirdness and prove you’re not a loser after all.”

So all that concept-like goop starts taking shape when it’s molded into a premise that’s something along the lines of:

It’s better to be liked for who you are than to change who you are to be liked.

Now wait a sec, that’s a nice bit of sentiment. There’s stake, there’s a prospect of a goal, and given that we’ll be using a bunch of popular characters from fiction as secondary characters and an antagonist, there’s some synergy happening there… But does it suggest a plot?

Outsider discovers their true value? Hmm.

The world's least intimidating keyboard.

It’s a rare thing to get a day off lately. This is a blessing and a curse, because while my writing process includes large swaths of time for cleaning the house, it leaves little room for personal projects. I was approaching creative burnout at the beginning of the year, thanks to pulling 34 drafts to get the story pinned down for my kids adventure spec ESCAPE FROM STARRY NIGHT (which, if you follow me on social media, you’ve heard entirely enough about.) So I decided to give myself a vacation from new spec work for the past couple of months. Let me tell you this, but “always be writing” is shit advice. That’s like telling a chef, “always be cooking.” It doesn’t take into account that at some point you have to do the dishes, and there’s more to the process than just the act of slinging words itself.

Writing requires contemplation, story—much like a good soup—needs time to simmer before the flavors all lock in. An incessantly working mind is neither healthy, nor does it give your creative faculties enough time to really work the stuff out it needs to.

So there’s your first piece of writing advice: Being busy is not the same thing as being productive.

Tim Ferris said it first... Who is he? No idea.

Either way, the vacation is over, and I’m gearing up for 2022’s big pitch fest — Starry Night did well on the Black List and is in good contention in a few festivals (God willing), and so it’s time to prepare for the best and make sure I’ve got enough samples to appease whatever rep might want to pick me up. I have plenty on the shelf that runs the gamut of genre, but since the Little Script That Could is a kids adventure, I felt it best to have at least one other sample of that kind of work.

Fortunately, around the time I scratched out the first draft of Starry Night, I did just that. It’s another adventure about a disaffected tee who learns the value of imagination when she discovers her new town’s library is a mystical McGuffin that allows characters from its books to escape — and teams up with an eccentric Librarian to wrangle said characters while they get to the bottom of a series of kidnappings. It’s called THE LIBRARIAN. Shocker, right?

Already, you can see as a story, it’s a little loose, and a little full.

When I read through the draft, there was a lot I was happy with — some good set-ups and payoffs, a premise that feels like it has legs, at least one or two variations of (open source) classical characters I was happy with… But it was in no shape to show the world. If I’m being honest, I wouldn’t even show it to my Mom’s cat. So after a few tries at seeing if I could somehow tweak-and-polish it into better form, it became clear that wouldn’t break the biscuit.

See? That's totally a thing.

IT WAS TIME TO START FROM SCRATCH.

“So… how the heck do you do that?” you might be asking. Well, you know the old saw: Different strokes for different folks. So while I can’t tell you how it should be done, I can tell you how I do it.

And since I’ve been M.I.A. and haven’t written about writing in any substantial way since probably back in The Wrath of Con days, I thought I’d do it here. Live, for all to see. It’s not a How-to-write series, so much of a How-I-Write series. A look under the hood, if you will. Or maybe just under the hoodie…

That came out wrong.

It will be rough, a little all-over-the-place, and have lots of fits and starts. Maybe it’ll be of use, or maybe it’ll just get me through the overhaul by giving me a place to collect my thoughts. You may have to figure some context out for yourself here, but hey — it’s good practice for the world we live in, no? So here we go: let’s throw a whole draft of stuff into the trash can and start over.

Seriously though, who throws like this?

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS CONCEPT

Also known as the big ‘ole “What if?” And if you ask me, I think most writers don’t spend enough time on concept. We get excited about something clever or familiar; we crib an idea from something we’ve seen, and the urge is to just get writing. This is how you make a forgettable movie. Anybody and their dog can ask “what if?” (SPOILER: The dog’s concept is, “What if dinner was an all-the-time thing?)

Your concept is the foundation of your story — it must stand the test of time.

There’s no exact way to know which ones will and which ones won’t, but I’ve learned that — for me, anyway — it’s best to only pull the trigger once I’ve found something I can’t forget. Novelty is not enough. It has to be something that stays with me, something that won’t get out of my head and circles my imagination like a carrion bird. I figure, if it does that for me, there’s a good chance it’ll do it for other folks, too.

Using this as my first litmus test, I’ll write anywhere between 30 and 100 loglines a year; I usually only wind up writing 2 or 3. So the big question to start with is: Why this one? Why THE LIBRARIAN? Why not a spec about dogs pulling a food heist?

Put a pin in CHOW HEIST. Maybe next year, if it comes back to me and lends itself to the scope of a feature film, why not? But for now… Q&A.

1) Is the concept memorable?

I think a lot of us would love to be able to have our favorite characters come off the page and live with us. We want breakfast with Sherlock. We want to chase the Wicked Witch of the West with a squirt gun…. The list is long, but it’s something we’ve all dreamed of. I’ve had this thing cooking for a little over a year and haven’t forgotten about it, so — YES.

2) Has it stood the test of time?

See above.

3) Does it have enough meat to build a feature out of?

Already, it’s suggesting a world to explore, it’s got a hydra of possible paths forward, it’s fun, and I like it. So yep, yep, yep.

WRANGLE THAT CONCEPT — THEME/PREMISE/GUIDING PRINCIPLE

Having a strong concept opens the wellspring of imagination, and this can result in ungainly brainstorming. A narrative requires focus, a point-of-view, and when it’s really doing its job, it’ll reveal a truth about our experience living on this spinning blue-green marble. Some call this nugget theme; others call it a guiding principle. In his book The Art of Dramatic Writing, Lajos Egri calls it a PREMISE. Take your pick.

In essence, your theme is not a general arena as they teach in Creative Writing programs: It is a specific truth about some aspect of our nature that also suggests an outcome.

So not “Man vs. Nature” or “Love” or “Nature vs. Nurture.” Way too unspecific.

Think something more along the lines of “Pride comes before the fall” “No good deed goes unpunished” “unchecked hubris leads to disaster” or “underdogs can defeat evil (by blowing up a killer space ball)”

See the difference? The former ideas may get you a B+ on your book report, but the latter actually help inform the direction and scope of your story. You don’t need a B+, you need a story. You need momentum and conclusions.

You need a thematic premise. It’s the firing wand that allows you to control the accelerated particles within your Proton Pack.

Once you’ve got one, your character arcs will start to emerge, your general structure will take form… You will actually have material to help you decide how to tackle your third act, and while it may bemoan the pantsers lurking hereabouts, if you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t have a story yet.

…So what is mine?

Well, in the draft I have, my main character Rory is addicted to her smartphone and described as this: “despite her age, the world’s already spinning too slowly for her.”

What this suggests is that Rory doesn’t immediately see the value in books, in things that take time to solve… A premise you might pull from such a description could be: “Impatience causes distress” or “Cynicism makes you miss the wonders of novelty” or even “If you’re in a hurry to grow up, you’ll miss the fun of childhood.”

All true, but are you seeing what I’m seeing? They’re just… flat.

My gut tells me these premises don’t suggest a dynamic journey. They’re not complete. It’s a kids movie, so one of the things we want in the premise is what’s referred to in the biz as “the vegetables.” Basically, you want a kids movie to teach something important in a fun way. You want to put broccoli in the Mac and Cheese so that all the cheesy goodness also has a modicum of nutrition to it. This notion really shouldn’t be relegated to children’s fiction, but hey… Cynicism make you miss the fun of life just as much as childhood.

David Mamet summarizes theme in a truly David Mamet-y way: “If you’ve got a plane and some gas, you can fly anywhere, but you can’t just go up in the air and fly in circles. It’s pointless.” Without a destination in mind, you’ll never encounter obstacles. Without obstacles, you’ll never find conflict. Without conflict, you’ve got a story that’s about as alive as my withering grapefruit tree. (RIP, Charlie.)

So while the premises I’ve sketched out suggest some kind of direction, they don’t really have anything at stake. They might be a plane with gas, but they never leave the tarmac… And we all know how boring those moments before the plane takes off are. What I need here is something that suggests a conclusion but also has value.