by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Let me be clear — I keep talking about looking into screenwriting only to realize I really have to focus on the novel. So, this could be another one of those instances. And, there are a lot of reasons why me writing screenplays would likely be quixotic. I’m too old and where I live to name a few.
But now that I’ve reached a point where the novel is going really really fast, I find myself, again, thinking of a second track — screenwriting. It would be nice to have a second creative track where I start from scratch and head towards a goal, just like I did with this novel about three years ago.
There are two other reasons why this appeals to me — one, I can leverage what I’ve learned about storytelling from working on a novel to any effort to write a screenplay and this element of Hollywood:
I’m old, but something about randomly going to LA with a few scripts under my belt and hitting the pavement is very appealing to me. But I’m really going to focus on the novel for the time being. What I hope is there might be some cross-pollination between the two tracks.
But I’m very old. And, yet, if you get a few drinks in me I can be quite entertaining at a cocktail party and I’ve seen LA LA Land enough times to delude myself into thinking maybe, just maybe, if I just show up in LA that I can somehow, somewhere get invited to a cocktail party and have someone of note notice me.
And, yet, this won’t work unless I have more than one screenplay already written. I have three sold screenplay concepts in my head right now that I just have to map out and develop. The thinking is — if I can just finish three, I can fly to LA and see if I can work my old drunk Seoul expat scene magic. But I’m not going unless I have a few screenplays already written.
It just seems as though I might fit the metrics of Hollywood a bit better than the literary world. I can see why Twitter liberals might see me as something of a kook if they do due diligence on me via, say, the Internet Archive.
And I’m really too old — and live in the wrong part of the world — to even think about such things.
But I’m kind at the Singularity of loserdom right now, so I really don’t have much to lose at this point.
