But I love the blank page. I love being in a state of boundless possibility. I love the reminder that—even as a mere human—I have the ability to create whole worlds. Writing is a superpower. Writers conjure human emotions—horror, sadness, exhilaration, despair—simply by arranging words on a page. Churning up a person’s emotions is a great responsibility, and I have never taken it lightly.
When I was just starting out as a writer, I had the audacity to think that what I was creating with my words came from me. I thought the ideas, images, and stories that popped into my head were mine, that my brain had generated them, that I was some sort of wizard.
But now I know that the ability to create is a very different kind of gift. When I write, I am not manufacturing, as one might do in a factory or a lab, I am receiving. My job is not to mine my mind for characters, it’s to ask them to visit me, then completely surrender to them. Writing is listening. It’s spiritual, in the sense that what I write is not of me, but rather flows through me. Flipping on my computer and greeting the blank page is an act of surrender—like saying a prayer—then humbly trusting in God’s sacred gift.
That’s not to say there is no craft involved in writing a book or a script. What I receive is not fully formed. I have to pair the images that flow into my head with words, then shape those words into beautiful sentences, and those sentences into a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Creating is a dance with the divine. The blank page is the invitation. The ideas are the invited guests. I use words to wrangle them. It requires skill and faith in equal measure.
Some writing teachers will tell you, if you want to be a writer, you need to write every day. But I don’t agree with that. You need life experiences to understand what you are receiving—otherwise you can’t authentically transcribe them. You can’t create emotional content without experiencing emotions. Original stories are a tangle of what is divinely offered to you, and everything you’ve learned, felt, observed, experienced. Put more simply, you need to breathe in to breathe out. Living is breathing in. Putting words on the page is breathing out.
I always take a moment when I sit down in front of the blank page to give thanks for what I am about to receive. I make a silent promise to listen and to trust. And then I let it flow.
As I brought my fingers to the keyboard to begin the script that would either keep me in the game or be the end of this grand experiment, I reminded myself to open my heart. Because if I didn’t write from my heart, I would have nothing.
I took a big breath in, then one long, glorious breath out.
And my fingers began to type.
CHAPTER 27
The contract arrived in my inbox when Libby was making dinner.
I scrolled through it. It was just a first draft, but I was encouraged that they’d sent it so quickly, because it signaled they were serious about getting to work.
At this stage, there were no guarantees my script would get made into a film, but Laura was going to try to negotiate a penalty if it didn’t, which she hoped would increase the chances that it would.
I wasn’t getting paid in full yet, but the option fee was fair, and I would get that money right away. I also got a guaranteed writing step, which meant they would pay me to get the script ready for production, giving me a portion up front, and the rest when I finished. The two fees combined amounted to a little over a hundred grand—enough to feed and house us well into next year.
My eventual payday, if Jack moved forward with the movie, was almost seven figures. This was more than “get the girls back in dance lessons” money, it was life changing. It was “pay off the mortgage and get Libby’s diamond back” money. And I was going to do everything in my power to get it.
“Guess what I just got from Jack Kimball,” I called out to my wife, waving my iPad in the air, open to the contract. It was taco night. Libby was scooping out avocados to make guacamole, and she had a fleck of green mash on her nose.
“Chlamydia?” she guessed, then laughed at her own joke.
“It was only our first date!” I joked back. “I’m not that kind of guy.”
“Let’s see it!” she demanded as she wiped her hands on a towel. As she went to grab the iPad, I pulled it back out of her reach. She narrowed her eyes.
“I don’t have to take the deal,” I teased. “We can still go back to New York, it’s not too late.”
“You know I never really wanted to go back to New York,” she said. And I knew she was telling the truth. Because she had an even bigger ego than I did, the last thing she wanted was to give her dad an opportunity to say I told you so.