relax, jake, it's television

The season is coming to end and we don't know if we're going to be renewed; ratings are great, but the exchange rate with the distant country where we shoot is bad and the economics may not work out of the studio. The really brave me would tell my wife "honey, rein in everything, fire the housekeeper, cancel the gardener, do your yoga at home, forget that wedding we were going to go to in Bordeaux, tell the kids they'll have to apply for loans for school, I'm going to follow my crazy heart right now."

But I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to start a round of meetings on television shows that I don't watch, meetings in which I will be smart and charming and breezy and funny and insightful and cool and, like Scarlett O'Hara visiting Rhett all dressed up in mama's curtains, acting like a job is the last thing I need in the whole wide world.

Why?

I don't know. I am.

Maybe because I'm not brave.

Or maybe because I'm honest, and know that the truest thing Hemingway ever wrote was a tossed-away line (as if anything in Hemingway is ever tossed-away) in The Snows Of Kilimanjaro (and I'm paraphrasing, because I don't have the book at hand): "What you do for a living is what you do for a living."

Maybe because I like it.

Progress

Done with the first chapter of Part Two (of three parts.) I actually worked in Paris. Worked in a shadowy high-ceilinged room in an apartment that was a gift from Louis-Napoleon, Emperor of the French, to one of his mistresses (who must have had a taste for gilded everything). Worked while there were museums to see and neighborhoods to explore and boudin noir to eat all around me. Which is not, of course, to say that I didn't get in a good bit of Titian, Montmartre and boudin on the side.

The problem, however, is pace. A novel can not be written a chapter a month. Can't. So something more is going to have to give. But what? When I wake up at 3 a.m. and work until 6 I am a wreck at work by 2 p.m. Drowsing at the table in the writer's room, dozing during casting sessions. It's wrong. It's embarrassing. It sets a bad example for the baby writers on the staff and it looks bad to the powers above me. I can fight it by getting up and pacing around and forcing my eyes open. But losing sleep is not the answer. So what, then? What? Weekends are good, but I need more.

How am I going to do this?

Paris: the challenge

In a month I go to Paris with the family for two weeks. Home exchange: our house in L.A. for a nice Parisian family's apartment a block from the cafe in which the opening scene of Celine's Journey To The End Of The Night takes place. I decided on that instead of hiking in New Zealand or kayaking in Mexico because I wanted to combine family fun with being in one place and getting a big schwack of work done on my book during the break from my duties on the series. (And it doesn't hurt that with the home exchange and buying the tickets with miles the trip is waaaaay cheaper than something more exotic.) So the question is: am I an idiot? Shouldn't I have not taken a trip at all and just stayed home? Will I really be able to get anything done while my daughter is saying hey dad let's go check out the Rodin museum and my son is saying hey dad there's an organ recital at St. Eustache and my wife is saying hey honey come sketching with me at the Louvre? Will I? Or will I once again put off the real work? Is there a 12 step program for compulsive travelers? For procrastinating novelists?

The Burning Ship

I know where my characters are headed. The big turn at the end of what in a movie would be the second act is all but written. But cooking up the emotional head of steam I need to make that turn explosive is going to take many thousands of extremely carefully chosen words and so far, with Part II of the book wide open before me, not one has been written. Meanwhile, I'm almost done writing the first draft of my episode for the show, so I've given myself the weekend to work on a way into Part II, with no other obligations and the wife still in New York and the house blacked out to keep the trick-or-treaters away. Am I getting somewhere? Am I any f%&king good at this at all?

To that last question, something like an answer came in a poem called The Burning Ship in this month's Atlantic. it's by Campbell MGrath, and it goes like this:

No room for regret or self-doubt in art,
doubt but not self-doubt. The ship hauls anchor,
the kerosene lantern flickers and goes out,
voices in the pitch black swell with anger

as shipmates mistake each other for enemies.
The lantern spills, the pilot drops a lit cigar.
Tragedy ensues and engenders more tragedy.
If only the moon could see, if only the stars

had been granted the power of speech.
But the blind remain blind, the voiceless mute.
The burning ship threads its way between reefs
in the darkness. Doubt, but not self-doubt.

Why?

I'm working on the script for an episode of my show that starts prepping the week after next; in fact, the (brilliant) elves in the art department are already sketching costumes and sets. The outline is in place and the script is flowing easily enough -- I take a moment to meditate on what the heartbeat of the scene in hand is going to be and then I start typing it out. In the current episode, for complicated plot reasons, about a quarter of the dialogue has to be in rhyming dactylic tetrameter (which may possibly be a world's first for an episode of a television show.) And even that isn't hard -- you push around a few ideas for the next block of poetry and it clicks into place. Or has so far. So why does a paragraph of my novel take me agonizing hours to chisel out of the granite of nil, and why does that feel right to me? Why have I spent two weeks trying to make one simple decision: do I switch POV from one character to the next for Part II, or do I stay in one character's head for the whole book? Why does the book feel so much more important to me than the TV? Why is it that I read some blogs and find myself aching to be teaching writing at a college for a living with a few published novels under my belt instead of writing TV for a living with a bunch of produced television under my belt? Would I really prefer that? I know that I like having lots of money. I like being able to travel to places like the one in the picture. I like it a little too much. It's the marble plinth my ego stands on. I know that one episode of my show is seen by many many times more people than will ever read my book, even on the very very very long shot that it is brilliantly reviewed and considered a success. I know that people -- not a mega-hit number of people, but an enough-to-get-ordered-for-a-second-season number of people -- take enough pleasure in my show to talk about it on line, and argue about it, and look forward to the next episode.

So why do I give that so little value?

A Writer's Prayer

Whoever you are up there, or in my head, or dissolved in the ether around me:

I handed in an outline for an episode of the show yesterday. It's pretty good. With input from my really sharp showrunner it will get better; the inputting will be a bruising experience and I will feel like a scolded third grader, but the scolding will be worth it, for the bettering of the story. By your grace, oh thing in the ether, none of this will happen until late Sunday. Which gives me two full entire errand-free days to work on my book. To dive head first into Part Two. To collect and read the notes I've collected through the decades, see what matters to me, dream my way to what might happen next, and maybe even figure out what word is going to be first out the gate. Oh great whatever the hell you are, give me one thing: make me Be Here. Not in the Huffington Post, not planning what restaurants I might want to eat at in Paris over Christmas, not checking blogs, not padding to the refrigerator to see if anything interesting materialized in there since the last time I checked. Here. Now. My thoughts on only one thing: on what my imaginary friends are going to do next.

I know it's a lot to ask. But I also that you are the Invisible Sky Being for the job.

Eternal Annapurna

Every new episode of the show feels like a new Annapurna to climb. Not helping matters is the mocking illusion that makes all previous episodes look easy in comparison. "Oh that one had the lost kid at the center, it wrote itself..." "That one I always knew the ending to, all I had to do was get there..." "That one had killer stakes, there was no way to screw it up..." Of course I know that at the time every one of those episodes seemed difficult to the point of unwriteable in comparison with the ones that had come before. So why does knowing that not make the episode I'm working on now any easier? Yes, it's just an hour of television among many many hours of television. But hammering out the story requires no less effort and precision than hammering out a chapter of a book. And right now on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles, with the stakes in the story feeling low, the resolution foregone and the story twists not half twisty enough, I feel that I am barely at base camp... And on November the 20th a director, actors, and a very big crew are going to have to start prepping something.