I have updated my [Loglines] page. I have revised loglines to short scripts on the page, and I have added loglines to longer works, too. In addition, I now have sample pages of the scripts available to read.

Take the time to check them out!

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In the midst of all the tragedies (RIP Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson) and the stumbles and falls that befell me today, I did receive a bright spot.

I learned my screenplay, The Problem with Being Happy, made it through the first round of the PAGE International Screenwriting Competition.

In ‘07, the pilot of a miniseries I wrote, Running from Miss Right, made it through the quarterfinals of this same contest.

I’m hoping to make it this time with HAPPY, but if not, this news is another whisper to my writing spirit that I’m on the right track, and my success is just around the corner.

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Cliché is at the root of audience dissatisfaction, and like a plague spread through ignorance, it now infects all story media.  Too often we close novels or exit theaters bored by an ending that was obvious from the beginning, disgruntled because we’ve seen these clichéd scenes and characters too many times before.  The cause of this worldwide epidemic is simple and clear; the source of all clichés can be traced to one thing and one thing alone:  The writer does not know the world of his story – Robert McKee, STORY

There is something to be said for doing some research and planning of a story, whether it’s as a plotter at the onset of the story or as a pantser who jumps right into a story and then has to backtrack to do some developing of characters, situations, events, etc.

This quote from McKee is an excellent one because in today’s media world of gimme, gimme, gimme–gimme more, gimme now, we find a lot of the same ole, same ole:  the same stories just different character names and locales.  We can nearly predict when an event is going to occur, and we can tell exactly what that event is.  Why is that?

Well, for one, we are a part of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” world – if a particular story is hot, then everyone will scramble to write the next best one just like it.  I’m already waiting for the 50-11 Slumdog Millionaires to clog my theatre screen.  In this “if it ain’t broke” world, some writers don’t try to be different; to be different might keep you from riding a trend wave, something I wrote about recently.

Another reason we find ourselves in Clichéville is some new writers (and some not-so-new) don’t take the time to study the craft of writing.  They get an idea for a story and think it’s easy to do and commence to writing; when the writing slows, they find themselves reaching into their mind for any snippet to toss into the story; those snippets often come from other stories.

We all need to realize that every story that can be written has been written.  We need to realize and accept this.  THEN, we need to realize that what makes our story different is our personal spin (due to personality, morals, convictions, likes, dislikes, beliefs, etc.) on that story and how close the story is to us.  We are the creator of the universe we place upon the page.  If we are not intrinsically connected to the world we write about, how do we expect a reader to want to visit the world?

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I finished ScriptFrenzy tonight!  Saying No to the Big O was completed at 101 pages.  I’m geeked.  Feel like I’ve accomplished something – now comes revision!

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Stanislavski asked his actors:  Are you in love with the art in yourself or yourself in the art?  You too must examine your motives for wanting to write the way you write.  What is your vision?  Each tale you create says to the audience:  “I believe life is like this.”  Every moment must be filled with your passionate conviction or we smell a phony – Robert McKee, STORY

In my time around, within the industry, I have seen so many writers opting to “write what sells.”  They have stories they are passionate about to write, but they see everybody selling in a particular genre and aim themselves to write that book and sell it.  Some sell it…some don’t.

Thing is trends, fads come and go.  A book that’s part of a trend now, in 2009, was probably bought a year, maybe two years ago.  It was hot in 2007, and the trend could be cooling down two years later…  Once everybody and his/her mama starts writing that same type of book, the industry becomes flooded with that genre and may start to back off from buying more…  If a writer is lucky enough (because sometimes publishing isn’t about talent but luck) to get published, his/her work might be likened to SO AND SO (add the top author of a genre) and the many other writers who have not created a unique voice but have simply added yet another book that reads like all the other books in that genre…  Most readers are quite intelligent; they can sense the passion it takes to write a good book, and if your book is just another like others, they will sense it, and it might hinder you from gaining a solid readership for future works.

Being true to your “true” writer self is important.  Yes, for many of us, publication is the platinum ring (I want better than the brass ring.)  However, we should not sell ourselves for it.  When we are true to developing our craft, to researching the industry (not mimicking it but being well-informed), to writing what is truly in our writer spirit to write; the right people will take notice, and literary dreams will come true.

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Update on Saying No to the Big O — I wrote 12 pages today, so I’m up to 87 pages!  4 days – 13 pages to go to make my 100 pages for Script Frenzy.  It’s all gravy now, LOL

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I sympathize with the youthful desire to make a first screenplay read like PERSONA.  But the dream of joining the avant-garde must wait while, like the artists before you, you too gain mastery of Classical form.  Don’t kid yourself into thinking that you understand Archplot because you’ve seen the movies.  You’ll know you understand it when you can do it.  The writer works at his skills until knowledge shifts from the left side of the brain to the right, until intellectual awareness becomes living craft – Robert McKee, STORY

If you want to know all about classical form and Archplot and the other terminology McKee uses, then you need to buy STORY today.

Essentially, McKee brings up an important point; writers who are serious about their craft need to study it and not take the act of writing nilly willy.

Many people say writing is subjective; for the most part, this is true.  People can love or hate a piece of art based on their personal preferences.  However, I’m one that also believes writing is objective.  There are rules, structure – from the grammar to the mechanics to the style to the…on and on – that instruct writers on the WHAT and the HOW of writing.

There are many writers out there, by the droves, who want to break the mold, to be different than everyone else.

My question is how can you do that if you don’t fully understand what’s out there and how it’s done.

You can watch a million movies, but that doesn’t mean you can write a great screenplay.

You can read a million books, but that doesn’t mean you can write a great book.

Yes, we can debate the successful ones who have gone on and have never had training or never studied the craft or never took writing too seriously, but they are the exception…not the rule.

If you want to be different, then you need to know what the “same” is and understand it so that you can develop your “different” way.

If you want to, for example, write a stream-of-consciousness novel, then you should know how a traditional novel works, understand the nuances of a stream-of-consciousness work, and figure out how you can fit in to that mold.

In the end, serious writers take writing seriously, and if that’s you, it’s time to get to studying so that each work you write is better than the last.

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OH, and my update on Saying No to the Big O:  From last night to today, I’ve written 15 pages; I’m not up to 75 pages.  For ScriptFrenzy, have to write 100 pages by the end of April 30th.  Twenty-five pages in five days.  Can I do it?

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To PLOT means to navigate through the dangerous terrain of story and when confronted by a dozen branching possibilities to choose the correct path.  Plot is the writer’s choice of events and their design in time – Robert McKee, STORY

I began my pursuit of an MFA in creative writing in the fall of 2001.

In the summer of 2003, I received an e-mail from my fiction professor asking me if he ever really knew who Shon Bacon was.

“Why?” I asked.

Well, he was bored and had started the game of putting students’ names into Yahoo and seeing what came up.  When he typed in ‘Shonell Bacon’ and ‘Shon Bacon,’ he realized I was a published author, an editor, an online magazine publisher, an interviewer of successful novelists, etc.

“Why didn’t I know about this?” he asked.  “Why didn’t you tell me you were published?”

I brought him back to my first semester in the program, during a Form and Theory of Fiction class in which during a discussion on genre vs. literature, he likened genre to Hallmark…and of course, literature was more substantial than that.

I was in the process of having my second “genre” novel be released and an erotic short story be published in a highly successful anthology.  Being in a program that was solely dedicated to literary fiction and having my “field” be delegated to an aisle in an Hallmark store kept me from revealing all the wonderful things I had done.

Why am I sharing this?

Well, another thing we talked about in class was plot, and in differentiating genre from literary fiction came the notion that genre is more plot-based; whereas, literary fiction focuses more on character.

At its purest, simplest way, this is true.

In a more complex way, this is totally untrue, and McKee’s quote above illustrates that.

ANY story, genre or literature, worth its merit must have some form of plot in the story.  In a recent romance novel I read and loved – Sweet Deception by Patricia Sargeant – the main characters are placed in a series of events (designed by the writer) and for the story to complete itself successfully, these characters must make decisions to propel themselves into new events that eventually lead them to their story’s conclusion (again, all of this designed by the writer).

I can pull any work of literature off my shelf right now, and it doesn’t matter if it’s written in classical form, or if it bucks form altogether, or if it minimizes the classical form; it still will have a plot.  Even a stream-of-consciousness novel like Ulysses by James Joyce has plot because plot is not a formula in which a story is written; plot is the writer’s creation of events and design to move the events to some conclusion.

Any story can become a complete and utter mess by branching off into any and every possible scenario an event can take, but because of the writer and his or her care for that story, he/she will find the best routes to take to make the story he or she wishes to tell complete.

No matter the genre…

UPDATE ON SCREENPLAY—today, I wrote 15.5 pages of Saying No to the Big O, so I’m now up to 60.5 pages.  Have EIGHT DAYS to write 40 pages.  Can I do it?  Me thinks YES.

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Still reading McKee’s STORY and nodding and yessing over it.

Something I read last night made me think about the Writers Boot Camp course I offer online.

McKee states, “Of the total creative effort represented in a finished work, 75 percent or more of a writer’s labor goes into designing a story.  Who are these characters?  What do they want?  Why do they want it?  How do they go about getting it?  What stops them?  What are the consequences?  Finding the answers to these grand questions and shaping them into story is our overwhelming creative task.

“Designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart.  Story demands both vivid imagination and powerful analytic thought.”

Those questions that McKee states are paramount to my WBC class.  They are important to the development of a strong story, of a story with a developed character, a solid situation, and a plot that moves toward a satisfying, “real” ending.

I, like McKee, care about the STORY, and if you’re a real writer, someone who’s doing this for the love of writing and with the desire to better your craft, then you will care about the STORY, too.

And speaking of story, I wrote ten pages to my screenplay, Saying No to the Big O.  Current page count:  44.

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Last night, I thought I was in church.

I began reading chapter one of Robert McKee’s STORY, and every five seconds, I was AMENing and nodding and shouting YES like he was the pastor of words.

In the pages I read, McKee discussed the decline of story and the loss of craft.

These are just some of the awesome tidbits:

The Decline of Story

…critic Kenneth Burke tells us, stories are equipment for living.

:::

…all fine films, novels, and plays, through all shades of the comic and tragic, entertain when they give the audience a fresh model of life empowered with an affective meaning.  To retreat behind the notion that the audience simply wants to dump its troubles at the door and escape reality is a cowardly abandonment of the artist’s responsibility.  Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.

:::

A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling.  When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates.  We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.  If not, as Yeats warned, “…the centre can not hold.”

The Loss of Craft

The novice [writer] plunges ahead, counting solely on experience, thinking that the life he’s lived and the films he’s seen [or books he's read] give him something to say and the way to say it.  Experience, however, is overrated.  Of course we want writers who don’t hide from life, who live deeply, observe closely.  This is vital but never enough.  For most writers, the knowledge they gain from reading and study equals or outweighs experience, especially if that experience goes unexamined.  Self-knowledge is the key – life plus deep reflection on our reactions to life.

:::

As for technique, what the novice mistakes for craft is simply his unconscious absorption of story elements from every novel, film, or play he’s ever encountered.  As he writes, he matches his work by trial and error against a model build up from accumulated reading and watching.  The unschooled writer calls this “instinct,” but it’s merely habit and it’s rigidly limiting.  He either imitates his mental prototype or imagines himself in the avant-garde and rebels against it.  But the haphazard groping toward or revolt against the sum of unconsciously ingrained repetitions is not, in any sense, technique, and leads to screenplays clogged with cliches of either the commercial or the art house variety.

Got two things to say:  A…and MEN.

If you’d like to pick ANY of these quotes to discuss, definitely jump in and do so…would love to talk writing with you guys!

Oh, and BTW, I wrote 13 pages today on my script, Saying No to the Big O.  Up to 34 pages now.  Excited.

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It was pretty appropriate that I received my copy of Robert McKee’s well-known book STORY in the mail yesterday.

For the first three days of Script Frenzy, I had been really sick.  I think it was the devil trying to mess with my spirit and get me off my game.  He succeeded, for a few days, and then came McKee.

Last night, before falling to sleep, I cracked open STORY and read the introduction.  It almost felt like talking to a lost friend.  It made me miss the days of my MFA program when my classmates and I would sit, drink, and for hours on end wax literarily about writing.

Afterward, we would all be so amped, we would rush home, turn off phones and TVs, and write until a slip of light leaked through blinds, alerting us to morning.

Many of the points McKee makes in his introduction weren’t new to me, but they were food for my literary stomach and filled me completely.

Story is about principles, not rules.

Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.

Story is about archetypes, not stereotypes.

Story is about thoroughness, not shortcuts.

Story is about the realities, not the mysteries of writing.

Story is about mastering the art, not second-guessing the marketplace.

Story is about respect, not disdain, for the audience.

Story is about originality, not duplication.

Want to know what these mean?  Get the book [here].  If you’re a writer, any style of writer, you owe your writing spirit this book.

As I read McKee’s thoughts on these points, my own thoughts were reaffirmed, solidified.  Things I have been thinking for years but allowed the market or others to sway my thoughts had been made firm again.

I went to bed with McKee’s words swirling about my head and my latest screenplay idea beating in my heart.

I was excited for the fourth day of Script Frenzy, for I would start a new screenplay – negative thoughts be damned.

The goal of Script Frenzy is to write a 100-page screenplay in 30 days.  Sounds easy, right?  I mean what’s 3, 4 pages a day.  No one says they have to be good, LOL

It’s not so easy when you have life and sickness and obligations coming from every direction and your writing begins to seem…so…hobbyish as opposed to being an integral part of what makes you, you.

So, today, I vowed to do coffee first and writing second.  NOTHING else would get done if I didn’t get pages written on the script.

I read through my outline I wrote a week ago and I charted what parts I wanted to get done by what dates to insure a script was done by the end of the month.

I sat and thought about my characters and the storyline.

I remembered McKee’s words.

And I wrote.

And I’m pleased.

Today, I wrote 21 pages. I’m 1/5 of the way through the 100 pages though in the end, I’m worried more about having a story written than having exactly 100 pages written.

Writing is on the agenda tomorrow.

McKee is on the agenda as bedtime reading.

Maybe he’ll inspire me again.

We shall see.

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I just submitted my screenplay The Problem with Being Happy to two competitions:  the 2009 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards and the BlueCat Screenwriting Competition.  This type of news wouldn’t necessarily warrant an update; however, this is pretty big for me.

TPwBH is the first feature-length screenplay I have written. (the oh-so-horrible scripts from my teenage years do not count.)  In 2007, I wrote a six-part miniseries adapted from a novel I wrote; the pilot was a quarterfinalist in the PAGE Awards.  In 2008, I began writing short scripts and my very first short – a one-pager – was a finalist in a competition.

2009 is the year of TPwBH and my short screenplays.

There are several more contests for TPwBH and goals to submit it to production companies, agents, etc.

Tomorrow, I start working on a new screenplay, Saying No to the Big O in April’s Script Frenzy.

I realize that no one is going to just give me anything, so I need to get up, put up the money and time and energy and dedication, and REACH MY GOALS.

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