In My Own Voice

I had dinner last week with my fellow writers on our last day in the writers room.

My friend Gina and I sat next to each other in this darkly lit, romantic restaurant in Woodland Hills. We've been friends for over ten years and Gina has seen my work evolve. We worked on a ten minute play festival together that we produced with other NYU alumni writers. We've been good friends for a long time and Gina has always been supportive. She has come to various play readings of mine and came to one over the summer of the play I wrote that I basically feel has changed the way I write.

As we've sitting over dinner and everyone else is talking, Gina leans over and says, "You know, I have to tell you again how great that play is." I nodded politely and thanked her. "I don't think we've ever talked about it. Is [my manager] sending it out?"

I told her that he wasn't - we actually share the same manager. Then she proceeded to tell me something really beautiful and humbling. She said that the play was something special. That she knew my work and that my other work was good, but this was ME. I listened to her compliments, which were so kind, and I just nodded with the occasional thank you. I told her that I had been afraid to write in that voice because I felt like it was too much. She looked me right in the eye.

"You should always write in that voice. That's your voice."

I have been writing since I was in the seventh grade. Miss Russell would have us write short stories and all of my stories were about comic book heroes because all I did was watch TV and read comic books. Then in high school I stopped reading comic books and I started writing little short stories or novellas. I wrote something that was 120 pages once - at my little computer in the corner during one summer. I think it was about the boy across the street that I had a crush on. In college, I wrote more fiction and eventually started writing plays.

I couldn't stop writing. I had a lifetime's worth - at that point, 20 years - of things to say. I never thought it was bad, but I knew my writing wasn't as good as it could be. I thought that about my writing for years. I had emotion that I couldn't tap into. I didn't know if I ever would tap into it. I was writing characters who were supposed to be far more mature than I. But nothing stopped me. I wanted to be that person I saw myself becoming one day.

Eventually, I got to graduate school. And then I got out here to LA to try and write in TV. I had developed a personality, but my writing didn't have that distinction. Yet I was still obsessed to become a better writer. And through writing I became better. I became a skilled technician as a writer. And with some luck, I would have had a career as that writer. I am of mixed race - someone should have hired me back then. I should have had a career earlier purely because I checked a lot of boxes - I could have been a very rich quota filler.

Year after year, I would get angrier and more frustrated that something wasn't happening. I would hear bosses and people I respected say to me, "You're doing all of the right things." Yet, it never felt that way. The one thing that kept me going was that I could feel myself getting better. I knew that in script after script, I was getting better. And for the record, I had some excellent spec scripts for shows like The Office, 30 Rock and Modern Family. I stand by the proficiency of all of those specs. I also had about 10 others that were at various levels of good. Any of these scripts could or should have gotten me a job at that point, I thought. I just was tired of waiting.

But something gnawed at the back of my brain. I had no voice. I was funny in person. I was weird. I was attractive and liked to socialize. I had stopped being shy and awkward and became someone who could fake being cool - or at least, cool enough. At that point, I was even living a Hollywood life - by hitching my wagon to a guy to whom that was of paramount importance. So I made it important to me. But I did nothing to find this voice. I found a lot of noise to distract and to drown out any silence so it wouldn't be obvious that I had no voice in my writing. And at that time, I literally had no voice in my relationship. I was living someone else's dream of how to live.

We broke up. My Dad got sick. (I'm fast-tracking this because a lot of this stuff I've covered throughout the history of this blog.) I didn't know if I wanted to be a writer any more. It felt stupid. It felt indulgent and selfish. And I wasn't successful at it. But late at night I wrote anyway. Dad had bad days and I had to hold a lot of my own pain and suffering in. I had to be his caretaker. So at night, I would write - waiting for him to wake up and need something. I wrote things that had no real consequence. I wrote to keep from going crazy - it didn't matter to my what I was writing. I needed something to distract me. Then I found my way into another relationship - this time with someone much nicer, but also someone who needed me to be something I wasn't. I still hadn't gotten over that.

Dad died. I took a year to do nothing but go to therapy once a week. I didn't work. I lived off of unemployment for much longer than I needed to. But it was there and I kept getting extensions and I thought, "Why the fuck not?" I decided to take time for me. And I did a lot of soul searching during that time. I still hadn't found my voice yet. Not even the direct aftermath of my Dad's death would do that. But I had started writing about death in my work - I never had a character die or dealt with death anywhere in my plays or spec TV pilots. The good thing was that I spent a lot of time writing and getting better at writing these pilots. I got involved with my writers group to run writing challenges and to encourage my fellow writers to write pilots. I had worked in a development job for seven years where I got to see first hand what it was like to create some of the most influential TV shows of the past decade. I knew things. And I needed a community. So I took advantage and made myself available. I had a lot of friends tell me I should become an executive or a manager. But I felt too old for that, even years ago. And I was stubborn. I was going to write. I realized that even though nothing was more important than taking care of my Dad when he was sick, that I had to write. And I wasn't going to let a fickle TV industry tell me who I was or should be as a writer. I stopped chasing the dragon. I wrote without getting paid. In the two year period when I decided that I was going to make time to write no matter what, I wrote eight scripts and 3000 pages. I didn't care whether or not I was going to be called a writer by other people. I was writing.

Two years ago - in the second year of that two year period - I proposed a play to a theatre company that was going to develop five new plays with writers. I had seen a news report the year earlier about active shooter drills and I wanted to write an epic eight character play about it. And I did. And it had all of the characteristics of plays I had written before. It had humor. It had a crafty structure. It was smart. But if I'm being honest, it didn't have that specific voice. I love that play. I owe my TV career to that play. People like that play. I am so grateful for that play.

People did really like the play. And I had a friend tell me this was my "silver bullet play." It's her theory that there's that piece of material that "hits it out of the ballpark (a phrase that I hate, but not hers)." It's this idea that you've got the play that cuts through it all. It was the best thing I had written up to that point. It's a great play for a number of reasons. And in the middle of writing that play, I had two friends ask me when I was going to write about my Dad and when I was going to write a play in the voice that's how I talk to them - full of vulgarities and no fucks. I flippantly said they were the same play.

And they were.

Because so many people told me that the shooter play was going to be my silver bullet, I started writing this other play. The shooter play had a great reading - so wonderful and fulfilling. But I couldn't listen to more complements. They were starting to raise my expectations and I knew that was dangerous for me. So I started on this other thing. I brought in the first 19 pages to my writers group and the head of the group flipped over it. "Keep writing. This is fucking amazing." My stomach had been turning at the thought of hearing it out loud because I had never written like this before. I finished the play three months later.

Long story only slightly shorter: He read it. He loved it. The company committed to a workshop. Then they asked me to join the company. Then we did a workshop five months later and that's the reading Gina saw.

That was my voice. 

It was me. I couldn't hide. I was vulgar and talking about my sex life and my dad's death. I was bare. And it was the play that made me see myself differently. I often say that my dad's death broke me open. Well, this play broke me open as a writer. I am different now.

And my friend Gina telling me that I was a good writer before, but that this was another level, really made me feel thankful for the entirely of my journey. This writer gets to experience the joy of writing this play. If I had the other things happen - purely out of luck, because I was no where near the writer I am now - then maybe I wouldn't be here for this. This is the guy I was trying to be. And now I don't know the person I'll be beyond this guy. But if life has taught me anything in the past five years, it's to  shout out to the Universe at the top of my lungs:

Surprise me.

I've learned to LOVE surprises.

My intention is to not know.
My intention is openness.
My intention is wonder.
My intention is expansion.
My intention is adventure.

I am grateful for the years nothing happened.
I am grateful for the more than 20 scripts I have written.
I am grateful for time.
I am grateful for patience.
I am grateful for my stubbornness.
I am grateful for my joy.
I am grateful that I am the person who wrote that play.