The Process

Oh, the Process...

Based on conversations with writer friends of mine, I'm happy to report I'm no different than them.  After all, best laid plans - and along the way, life happens. As a writer, I'm always working on "my" process.  It's constantly ebbing and flowing with my mood, activities, circumstances, etc.  But the process is more than creating characters and jerking them around in their world until they vomit.  It's LIFE - all of us, being jerked around in our world until we throw up.  Hopefully we have the courage to keep getting back on that crazy rollercoaster for another round.

Just over a year ago, I finished the latest draft of a dramatic script called "Somewhere Along the Way."  It's the first script I've written in a while that was straight drama (I tend toward supernatural movies and/or thrillers these days).  This story begins with a guy in his early 40s who is at a crossroads.  His marriage is failing, he feels disconnected from his college-aged children, and his family's homebuilding business is suffering through the worst housing crash in decades.  Everything he's known his entire adult life has come into question.  And, as a result, his own sense of self is a big friggin' question mark.  His process?  He runs to a familiar place, far from the current trials of life, back to where life used to make sense.  It's there after some happy, sad, and angry moments that he realizes that, despite all the plans he made, "Somewhere Along the Way" life just happened.  For better or worse, he is who he is because of all these little events.  And it's time for him to choose where he goes next.

We all choose how to deal with life's challenges (big and small),.  We simply MUST in order to remain viable as humans. While life zips by around us - seemingly at the speed of light these days - we're bombarded by our own IF/THEN statements.  Of course, most of our decisions are conscious, predetermined by evolution or our environment, or some combination thereof.  Regardless of how we ultimately decide, most decisions in life are innocuous (soy or no soy latte?  paper or plastic?) while others are lifechangers (quit or stay?  straight or gay?).  How we deal is our process - which ultimately generates the formulas on the spreadsheet of our lives.

Yeah, I know...  To some degree, seeing life as one big spreadsheet is macabre, maybe even a bit hokie.  I certainly don't want to place my very existence into the hands of those who gave us the blue screen.  But think about it:  the final cell on the spreadsheet of life is your eulogy - what those who knew you would say about you when you're gone.

You want to make sure the result of that final formula isn't #NAME? or #NULL.