Coming up with an idea is always the hardest part of anything creative. Writing the story for Ever and writing the script for Cold War has opened my eyes to two things: How amazingly egotistical writing makes you and how amazingly
egotistical you need to be to write.

I do not mean to imply that I was not egotistical going into this process. This would be a big/old lie.    Just to give you an idea about how egotistical I am:

  • I have carefully filed and kept every story I ever wrote, including one I wrote in 3rd grade about a baby seal that had super powers and used a helicopter to save other baby seals that had been captured by people who were going to club them for their skins (did I mention yet that my early education had kinda a left-wing slant?)
  • Often, in the middle of a conversation, I will think to myself, "I fail to see how this person's trip to England is relevant to the subject at hand, which is my trip to England. They should be quiet."
  • I have created this web page.
  • I have carefully filed and kept the sequel to the aforementioned baby seal story.
    		• Now Bob, like most things just borne,...
  • I often repeat my name out loud while wondering how it will appear to others:
    1. At the end of a tv commercial, as a selling point for a film.
    2. With my face, on the cover of Premiere magazine.
    3. On a toy surprise in a happy meal.


    • To make this next section easier, I will point out some of my more egotistical moments with an e factor of, say, 1 to 5.

    So what is it about writing that makes you egotistical, you say?(e=4) Well, it
    was pretty hungry... kind of traps you. Perhaps the most significant, albeit recent, discovery I have made (e=3)about creative writing is you don't really ever know how you do it. If you are writing news articles or interviews, then how you will write can be determined by a simple formula using what the focus of the magazine is about(and therefore the interests of the reader) and the subject matter you are dealing with:
    If you are writing for the Wall Street Journal, and you want to talk about the high Dow Jones average, you are going to answer simple questions like: How high is it? How high was
    it before? Is it gonna get higher, or go lower? The same questions you asked last year when you wrote about how low the Dow Jones average was.

    If you work for People magazine and you are doing an interview with the Dalai Lama, you would probably ask him: Is he visiting any other countries besides America? Where does he get his robes? And is he traveling with any famous celebrities of the female persuasion? Do they share a room?

    It's what your reader wants to know.(e=2)

    Now movies, well...they have computer programs now that randomly create plot lines. People say they work surprisingly well. I think, to some extent, this implies I am full of shit when I say that writing a script is hard, since this dumb program just spews out plot lines based on scrambling the plot lines of every movie ever made. I
    don't know who was surprised, though. I mean, top dog hollywood writers got 4 million to come up with 'Showgirls', so in a relative sense, it doesn't seem like that much of a challenge:
    (beep, oop ork- Cannonball Run III, replace Burt Reynold with George Clooney. Make Don Deluises' character a drag queen.) Hopefully they will release a patch for the program that will remove the "...and a meteor hit the earth" variable....





    		and a little pissed.



    This chapter has wandered so far off topic the only way I can save it is to start again.