About Me

For most of my life, I told people I was a writer. For a long time, the embarrassing truth was that I was mostly a collector of stories.

I wrote down every movie idea that came into my head. I watched people. I listened to the way they talked when they were proud, ashamed, scared, funny, cornered, or trying to pretend they were fine. I filled notebooks, phone notes, and emails to myself with scraps, titles, scenes, strange little premises, and half-formed characters. I also kept telling myself, half as a joke and half as an excuse, that I probably would not become a good writer until I was fifty.

As I approached fifty, the joke stopped being funny.

By then, I had lived a lot of lives that did not look like a straight path toward screenwriting. I majored in Theatre Arts. I worked in a used bookstore and a library, spent time in maintenance and construction, and later spent years in upper-level management in the greenhouse industry. I was a stay-at-home dad for eighteen years. I homeschooled my children for several years, volunteered in their classrooms, went back to school for teaching licensure, collaborated with college-aged students, and spent a year in a high school drama classroom alongside a seventy-eight-year-old veteran teacher.

In other words, I spent decades watching people.

I watched children become adults. I watched adults behave like children. I watched teachers try to reach students who were not sure they wanted to be reached. I watched parents carry private terror behind ordinary schedules. I listened to teenagers talk through their worries during late evenings in the high school theater. I watched workers, artists, retirees, dreamers, cynics, and people who were much funnier than they knew. I watched people from different ages, classes, backgrounds, and belief systems try to explain themselves, protect themselves, and survive themselves.

At some point, I realized I had not been avoiding writing. I had been gathering the raw material.

When I finally committed to screenwriting, I did not want to write one script and hope it defined me. I wanted to build a body of work. I wanted dark comedies, dramas, thrillers, satires, horror stories, science fiction, character pieces, and strange little human disasters. I wanted the work to be varied without feeling random. Different genres, same nervous system.

What connects my scripts is pressure. People under pressure. Families under pressure. Institutions under pressure. Bodies, memories, beliefs, marriages, careers, and entire identities pushed until something true comes out. Sometimes that truth is funny. Sometimes it is brutal. Usually, it is both.

I am drawn to stories about flawed people trying to survive themselves. I like characters who say the wrong thing beautifully, make terrible choices for understandable reasons, and find humor in moments where humor probably should not survive. My work tends to live somewhere between heartbreak and absurdity, because that is where life has always seemed most honest to me.

I came to writing later than I intended, but I do not think I came to it empty-handed. Waiting gave me range. It gave me children, classrooms, grief, bad jobs, good jokes, strange conversations, and years of watching people reveal themselves in small, unforgettable ways.

Now I write the stories that were collecting in my head all along.