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 had a pretty impressive collection of beginnings.

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. I needed life experiences! 

As I approached fifty, the joke stopped being funny.

By then, I had followed a career path that didn't involve much of a career in writing. 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 time in a high school drama classroom alongside a seventy-eight-year-old veteran teacher.

Along the way, I watched children become adults. I watched adults behave like children. I watched teachers try to reach students who weren't sure they wanted to be reached. I listened to teenagers talk through their worries during late evenings in the high school theater, often revealing more than they intended. I met people from different generations, classes, backgrounds, and belief systems. Some were wonderful. Some were infuriating. Most were a little of both, depending on the day.

I'd love to claim that all those years were deliberate research for my future screenwriting career. They weren't. Some of it was me paying attention, and some of it was me finding perfectly reasonable excuses not to sit down and do the thing I'd been telling people I wanted to do for decades.

But I was collecting material, whether I realized it or not.

When I finally committed to screenwriting, I didn't want to write one script and spend the next five years trying to convince someone to make it. I had too many stories I wanted to tell. Some were dark comedies, others dramas, thrillers, satires, horror, and science fiction. I wanted to see how many of those ideas that had been rattling around in my head could actually become movies. And whether any of them were as good as I'd imagined.

Different genres, same nervous system.

Looking back, almost everything I've written involves people trying to keep a bad situation from getting worse, usually while doing exactly the things that make it worse. I suppose that's what I find interesting about people. We're remarkably good at creating our own problems, often for reasons that make perfect sense to us at the time.

I like characters who make terrible decisions for understandable reasons. People who say something funny when they really shouldn't, or who manage to be completely right and spectacularly wrong at the same time. I'm interested in what people say when they're trying to hide something, and especially what they accidentally reveal in the process. Maybe that's why I've always enjoyed writing dialogue.

I also like stories that can make you laugh at something awful and then feel a little guilty about laughing. Life has always seemed full of those moments to me, and I don't see much reason to leave them out of movies.

I don't know whether waiting until fifty made me a better writer. It certainly gave me more people to write about. I had children, classrooms, marriages, strange jobs, friendships, arguments, disappointments, and thousands of conversations to draw from. I'm sure I couldn't have written most of these stories at twenty-five.

Of course, I also could have started a little sooner.

I still collect stories constantly. My phone is full of ideas, overheard conversations, and things that struck me as funny at the time, some of which I can no longer explain.

For the past several years, I've stopped living and started writing. Nonstop. I hope you find something you like.