I had lunch recently with novelist and screenwriter Robert Morgan Fisher, who supervises the online screenwriting program at Writer’s Boot Camp (WBC) in Santa Monica, CA.  His first novel, called Set the Poem Free, won 2nd place in the 2000 Publishing Online North American Fiction Open.  He was awarded $5,000 and briefly published online.  The company fell in the dotcom decline, but, undeterred, Robert entered the screenplay adaptation of the novel in the 2000 Washington State Film Office Competition.  Six months later, he won the contest’s grand prize–a $1,000 cash award.  Better yet, one of the contest judges, a producer, called to talk with him about the script.  They had meetings, did “orbits” around the script (line-by-line readings for revision) and the development process with the producer (these things take time) continues.

Currently, the novel and script have been revised, expanded and retitled (In War With Time) and Robert’s book agent, Alice Volpe, is shopping the novel for a print deal.

Just after we met, Robert Morgan Fisher’s second novel, Minor Weiss, won the 2002 New Century Writer Award for Best Novel. Robert emailed  me a note with the good news saying it “initially came … as I was ‘Googling’ myself, if you can believe that, followed quickly by official notification. The New Century Prize is one of the few contests I’m still chasing these days so this was a big one for me and the prize money will come in handy. Hopefully, the fact that my follow-up manuscript has already won some recognition will mitigate publisher fears of a sophomore slump and hasten print deals for both novels.”

 On the day we met, my questions tumbled out: What is your own writing history and what writing are you doing now?  Why do you believe in the approach you are currently taking?  What information do you have for those hoping to write screenplays using their personal experience? And what do you see as the dos and don’ts of using personal experience in novel and screenwriting?

As the starter of Houston’s smoked salmon arrived, I laid the microphone and Sony mini-disc recorder I’d brought along at the end of the booth.  We noshed and Robert began:

Robert:
All writing is autobiographical on some level. My first novel takes place in the area of the country that I consider most formative in my childhood–Whidbey Island, WA.  I can point to places in that novel that I think show my use of a place that I know well.

When I wrote the screenplay adaptation, I also used autobiographical detail.

Sheila:
Can you show me an excerpt?

Robert:
You can see it in the background that Adult Audie offers  in this scene:

FADE IN:

INT./EXT. CAR – HIGHWAY – WASHINGTON STATE – DAY

1967 STATION WAGON, loaded down with LUGGAGE and BOXES.

THE GILLEN FAMILY:  AUDIE, 13, sits in back, flanked by his sulking sister, STEPHANIE, 12.  An open BOOK, “THE ROBERT W. SERVICE TREASURY,” on Audie’s lap.

                        ADULT AUDIE
I was the son of a warrior …

FRED, 36, operates vehicle with the disciplined concentration of the Navy fighter pilot that he is.  FLAT-TOP CREWCUT and AVIATOR RAY-BANS.  Prominent nose, like the prow of a destroyer.

His wife, ROSE, 34, rides shotgun.  Passing resemblance to Jackie O.  She lights a cigarette.

Audie tries to recite from memory:

                        AUDIE
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold …” Ummm …

FRED
C’mon, Audie.  “The Arctic –”

AUDIE
AUUGH!  Let me …
(beat)
“The Arctic trails have their secret tales –”  Darn it.

FRED
“That would make your blood run cold.”

AUDIE
Yes!  “The Northern Lights …”
(squints hard)

FRED
(from memory)
“– Have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see …Was that night on the Marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.”

AUDIE
(checks book)
That’s right.

FRED
“Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.  Why he left his home in the South to roam ’round the Pole nobody knows.  He was always cold …”

Audie looks out window, not listening as Fred drones on.

                        ADULT AUDIE

The first ten years of my life, we moved from one military base to another — anywhere we could find a defendable position.  When I was thirteen, at the height of the war, my family was taken prisoner …

****

Robert:
I write screenplay adaptations almost on the heels of the novels; I can feel a synergy between the two forms. Writing the novels and screenplay adaptations in tandem makes use of the synergy. Going between the two forms helps me drill down into the story and the conceptual aspects of it to make good story decisions.

My current project involves protagonist, Minor Weiss, a radio comedy writer (as I was) who has been hired to write television sitcoms. Although by age he is considered too old for the industry, he looks young so he gets a job.  Once hired, he puts together a staff of young people as he is supposed to, but he really works on scripts and ideas behind the scenes with older guys from his radio days. I’m happy to use my experience in writing, but for a good script, I have to be willing to dig deeper, to use my life experience as a stimulating point of departure.

Sheila:
I like that phrase, “stimulating point of departure.” Can you say any more about your experience in that direction?

Robert:
It simply frees one up to tell the most entertaining story possible. Unless it’s a memoir, one owes NOTHING to the source experience.

Sheila:
On another note concerning experience, you’ve told me you wrote for radio. I’m curious about that.

Robert:
I wrote radio comedy for years.  Everything you hear on radio is bought and paid for: the quips, monologues, one-liners, topical jokes, parodies, all daily output. I turned that stuff out for five years.

Sheila:
How did you get started doing that?

Robert:
As a freelance writer.  Just before the radio comedy writing, I was an assistant to a talent manager for celebrities in LA. I was learning a lot but wasn’t happy in the job.  I had done a lot of acting, hosting, and had trained with The Groundlings.  I had been an improvisational actor with Specific Hospital, the long-form  improv that The Groundlings pioneered with a cast of about 10 actors playing broad characters. Cast members included Eric Allen Kramer (Co-starred in THE HUGHLEYS and many other films and TV shows) and Michael McDonald (cast member of MAD TV).  The story line evolved from week to week. Specific Hospital was absolutely essential to my development as a writer.

Ultimately, I began to write sketches for radio comedy. My first attempts didn’t go over well, but I came back a few months later with a moustache and a beard. No one recognized me, and I got more work. I got better and better at writing the radio comedy. Consistent freelancing led to a staff job and administrative/producer duties.  I wrote (and voiced) thousands of bits over five years.

Sheila:
And you got from radio comedy writing to novel and screenwriting? How?

Robert:
I started collecting every back issue of Writer’s Digest Magazine from five years back to fill in the gaps.  I spent hours each week reading and highlighting in them.

Sheila:
You mentioned once that you won a Writer’s Digest contest. You must have learned from your reading!

Robert:
In 1994, I took 2^nd place in the WD television and film script category as well as 3rd place in the literary short story category. I thought I had “arrived.”

I also learned a lot about writing from writing radio bits because in comedy you can’t have a single word that you can push off the page.  I learned a lot about dialogue from another job I had–transcribing dialogue for my wife, who makes educational documentaries. In transcribing, every um and ah has to be typed.

I wrote the first novel and the first screenplay adaptation in the late 90s. Then I got laid off from the radio syndicate.

Eventually, I answered an online call for interns to volunteer 15 hours a week for six weeks in exchange for free screenplay classes. Jeff Gordon, the founder of WBC, had been doing what he does for about 12 years and despite the bad economy the company was in a state of expansion.  I volunteered for Basic Training and eventually entered the Think Tank.  I was later offered a position as Logistical Coordinator, and ultimately I became Program Coordinator. Two years later, I’m not only writing novels and screenplays, but working with WBC at the highest level. I am currently responsible for overseeing the program’s Online Course.

I’ve applied the tools of WBC to my initial screenplay project and took all the changes to the producer I’m working with.  I made changes in the novel, too, and took those to a book agent.  I’ve now revised and expanded both projects using the tools I’ve learned that help me fix holes.

The novel is darker and edgier now, and has a new title that reflects this, In War with Time.  These lines in the book show something about the new tone:

I was the son of a warrior. The first ten years of my life, we moved from one military base to another – Pensacola, Norfolk, Naples, Alameda – anywhere we could find a defendable position. When I was 13, at the height of the war, my family was taken prisoner. We’d been driven to the farthest peninsula, of the final island, in the remotest corner of the lower forty-eight. We traveled up the coast that summer from San Diego to Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington. Enjoy the sun while it lasted, we were told, winter would be long and misty. The years remain shrouded in that mist, a pewter cloudiness making the sun’s existence almost hypothetical. Infrequently, a sunbeam shattered the damp dimness as if an omnipotent giant straddling the Cascade Mountains had momentarily lifted the marine layer with the detached curiosity of a boy searching for snakes under a board in the woods. When I think of that giant today, decades later, it’s almost impossible not to picture him as myself. I try to disguise this mythical figure with a beard (the long, white, hard flinty kind of whiskers that have more in common with cuticles than hair); I try to conceal the giant’s features behind a monkish hood or make him altogether faceless. But it never works. My own face creeps back in there somehow and I have to accept that he is me. And that I was also that boy in the woods looking for snakes.

It was early June. Mom had wanted our northerly migration to be a “nice leisurely trip up the Pacific Coast Highway.” I’m sure she envisioned quaint roadside picnics on a bluff in Monterey – wine, cheese, french bread – followed by an afternoon stroll down Cannery Row. By Morro Bay, they were bickering; by Big Sur, Dad was threatening to stick Mom on a plane to Seattle. By San Francisco he’d had enough and broke east for the interstate. He gunned our Chevy wagon like a jet aircraft in search of a viable target. The monotonous contention of our trips was mitigated by my occasionally breaking out the Robert W. Service Treasury. Poetry (at least an appreciation of it) was a Gillen family tradition. Service, Kipling, Whitman – the easy, narrative poets – that was the gold standard. “Bad poets” some might say. But what is bad to an academic is merely accessible to someone like Fred Gillen. Dad was the product of the New York state school system. He was articulate to the point of pomposity and could expound at length on any subject, literature being a favorite. Flying jets requires a firm grasp of physics and math and he claimed that, because of the New York state school system, he’d mastered these disciplines before even learning the alphabet. All Irish blarney, of course – yet I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a slide rule tucked away in one of the zippered compartments on his jungle-green flight suit. He was no simpleton, my father, but the work of a warrior is all about split-second decision-making. He had a respect bordering on love for any kind of acronym, the ingenious streamlining that made things, even something as simple as a poem, go faster.

The heavy text lay open on my lap, while my father squinted behind Aviator Ray-Bans. I’d close my eyes and try to recite:

“There are strange things done in the midnight sun … by the men who moil for gold …” How does one “moil”? I’d savor the word a tad too long. Then Dad would prompt me:

“The Arctic -”

“Augh! Lemme … The Arctic trails have their secret tales … darn.”

“That would make your blood run cold.”

“Yeah. The Northern Lights … Ahhhhh – I give up.”

“The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see, Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee …”

Marge – where does she fit in? I’d sigh with defeat as he droned on through the entire thing, drunk with his power over the poem. It was admirable and awesome in a boastful way. You waited for him to trip up, half-hoping that he would, half-hoping that he wouldn’t.

“Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows. Why he left his home in the South to roam ‘round the Pole, God only knows …”

****

I’ve definitely learned the difference between editing and rewriting–rewriting is changing 60-70% of the material.

Scene testing, story components, what’s soft and what to keep, tuning a second act adventure, creating second act complications, being sure there is a dynamic character, and main character misbehavior are among the tools I now use.  Changing what was originally too soft changed and affected my character’s opponent as well as the book’s battle.

Sheila:
And folks can now learn what you did online?

Robert:
Yes.  WBC has had its Basic Training classes online for about a year.  Students have assignments, receive a workbook, and use an 800 number for online discussions with instructors.  They write a draft in eight weeks. The eight-week course costs $595. The course includes five weeks of instruction, three weeks of polishing the script and phone conferencing. It’s cheaper online.  The onsite Basic Training course costs $895, though we take off $100 if a candidate signs up within 48 hours of contacting us.  We try to reward confidence and motivation.

Essence Magazine recently ran an article about African Americans in the film industry with a sidebar about WBC and now we are getting many calls.  We are interested in coaching writers from diverse backgrounds.  In fact, I mentor two Fox Diversity writers, one an Asian American and one an African American, to help them progress in the ranks.

I like WBC because it uses a nonlinear approach to screenwriting, a conceptual rather than episodic approach to getting the script on the page. I encourage writers to begin by writing the second act because the second act adventure is going to change the first and third acts, which will write themselves if the second act is well written.

The most common comment producers have is “shorten the first act; it’s too long.” First acts usually need trimming if you start with them.

Another thing I like about the WBC experience is that the process you learn works with any narrative structure–I’ve used it on the novels and even songs.  I’ve co-written numerous folk standards (“Mr. Schwinn,” “Ring On My Hand” and “There Oughta Be A Highway,” played on Folk Radio) with singer Darryl Purpose who Britain’s Q Magazine called “the most important narrative songwriter to emerge from American since Harry Chapin.”

The WBC experience works for plays, teleplays, and short fiction, too.

Sheila:
What happens after you write that draft of a script in eight weeks?

Robert:
After the online Basic Training you can sign up for a one-year online membership, and there’s also Think Tank if you’re in L.A. or New York. WBC staff helps you with further development and making contacts. We are not shy about opening doors for writers whose work meets a certain criteria.

Sheila:
Can you really make it in LA if you don’t live in the area?

Robert:
To make it in LA, all you need is a representable script, one that stands out with a compelling Conceit (WBC’s name for one of its teaching tools). More than one script is best, and we can help our students with getting meetings and finding agents when their scripts are ready.  On our website we have alumni spotlights.  Michael Lippman’s script “Freud and Jung” is about to start shooting, and Columbia Pictures bought Barry Stringfellow’s “Viva Lefty.”

Sheila:
What other advice do you have for would-be screenwriters?

Robert:
If you want to write movie scripts, watch movies. If you want to write TV scripts, become an expert in the shows you want to write for.  Read scripts.  You can get them online from Script-o-Rama. Use Final Draft and Movie Magic, two software programs they offer you templates for shows.

Read novels, read the news, keep up with current events.

Know the genre you want to write in.

Lose your ego.  It makes you naive about the work involved in turning out a good script and makes you resistant to learning tools.  And you need tools for screenwriting. We call them our Conceptual Tools at WBC. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough.

To begin, at least have a vague idea of what you want to write about, at least as much as, “I want to write a western with a detective in it.” Then drill down with hard conceits that differentiate your movie from all the other “detective/westerns.” All stories are derivative to a degree and we deal largely with creating an awareness of the legacy of film and TV.

Check out the WBC website. There are articles by successful alumni and others.

Sheila:
I don’t think I can end our interview without asking you to name some of the movies you admire.

Robert:
“The Closet” and “With Friends of Harry” (both French) appeal to me a lot.  I also like “About Schmidt”–the gag of the letter writing is a runner, as they say in comedy, because it keeps appearing. I really like that the movie focuses on a stage of life not often depicted–Schmidt is about to step off his work career into obsolescence with unresolved issues. I was a bug on the wall during the development of “Schmidt.” The producer I’m working with (Bill Badalato) would take calls from Alexander Payne while we were working. One time he said: “That was Alexander Payne. You’re a lot like him.” My proudest moment.

I like “Adaptation,” even the ending that many think deteriorates into silliness. I found it entertaining and a movie is supposed to keep us entertained.

When you are writing screenplays, you have to be sure you’ve done the “front-end work.” That involves the conceptual components of your story; your conceits have to receive a “clean bill of health.”

“Antwone Fisher” is a film I like. It’s a Cinderella story with diversity issues. All movies are derivative.  Conceit is about how your movie is different from all the other derivative movies. “Antwone Fisher” is a competent film and will mean something twenty years from now. It’s about isolation, rage, and abandonment. The “battle scene,” which has to have something at stake and offer the character a way to redeem himself, occurs when Antwone shows up at the door of his abusive former foster mother and refuses to come in while he asks for information about his birth mother.

In “The Pianist,” the main character misbehavior is “not playing,” and when he does play for the SS officer he is winning the battle scene, where he makes a correction of misbehavior and saves his life.  The misbehavior should always have the ultimate power to redeem your main character.

As we finished our meal and rushed off to get our cars before the parking enforcement officers found expired meters, I asked Robert to make a comment on what for him is the pleasure of the craft.  “Fingers to the keyboard; the physical act of writing.  Maybe it is because I’m a good typist.  But the screaming words have to go somewhere and it feels good when they are getting out.”