David Fincher's "It's A Wonderful Life"

When I'm working on a project, sometimes I watch favorite movies to give me vivid examples of great storytelling. Tonight I watched The Game by David Fincher. This is one of my all time favorite movies. It's a redemption story. Some hate the ending while others like myself find it moving and mind-boggling.

So after watching The Game for the umpteenth time, I came to this conclusion.

This is David Fincher's It's A Wonderful Life.

Crazy thought, huh?

But consider this.

Both men have rich lives. George Bailey from It's A Wonderful Life is rich with family. Nicholas Van Orton from The Game is simply rich period--a multi-millionnarie. Yet both of their stories center around suicides. Both men end up trying to kill themselves.

Their youth is documented in unique ways: It's A Wonderful Life spends much time on this, detailing Bailey's life and his impact on others. The Game shows enough of Van Orton's youth in the opening montage. Yet both of their childhoods cast large shadows over their adult lives.

Both of these men are lost looking for themselves. Bailey has spent his life giving of his time and energy to the inept building and loan. He's worked himself to the bone. For what? Some might say a wonderful family. But he feels empty. Van Orton is the polar opposite, right? Or is he? He's financially set, but he too has worked himself to the bone. He's lost himself. For what? Who is he?

Both of these men suffer from memories of their father--what their father did to them. To George Bailey, his father built a dysfunctional building and loan only to leave it to him like a ball and chain. Then he dies unexpectedly. To Nicholas Van Orton, his father leaves him only deep scars from--yet again--an unexpected death.

Angels come across both of these mens' paths to help save them. To George Bailey, it's the lovable Clarence. He really is an angel, though he's somewhat misguided. Then there's Nicholas Van Orton's brother--who too is somewhat misguided.

George Bailey and Nicholas Van Orton both need to lose everything in order to find meaning. Both of them literally end up at graves where they have a crisis of faith. For George Bailey, it's when he learns that his brother died as a child, that he was never there to save him, that his brother didn't go on to become a war hero and save lives. Then there's Nicholas Van Orton, who ends up in a grave in the middle of Mexico, having lost everything.

Both of these men need saving. Both of them need faith. Both of these men need to understand what they're living for.

And at the end of each story, they end up surrounded by all the people in their lives. They're literally shown the difference they've made. They're reborn through their experiences, through their deaths. They wake up to find a different life than the one they left behind. They greet those in their lives with humility and thanks and grace.

They see life with a whole new perspective.

Both men are redeemed.

So, like I said--crazy, huh? Yeah, I know. Maybe I'm the only person to ever draw comparisons between Frank Capra and David Fincher. Yet I know many would agree with me that they are truly two of the most talented filmmakers to ever make motion pictures.

There are probably those who roll their eyes at It's A Wonderful Life with its angel and its mean ole Potter. Not me. I wipe the tears from my eyes at the end. Every time. There are also those who probably find the TWIST at the end of The Game to be preposterous, thus dismissing the entire film. To me it holds up every time I watch it. And when I finally see the talented actor Michael Douglas brilliantly break down at the end and hug his brother, I am moved.

In my bio line on Twitter, I recently said this about what I do: Take a flawed character in search of redemption, add a twist, then sprinkle in some genre flavoring. Isn't that what these two movies are? One is a Christmas story, one a tale of suspense. But in the end, aren't they the same sort of story?

A man finding redemption.

To me, it never gets old.

Even In The Most Miserable Of Seasons . . .

There's always a reason to celebrate.

My Feelings Exactly

Youngblood Hawke is a classic work by the classic novelist, Herman Wouk. Another novelist, Angela Hunt, suggested I read this when I was still trying to get my first novel published. It's the rise and fall of a young writer and is very informative about the nature of writing and publishing.

I came upon this quote in the novel recently and marveled how it sums up my daily thoughts about my personal writing journey:

"Hawke had two views of himself and his work: one, that he was an industrious nobody, a grinder of words, who failed on every page, let alone in every book, to say what was on his mind, and who with great good luck had managed to find a sale for his concoctions; the second, that he belonged in the company of great authors, and that he would show his true stature once he achieved independence from money problems."

The Story Behind Every Breath You Take (Part 3)

I'm continuing to detail the journey behind my first self-published novel that I just received a couple weeks ago. I want to share reasons why I decided to embark on this adventure. I've gotten some questions asking about why I self-published, what the story is about, etc. So let me continue explaining.

At the start of 2008, I entered the new year as a full-time novelist. So you can imagine my surprise (or maybe I should call it horror) to learn that the next book I was going to work on got cancelled by the publisher. It was going to be another Henry Wolfe adventure. Not only was I looking forward to writing another rollicking and fun tale, but I also hoped to sign another contract for more of these. But--well, these things happen in publishing.

The cancellation meant that the remaining part of the advance I was supposed to receive got cancelled too. That was sorta like someone saying you wouldn't be getting paid for a couple of months.

Yamma. (That's my slang for yikes and damn and oh mama and a few other things).

So I began to work on Every Breath You Take. I approached it as a book I would write and hope to sell to the general market. Perhaps I would even do it under a pen name.

Around March of 2008, I took a trip to New York to talk to my new publisher who I had signed with in 2007. They expressed interest in my love story but also urged me to stay in the genre that I was doing with them--the supernatural suspense genre. They were quite excited about my first novel with them, Isolation, along with future books.

Yet here I was, with a cancelled contract and another nearly completed novel without a contract. The most foolish thing I could have done was try and land another contract with another publisher. That would have been like going on a date with another woman when you're on your honeymoon.

I needed to bide my time. Because, as I've shared before, EVERYTHING in publishing takes time.

So I kept writing Every Breath You Take. I finished the first draft on March 22, 2008. The plan was to give it to my agent, hear her glorious praise as the tears streamed down her face, then watch as she sent it to my NY publisher and hope they would want to publish it.

Then a couple things happened.

One is I went to get my taxes done and got confronted with a double Yamma.

Second is that I heard back from my agent who said that Every Breath You Take needed quite a bit more work before she could send it out to publishers.

My spirits were hitting Rock Bottom. And that's when I decided to take a part-time job to earn some extra cash and bide my time.

It was April of 2008.

Orders For Every Breath You Take

Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! Just wanted to post a quick note and say that I plan on starting to send out orders for Every Breath You Take next week. I haven't been beating people over the head to order it since I always planned on sending them out after Christmas. So for all of you who have ordered it already, thanks!

A longtime reader and fan of mine who ordered the first copy from me has already read it. It's nice to know she said that it might replace Sky Blue as her favorite.

The Point Of Christmas

This quote from Donald Miller's awesome new book, A Million Miles In A Thousand Years, sums up Christmas to me. I just read it and thought it certainly applies to today and to why we celebrate:

"Do I still think there will be a day when all wrongs are made right, when our souls find the completion they are looking for? I do. But when all things are made right, it won't be because of some preacher or snake-oil salesman or politician or writer making promises in his book. I think, this will be done by Jesus. And it will be at a wedding. And there will be a feast."

Favorite Christmas Album

George Winston's December.

Totally Awesome Photo

How cool is this cover of Time (circa 1981)?

Waiting For The Night To Fall

Being a writer is mastering the art of waiting.

For impatient people like you, mastery is almost impossible.

Everything about being a writer is about waiting.

You wait for ideas to come. Even for people like you who get ideas daily, it takes time to get worthy ideas, to get great ideas, to get publishable ideas. Stories are a dime a dozen (download plenty free on your Kindle today!), so finding the right story takes time.

You wait to finish your story. Some novelists write twenty thousand words a day, but you’re not one of them. Maybe you write five thousand words, but if so you’re usually spent for a few days. Writing takes months if not years. It’s not hard to get words onto the page. It’s hard getting meaningful, impactful words on to the page.

You wait to retouch and retweak and redo your story. It’s takes time shifting from your right brain to your left. Don’t let anybody fool you: the most difficult thing in the process is creating something from nothing. Anybody can sit on the sidelines and make suggestions. But trying to do this yourself before submitting the story takes time.

Then you hand it in. Whether it’s to an agent to review, or to an editor to review, or maybe to your spouse to review.

Now here’s when the waiting really starts in earnest.

Reading takes a long time. If you were a musician, it would take three, four, maybe five minutes to listen to a song. But it can take hours before the manuscript is read. Then it takes a lot longer to get input, simply because input takes time to digest. Agents, editors, publishers—they all need to think through their comments. They’re dealing with highly emotional and insecure people, so they need to be encouraging and careful while still doing their job (creating books that WILL SELL).

So reading takes time and input takes more time.

Meanwhile, you’re waiting. And if you haven’t gotten published yet, multiply that times ten. Or maybe a hundred.

When you had a fulltime job, you would worry and wonder even though you had lots of other things to do.

But writing is now your fulltime job. (For the love of mankind, what possessed you to write fulltime anyway?). Of course, you work on other projects and do other things, but still, part of what you do is wait.

You wait to see if a project is accepted. Wait to see if a book needs rewriting (they always do). Let’s rephrase that—you wait to see how much rewriting a book needs.
Then there are the times you wait to see if an idea or a synopsis or a book gets the green light.

And you wait.

Moons change shape.

You wait.

Seasons pass.

You wait.

Your hair grows longer and more unruly and the bags under your eyes begin to look like the moon and your beard is growing in so much you’re starting to look like Cousin It.

You wait.

When you finally hear something, somebody needs to awaken you from your sleep. Like waking the dead. Who needs to write another vampire series when you’re looking like one?

Most of the time, the news is what you expected. Sometimes it’s worse, seldom times it’s better.

You hear news and then have a panic attack because whatever they want (your editor or agent or publisher), they want it tomorrow.

You wait to get the strength to carry on.

You understand why Stephen King drank and drugged his way through several novels (though you’re not advocating anything like that, of course not, you wouldn’t ever do that!).

You wait to get inspiration and it never comes but you get to work anyway.

You wonder why your dog is looking at you with pitiful eyes.

You wonder why the rest of the world waits to see when you’re going to get a “real” job.

You wait for the next thing.

Then you wait to find out what you’re going to be waiting on next.

Because when you’re a writer, you’re always waiting.

2,676 Copies . . .

The new novel arrived and looks great.

It's going to be fun selling these.

The Story Behind Every Breath You Take (Part 2)

Continuing to share the timeline and process behind my next novel to be published . . .

So it was the summer of 2007 and I had come up with a great hook for my story.

I wanted to write a story about a father watching over his daughter from Heaven.

The hook became this:

What if a father, who died when his daughter was only two years old, was granted the gift to attend his daughter's wedding? The twist is that she's engaged to the wrong guy and the father has to play matchmaker, all while being unable to reveal who he is.

I thought this had the makings of a pretty neat story.

When I left my fulltime job (the one with the salary and the benefits), I had just signed a four-book deal with FaithWords. The idea for Every Breath You Take was in my back pocket, so to speak.

I would start writing it in January, 2008, after learning that my next Henry Wolfe adventure had been canceled.

These things happen in publishing.

Donald Miller on Storytelling

"The thing about writing a story, in real life and on paper, is half the effort is just figuring out what the story is going to be."--Donald Miller in A Million Miles In A Thousand Years

Reading Other Novels While Writing

"It's disturbing to read a novelist with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together. It's much like taking your car apart and having all the pieces on the floor just as somebody rides by in a Ferrari."--Norman Mailer in The Spooky Art

The Story Behind Every Breath You Take (Part 1)

I'm going to detail the timeline behind the love story that I'm about to publish in the next week entitled Every Breath You Take. This will hopefully be interesting for those of you who are in the process of trying to get published. As I've said a thousand times before, the key in being successful as a writer is persistence. While I wasn't successful in landing a six-figure advance for Every Breath You Take, I feel I was fortunate to find a good story and guide it to publication.

My hope is that this will show you the journey of one book—how one idea leads to another, the process of writing and rewriting, and the task of trying to sell it to a major publishing house.

The first few nuggets of ideas for Every Breath You Take came probably in 2006. The story had several other titles and storylines. The one idea I wanted to explore was that of a wounded and broken young girl—her journey. That idea, or more like character, ended up getting scrapped from this love story. Instead, she ended up on the pages of another novel: Broken, which comes out this May.

I began working on TREATMENT #1. I won’t mention the working title because I still love it and want to use it sometime down the road. The prologue opens with a woman in her twenties thinking about killing herself (a little dark for Hallmark love stories!!). Then it goes ahead a few months where she’s living in the Chicago suburbs and meets a young man. They will fall in love, of course. But their storyline is not the only storyline in the book. I had the backstory of a father praying for his daughter after she was born. At the end of the novel the reader would understand the power of these prayers, and how God had answered them many years after the father uttered them.

So I wrote about 120 pages on that story (about 20,000 words). My idea was that I would give it to the publisher I worked for and have them look at it. They had published my first two novels and knew that I could hand a story in on time and also deliver a decent product. At that time, we were having some trouble getting some of our fiction authors to actually deliver manuscripts on time or deliver what we wanted.

So write a decent love story and get a decent contract. Easy, huh? I’d already published seven novels with more in the works, so I had a decent track record.

So on November 25, 2006, I gave the acquisitions director at the publisher a cover letter suggesting the idea for my story along with 50 pages. I worked hard on this proposal and thought it was really something worthy of publication. (This came in addition to the other novel I was working on at the time.)

In early 2007, probably around February or March, the acquisitions director finally met with me to talk about my proposal. She was kind and I knew she didn’t want to hurt my feelings, but the basic gist was this: the material just wasn’t strong enough. It needed to be a strong and a special story.

I went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out why it wasn’t strong or special.

I came to the conclusion that it didn’t have a GREAT HOOK. So I spent a while trying to come up with a GREAT IDEA and a GREAT HOOK.

Easier said than done.

The acquisitions director had mentioned that she liked the father-daughter idea, and thought I should build on that. I liked that idea too since I was a new father and wanted to write a love letter to our daughter.

I thought back to simple love stories like The Notebook and tried to figure out what made them special. The writing on that novel was simple, so what was the draw? For that story, the GREAT HOOK came from the Alzheimer’s angle. Yes, it was a moving love story, but it cut deep when you realized why it had been told.

So middle of 2007, I arrived at my GREAT HOOK. I’ve been told it’s a great hook and I still believe it is. If I pulled it off—well, that’s another story for readers to decide.

But I took that initial story idea and basically split it in half.

The story of the broken and wounded young girl went somewhere else. At the time, I just held on to that character. She would make her appearance in another novel. But the other story, the love story with a father-daughter theme, ended up getting changed when I came up with a supernatural twist.

That was the summer of 2007. I started writing what eventually became Every Breath You Take.

I was still at the start of a long journey.

Top 100 #11

The opening track on the mind-blowing OK COMPUTER. Love this song. Haunting, strange, beautiful . . .

AIRBAG by Radiohead:

In the next world war
In a jackknifed juggernaut
I am born again

In the neon sign
Scrolling up and down
I am born again

In an interstellar burst
I am back to save the universe

In a deep deep sleep of the innocent
I am born again

In a fast german car
I'm amazed that I survived
An airbag saved my life

In an interstellar burst
I am back to save the universe

In an interstellar burst
I am back to save the universe

Ordering Every Breath You Take

I'm going to make a promise right here. To my friends and fans (I guess I probably do have friends who aren't fans--that's okay), I'm going to promise you something.

If I'm able to keep doing this long enough to be hugely successful, I promise that one day, I'm going to surprise you with a self-published novel that's good enough to fit alongside any of my other books AND THAT'S FREE!

For now, I can't afford to give a book away. Wish I could--seriously, that would be a lot of fun. "Hey--where can I get that new book?" asks random indifferent reader. "Sorry, I did a special printing of 2,500 copies and gave them to my top fans" says NY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR THRASHER.

So Every Breath You Take is going to be printed--this week perhaps. You can order it through my website. I overhauled it with the ability to have people order online. It's simple--have already had some people order my other books. You'll have to have a PayPal account. They're easy to get.

The other way to order a copy is to contact me through my website and tell me you want a copy, then send me a check in advance to my PO Box.

If your a fan of any of my novels, I hope you get a chance to read this new book. Read the things I've already said on this blog about it. It's not a partial book--it's got all the blood, sweat, and tears all my other novels have in them. It's a cool little story that I can't wait to get into readers' hands.

At Base Camp Of Next Novel

The expedition to my next Mount Everest has begun and I'm at base camp. The team is assembled and my gear is all in order and right now I'm getting acclimated to my surroundings.

I've made a few small climbs so far, getting my bearings. The route is clear.

Still a long ways to go. But so far I'm feeling good.

Hoping and planning to reach the summit in May.

I think this mountain is going to be a particularly incredible one to climb. Making the top all the more beautiful.

When You're A Fulltime Writer

YOU determine when it's a snow day . . .

Doors

What's behind door #33?

Unpacking

What an odd sort of profession this seems to be.

Daily going into a solitary room and picking which suitcase to open.

There are several full of fears, well worn and traveled.

There is the suitcase of curiosity.

The suitcase of failure.

There are those packed in the corner of the room. The one filled with humor. Another packed with wit. Another of unbridled courage that often gets lost and goes missing for weeks at a time.

There is the tiny carry-on case full of wisdom.

There is the matching set of suitcases full of regret.

These are the tools of the trade, the ones I unpack daily depending on the story.

The story is key yet it’s not the point.

The point is what’s inside these suitcases.

Daily I get to remove their contents and wrap them around a journey and a character and a theme.

Daily I get to face my fears and remember my regrets.

This is a job for an insane person.

To daily look in the mirror and wince.

Then to try and make something out of that picture.

New suitcases come every day. Some nice and shiny. Some weathered and falling apart.

I pick and choose every day.

And often, I forget to put the contents back in their place.

I carry into the night the fears and the curiosity that I found earlier.

I find memories in my pockets before going to bed.

A story is lifeless unless the creator puts himself in it. A story is nothing without the worldview and voice of its narrator.

But to get to the worldview and voice, you have to unpack these suitcases.

And sometimes, at least for me, it’s a real drag.

The baggage I’ve carried for a lifetime isn’t that different from others, but it’s mine. Sometimes I bury the suitcases in the back lawn but they are always there again the next day, waiting to be opened, waiting to be used.

And use them I do.

Why I choose to open the cases that scare me the most is the one thing I don’t understand. The suitcases of laughter and discovery are there but often feel out of place in my work. The suitcase of hope usually only gets opened near the end of a story.

It’s part of the process and part of this crazy, wonderful thing called writing.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation

Some movies never get old.

Every Breath You Take--Front & Back

Here's the front & back of Every Breath You Take. Files are at the printer and should be rolling sometime this month.

I'll have information soon on my website and blog how you can order. But if you can't wait shoot me an email through www.travisthrasher.com and I'll get some more details to you.