Where does a writer come from?
In 1994, in my second year of high school, I availed myself of the 1986 Magnavox VideoWriter 160 word processor that my mother didn’t have use for anymore. With visions of Snowcrash and the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG dancing in my head, I peered into the 10-inch panoramic CRT screen in glorious piss-yellow two-color definition and, lying on my stomach (for whatever reason, I didn’t want to pop it on the kitchen table and didn’t have another tabletop to use — I probably wanted to be able to watch TV while I worked), wrote about ten or fifteen pages of a cyberpunk novel, which was exceedingly of the quality you’d expect from a 15-year-old kid who thought pretty highly of his own intelligence. After using the convenient, built-in printer, I showed the pages to a handful of my friends, and they all really liked it and wanted to see more. I wrote out some ideas in my school binder, but then went a few days without being motivated to write more, and never added to it again. Obviously, that’s all for the best.
I was always a voracious reader, and I’ve done some sort of creative writing for as long as I’ve been aware of or capable of it. In second grade, I wrote a “book” for the book fair called “My Dog,” which won an award. (I didn’t have a dog at the time.) In third grade, for that year’s school book fair, I wrote a “book” called TransFormers The Movie 2, which was essentially the most popular thing in my class that year. The next two or three years were spent with kids asking me if I was going to write a follow-up that year, and I think I obliged them at least once. But for the rest of my time in grade school, people continued to mention to me how much they liked it. Grade school children are, of course, exceedingly easy to please, particularly when it comes to established IP.
In middle school, I began playing and writing music and lyrics, and I joined the yearbook staff. In the eighth grade, I wrote a parody for an end-of-the-year student journal where the characters from Married … With Children were inserted into A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Honestly, that’s the one thing I wrote before I was 18 that I’m still a little proud of. I kept writing, joining the school newspaper my freshman year (and becoming the editor of the paper the following year). I spent the last two years of high school with Drama as my elective and graduated as an Honor Thespian, and my creative writing was mostly confined to my musical endeavors, as I created some songs both on my own and with a band that were truly awful, even by “teenagers in a band” standards.
In my senior year or shortly after graduation, I was at Amoeba Music in Berkeley when I found the published screenplay of Pulp Fiction, which was (naturally) one of my favorite movies at the time. Although I’d been reading and acting in plays for years, this was my first time seeing a film script, and seeing what the format looked like was a real third-eye-opening moment. Through that book, I learned nearly 100 percent of how to write a screenplay.
