I started with a Fender Stratocaster HSH Player guitar. Sage green metallic, maple neck, black pickguard. I installed a set of Dunlop strap locks, tuned it, started playing.

Then I added a Fender 60D $200 acoustic to gain hand and finger strength, and returned it because even knowing the action was high and could be fixed, the intonation up and down the neck was so bad it was frankly unplayable.

On to Martin. I learned mostly on a D-10e, a beautiful working Martin guitar with those deep booming bass notes. But…

But it felt not right, yet. As I gained more experience in playing and more of a sense of what I was doing, I felt a flatness to the feel of the fretboard. Not bad, but just – flat. Silent. Not communicative. Not speaking to the notes fretted, just present to make sounds. I didn’t know what this was I was looking for. I took the guitar to a local luthier, who did an outstanding job of setup. Better.

I ordered a Taylor. I had heard, but not played one. But I had heard they were a player’s guitar, intended to speak to the musician and respond. Whatever that was.

I tried the guitar when it arrived and it was frankly a revelation. Fretting a note was a collaboration rather than an isolated act. The string felt right or wrong, but very clearly defined. Something about the tone released when not quite right on top of the string in quite the right place on the fret communicated back how to adjust, and I was able to feel the note in a way neither Martin nor Fender had managed. This, for me, was the perfect guitar to learn further on.

I found it made the Fender fretboard feel incomplete.

Not saying Martin or Fender are bad. Just saying they lack this sensitivity to touch.And I find this incredibly helpful in this stage of my journey. I think as an experienced and competent guitarist both of these would be useful tools to express myself in music. But they are not Taylors. And they lack that feel to them.

I bought a T5z, a Taylor electric.

I have a sound in my head, connected with an emotion I can conceptualize but not write out or express in visual. It is so clear to me.

My song (Zen Guitar).

And this T5z captures that sound, in the variety of tones it can produce. Kind of a blend of Wes Montgomery and Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon. Space and clarity and emotional resonance.

Plus, it has that exquisite neck and playability.

Best learning guitar ever. Taylor.

— spence

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Taylor would be Mac.
Beautiful interface with lots of response to what you do, and a lot of information provided as to whether what you are doing is good or bad.

And, I think Windows would be Strats.
I’m thinking of the presets on modeling amps. “Here’s what you can say with this instrument.”
You can do more, but you have to reach behind the curtains…

— spence

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I read “The Nutshell Technique: Crack the Secret of Successful Screenwriting” by Jill Chamberlain straight through.

Seriously good work. The technique isolates 7 or 8 (I have not yet counted them through for myself) essential pieces that change a situation into a story you can be involved with. It’s simple and it doesn’t take weeks to learn or to use. It is like stretching out the anchor threads correctly so you can weave in the color and action and dialogue. Great book.

Unlike Dramatica or Save the Cat it doesn’t restrict at all beyond those pieces and where they must occur.

I found another piece – feels like serendipity – “The Idea: The Seven Elements of a Viable Story for Screen, Stage or Fiction” by Erik Bork. I started reading through this.

I had started “How to Write a Movie in 21 Days: The Inner Movie Method” by Viki King – and I switched after the first couple of chapters to the Nutshell Technique. I’m coming back to that though – just jump in and write is not where I am at this moment. I’m finding the whole story. The Idea is next.

Once that feels ready, King’s book looks to be a blast to stop thinking and just write that first draft.

All of this aligns with what I’ve already found true so far. William Goldman speaks of writing the first draft of a screenplay all the way through with no editing at that stage, just respect the spine of the story.

I love William Goldman’s voice in writing. First screenplay I ever read was by accident – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had come out in theaters a couple of years back, and I was traveling 11 hours from San Diego to San Francisco by bus. The bus stopped at a diner, I browsed the spinning rack of cheap paperbacks, spotted “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, glanced at it, purchased it, and only on the bus did I realize this wasn’t the book the movie was based on, this WAS the screenplay. It was excellent. Many screenplays don’t read as smoothly as that one did, it was a perfect introduction. When he speaks of his process he speaks of finding the spine of the story, and holding that sacred as he muddles through a first draft.

I think the Nutshell Technique nails that spine. The Idea with any luck refines where my story is, and what pieces of it matter. And then write away. In 21 Days.

Nutshell -> The Idea (evaluate what works or does not and where it would change…), and back to Nutshell and refine that, round and round through that until it feels ready to write, then -> 21 Days and write that first draft ala William Goldman.

The other thing I am seeing in the pieces of the Nutshell Technique is that once those elements are in place you have a framework to outline and plan rapidly. So, there’s that.

Update Monday 5th Nov…

I dropped back to re-read the Nutshell Technique and playing with that view of the ideas and structure and the time period and the stories I see in it. “The Idea: The Seven Elements” is interesting but not grammatically new stuff. So far, and I’ll come back to it and take another look in a bit, the book isn’t definitively different from the basic of get your character up into a tree and throw rocks at them… It was muddling the clarity I found in Nutshell. I’m going to drop it for now.

— sm

— spence

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I’ve finished

• Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer
• Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince
• MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot
• A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age
• L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City
• Hitler: A Biography
• Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939
• Reporting on Hitler: Rothay Reynolds and the British Press in Nazi Germany
• The Collaboration
• Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America

That’s more or less in reverse order, latest book to earlier.

I still have

• Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood
• Into the Dark (Turner Classic Movies): The Hidden World of Film Noir, 1941-1950

That last is a bit out of the era but I wanted to pull film noir elements back to their roots, and weave them in.

I would love to find Frances Marion’s How to Write and Sell Film Stories, but dammit, the only thing on eBay is a signed copy for $250, and a listing on Abe’s books for $525. I’d love to hear Frances’ voice on what she would want to say about what she was doing, but not for that.

I started with 1930’s Los Angeles, and just started feeling my way around the era. I had my main character walk into Louis B. Mayer’s office at MGM. I found she was walking into a blank space, I didn’t have a feel for that man in that time yet. From Louis B. Mayer I found Irving Thalberg, then Frances Marion. I narrowed the time down to the 6th academy Awards date, 16 March 1934. Then reading to get a feel for what’s accurate, what will have a natural and cohesive feel for that time and how do these people see their role and how this industry is at that time.

Getting there.

I also found a couple of more screenwriting books. I’m actually surprised there are any I don’t have, by this time. But – there were yet more.

Frankly out of everything I’ve read of screenwriting, three stand out as the least touted and most helpful as a writer so far

Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade, and it’s predecessor, Adventures in the Screen Trade are two. William Goldman is absolutely worth reading. Not specific lessons but the approach followed by a very successful master. His voice as a writer is a joy.

And The Hollywood Standard for the nuts and bolts of formatting.

The new books were How to Write a Movie in 21 Days: The Inner Movie Method, which sounds like it hits right at the pieces I’ve been experiencing so far, and I can read it in tandem with the Frances Marion bio. The second was The Nutshell Technique: Crack the Secret of Successful Screenwriting, which is another view on what makes up a story.

I keep starting to write and realizing again I’m still filling in the picture and the era. There will come a point where the details feel real and the imagery won’t be superficial and trite, and as I walk that character through the office, Louis B. Mayer will be alive in the imagery and on the page, not a cut out figure, and the office will have depth and detail.

— spence

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I started asking big questions as soon as I could talk.

“Do the drains for the bathtub and the shower go to the same place as the toilet?” (My mother answered “No!”, so that I wouldn’t pee in the shower.)

And…

“What the hell is going on here? AM I stuck in the Matrix? Did I unknowingly take a blue pill? What is this messy, inconsistent, cruel and harsh, soft and loving existence?”

I turn 60 this year. I don’t feel 60. But I hear the whisper of aches, the bones telling me there is not an infinite potential up ahead. Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) is a three day experience instead of a day-and-a-half of luxuriant soreness. A heavy full workout is the ending for the day, pretty much, not just a trigger for endorphins to spin through the brain, but an actual tiredness and a limit to energy. My continuity of awareness, my sense of duty and obligation, experience and longing, love and tragedy, stops somewhere up ahead. I get to push off frailty but it waits.

I started writing in my twenties. I started treating pages and words as intentional, purposeful, necessary.

I’m writing a story. There’s so much to the period I want to write of, in universal exploration of human experience. So many changes coming together. I started with one story, wrote scenes all the way in to Louis B. Mayer’s office and a bit beyond, realized I didn’t know anything about it, really, other than a vague sense of searchlights and old cars. I googled and found a couple of images. The photographs were of an enormous white room, with a semi-circular white custom built desk. This was from the 50’s. I needed to know what it would have been like in 1934. More, I realized Louis B. Mayer was a key character, not a by-the-way-I-threw-in-a-famous-figure. And there were more.

There is the character I envisioned and created, Hildie Hastings, ex-starlet, smart, running a smaller studio. There’s Francis Marion, whose drunk violent alcoholic ex-husband, director George Hill, just committed suicide a couple of years ago, and who is one of the top screenwriters of any gender in Hollywood, has been for decades. There’s the era, the 1930’s, the doom rising on the other side of the world, dark clouds shading to back in Europe, the fading Great Depression, the memories of the Great War and the sense we were sliding into another world war in Europe. The exuberance of motion pictures and stars and Hollywood and the Academy Awards. Curving cars, searchlights into the sky, premiers. An industry created out of nothing. There’s Irving Thalberg, Boy Wonder, working 18 hours days, key to MGM and married to MGM’s top star – told he was doomed from birth, lives to 37, dead in two years. From a superficial setting to involvement. Research. Commitment.

These people were creating with no idea how any of it turned out. No one even had any idea that feature films even had any lasting value. It was all a brand new thing, and they dreamed.

I may never sell a word. Is it worth it anyway?

I may never sell a painting – is it worth it anyway?

I may never publish a photograph – worth it? Or no?

When the characters start speaking lines on their own and coming to live off the page, is that the ethereal sense of God-like ability and creativity, is that how good characters and good writing work, or – is that a sliding off into fantasy and belief. Or both…

It’s like having a pocket universe. But it’s unfinished.

When I think of finishing the story, the screenplay I think of the threads of narrative, the pieces and scenes coming together weaved into a whole with skill and deft turn of dialogue and visual movement. I feel the music I can’t yet hear and I get a sense of the emotional hit that should be present in a really good story with characters you find you love. It’s damned good.

Getting from this place on one side of the vast canyon of incomplete scenes, across to the other side with a mass of paper punched in three holes and clipped with brass clips in top and bottom holes (but never the middle) – maybe there is supposed to be a bridge there, but for me it turns out the path is down the side and through the brush and wash and rocks and boulders at the bottom. And then the sheer rise of rock on the other face is daunting, but maybe that crack there would provide a handhold?

If the journey is the thing, is the narration of that journey the thing too? Can I write about finding that path?

Can I use that narration, that meta-thought, writing about finding a way to write, to work through?

Stay tuned…

— spence

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Some words are infused in the mind with their own meaning. They reflect and echo their concept into the mind, cascading and expanding into vision.

Redolent.

Redolent with the bracing scent of urine…

…speaking of the backside of the column holding up an underpass, surrounded by piss-stained brick, in downtown Boston.

Redolent of new mown grass

Redolent with possibilities. Wafting. Pervading. Language is just awesome.

— spence

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When Ashley was born, on a bright day in July,
her nickname was immediately “Bug,”
as in “cute as a bug.”

I went in to watch her sleep
in her crib
almost every night after we brought her home.
I watched her very small chest rise and fall.
That was a miracle.

Having this child meant being completely vulnerable
to the whims of the universe.

I cast hope out into the future.
I get to watch over her and love her, forever.

When she was about three
Ashley got quieter
and quieter
over several days.

Her doctor said she had pneumonia
and was hours from needing admittance to a hospital.

She got better.
But she scared me.

She rode her bike without training wheels in Lake View Terrace, CA.
She helped me build a coffee table in Boulder CO.
She sledded down the hill with our dog Samantha at the house in Milford MA.

She was golden blonde,
sunshine
and warmth.

She faded the winter she spent in Massachusetts,
so I sent her back to California.

Ashley traveled through Europe when she was fifteen
.
She determined that Corfu was her favorite place on the planet.
She talked about that trip for years…

“When I was in France…”

Ashley studied International Business in New York City.
She found she hated it.

She discovered space and color and form and balance and function.
She studied Interior Design, and she found she loved it.

She got quiet once again, this time over several months.
She was admitted to the hospital and we got word that she had leukemia.

By the time I got across the country from Boston to Los Angeles,
Ashley was on a ventilator and could no longer speak or communicate directly.

All of us,
all of you,
family and friends,
came together
and somehow we got her through the worst two months ever.

At the lowest point in that February I was holding Ash’s hand,
feeling the warmth of her still presence,
accepting each moment as a gift.

That diagnosis
and then that reality,
cancer patient,
Ash just accepted.

She looked ahead with true courage at each point in her journey
and asked,
“What next?”

Ashley knew she was dying that last week.
She found
the rare gift
in that
rather than the despair of it,
that ending.

I tried to find everything I needed to say to her,
as her dad,
as someone responsible for her and to her.
I came close enough.

She managed a death
at peace
and without despair or anxiety.

Her passing on was with eyes wide open.
She said “It’s over…”
and she meant this life, this struggle.

And then she asked
“What’s next?”
and she went on.

An expansion of being, rather than in any way diminished.

This breath holds the spirit to the body.

And so it was.
Ash let go
and the breath stopped…

.

July 2nd 1986 – 3rd January 2011

I will always
miss her presence here

.

Koi Pond at St. Joseph’s Hospital by Ashley Lyn Munsinger

The post Ashley Lyn , You are Loved and You are Missed… appeared first on Spence Munsinger.

India.Arie has a vocal phrasing that lilts, harmonizes and brings up the hairs on the back of my neck, it’s so exquisitely threading through notes.

My daughter was in a coma for 42 days in 2010. I found and bought 2 CDs of India’s music, Voyage to India and Testimony Vol. 1. I played these each morning during my walk to Torrance Memorial Hospital.

India’s voice is perfect for illuminating sadness and possibility of loss while also pushing for an absolute love of life and endless possibility and hope. It kept balance back then, it gave comfort and it kept me somewhat sane.

Saner than otherwise, anyway.

“I am a queen.” “Not the girl in your video”. Powerful songs, embodying and holding the essence of the woman my daughter had become and a future I hoped she still would have.

I found that voice again, recently – just so warm and sweet in tone. Songversations. Songversations: Medicine. Just brilliant. Thank you.

— spence

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