Interview:

Since graduating from Stanford University in 2003, I’ve worked about every job imaginable – mostly as an author, screenwriter, and journalist, but also as a teacher, concert promoter, fundraiser, temp, nursery assistant, day laborer, and, briefly, as a dishwasher in Alabama. All that time I’ve been translating experience into words in the forms of screenplays and fiction. Originally from Chicago, I now live in New York City, where I’m pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University. “A House Divided” is my third feature script, following the lost-youth drama “Plan B”(2006) and film-within-a-film thriller “A Kaleidoscope of Youthful Desires”(2004). I also wrote, produced, and directed the award-winning short “Rock Paper Scissors” (35 min, 2003), which premiered on opening night of the 2003 Stanford Film Festival. That’s where I learned my technical craft as a diligent and dues-paying member of the Stanford Film Society. In addition to my film career, in the last six years I’ve published more than a hundred pieces of fiction, journalism, reviews, essays, and travel writing, mostly in the Chicago Tribune, but also in the Baltimore Sun, Newsday, Aegis, and The Mind’s Eye, among others. My short fiction has been honored four times by the literary magazine Glimmer Train,my recent story “Two Girls” was a Finalist in the 2008 David Nathan Meyerson Memorial Contest at Southwest Review, and in 2003, my fiction won Stanford’s top creative writing award, the Bocock-Guerard Prize for Fiction.

Currently, I’m promoting “A House Divided”in conjunction with Luminair Film Studio in Chicago, seeking producers and talent to make the film a reality. I’m also writing a collection of short stories, entitled “The Storm Before the Calm,” and working on a new screenplay, under the supervision of screenwriter and author Trey Ellis at Columbia, about illegal adoptions from Guatemala to the U.S., entitled “The Baby Pipeline.”

Is A HOUSE DIVIDED your first script? If not, what else have you completed?

A HOUSE DIVIDED is my third feature film script. I wrote the first, “A Kaleidoscope of Youthful Desires,” when I was graduating from college, and it’s a wonderfully unmanageable mash-up: a paranoid thriller, a film-within-a-film, a tragic romance, a road trip comedy. I tried to fit every idea I’d ever had into that one script, and one day I’d love to go back and beat it into some semblance of sanity. My second script was “Plan B,” an earnest drama/comedy about footloose young folks in Chicago, which I wrote with my friends Matt Kolsky, a sports radio host, and Michael Gaillard, an artist. I’m now working on my fourth script, “The Baby Pipeline,” a character-driven thriller about illegal adoptions. The new script has entailed a lot of investigative research, which is new for me as a screenwriter, although I’ve worked quite a bit as a journalist, and I’ve found the combination of investigation and creation very invigorating.

Why did you write A HOUSE DIVIDED? And how long did it take you to write it?

I had a very clear vision for every other script I’ve written or attempted, but A HOUSE DIVIDED began pouring out of me unannounced in January of 2006. Looking back, I realize I was very loosely inspired by Guy de Maupassant’s 19th-century novella “Pierre and Jean,” which also features a mysterious inheritance that divides and destroys a family. But the primary original plot lines and characters in A HOUSE DIVIDED sprang almost fully-formed from my head that winter, with very little foresight or planning. Also, I imagined the story taking place at my parents’ home in Evanston, Illinois, where I grew up, and that lent the story a sense of immediacy as well as a haunting enchantment for me—I kept imagining my own family encountering the sort of trauma that my characters do. It was a bit of a harrowing experience. Of course, in reality my life has been (fortunately) much more staid and settled than that of the family in A HOUSE DIVIDED. All told, I finished the first draft in just two months, and then spent more than a year revising it.

Describe your process; do you have a set routine, method for writing?

Since I’m working as a freelance writer and studying creative writing full-time as a grad student at Columbia University, I have to be very disciplined about setting aside time to write my own creative work. I’m a night owl and feel creatively juiced around midnight, so I go to Yaffa Café in the East Village of Manhattan every Sunday through Thursday night. I arrive at 11 pm and write until about 4 am. That gives me 20 to 25 hours of writing each week. I drink one large cappuccino, and the staff knows I’m working so they give me a quiet table in the back. It’s a clean, well-lighted place to write.

What inspires you to write?

I can’t imagine not writing. The life we all experience each day is so wrapped in mystery and suffused with feeling—desires, joys, sorrows, laughter, grief, honor, shame, fury—that I feel compelled to express my own tiny view of that everlasting drama. I believe that fiction, film, music, and so on, are methods of empathic communion among separate individuals: the spiritual equivalent of sex. It’s how we connect and live inside one another’s heads for a little while. And you know what else? I really enjoy writing. When I walk home after a long night of writing, a night spent living imaginatively inside another person, a character I’ve created from within, I feel very strongly linked to all the other people I see on the streets, as if I know what they are feeling and thinking, and they know what I am, and we are all sharing this life together. I guess you could say I feel a sense of mystical unity, which makes writing a form of meditation or prayer for me. Of course most of the time I don’t write nearly well enough to feel this way! Usually I walk home frustrated, or else just tired, or maybe excited to get started again the next day. That feeling of completeness only happens two or three times a year. But it makes the everyday writing slog worth it.

Apart from writing, what else are you passionate about?

Well, watching movies and reading novels, not surprisingly. I also love to play basketball, especially pick-up games in New York, which are a fascinating sociological exercise as well as an athletic one. I also love spending time with my fiancée: coming home to her every night is the highlight of my day. And a great conversation—who doesn’t love that? And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my hometown team, Da Chicago Bears. The world stops for me when the Bears play on Sundays. I’m still reliving the nightmare of Rex Grossman’s pick-six in the 4th quarter of the 2007 Super Bowl in Miami. I was there. In the rain. It was brutal.

What influenced you to enter the Movie Script Contest?

My friend Daniel Elder, a producer at Luminair Film Studio in Chicago, has been a huge supporter of A HOUSE DIVIDED from the get-go. He mentioned the contest to me. He thought it’d be a great way to see if other folks in the industry liked the script as much as we did. Also we were hoping for feedback from other industry pros. That’s a rare opportunity and clinched my decision to enter the contest.

Do you feel that screenwriting contests are worthwhile for writers and why?

Absolutely. The film industry, like any creative industry, is very difficult to break into. It is dominated by people who already know one another, which is understandable, because it’s a collaborative and expensive art, and let’s be honest, people are more comfortable working with, and trusting, people they know. Also, there are so many aspiring screenwriters that it’s very difficult for producers and agents to find the diamonds in the rough. Screenwriting contests are a great opportunity for people with talent, knowledge and commitment to prove themselves and break into the industry.

Who is your favorite screenwriter or writer and why?

It’s hard to pick just one screenwriter, but names that come to mind include: Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, Paul Schrader, Charlie Kaufman, Pedro Almodovar, Oliver Stone, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and early Quentin Tarantino. I especially admire writers like Allen, Kubrick, and the Coen Brothers, for the diversity of their work.

Any advice or tips you’d like to pass on to other writers?

Keep writing. I hardly feel qualified to offer any other advice. Keep writing.

What’s next for you?

I’m at Columbia University pursuing an MFA, so I’m getting tremendous instruction and feedback every day in both fiction writing and screenwriting. I’m planning to finish my new screenplay, “The Baby Pipeline,” by May of 2009. I’m also working on a collection of short stories, entitled “The Storm Before the Calm,” and planning to start a novel during the summer. And of course I’m promoting “A HOUSE DIVIDED– a passion project that I truly believe will be made. It will just take the right people to find it, fall in love, and run with it, transforming it into a film. Fingers crossed.