Living with/out Hope as an Artist

or, What Goes up Must Come Down

William Holden and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, 1950

A SCREENPLAY I wrote is out to some production companies and agents as I type this, among them my dream studio and the rep for a fairly legendary actor. I’ve been down this road before. Close but no cigar. It’s exhilarating, hard work finally paying off, a light at the end of the long black tunnel. Intoxicating even. But what goes up must come down.

The screenplay is an adaptation of my second novel, Porno Valley, a darkly comic neo-noir about a vanished porn star, the old PI hired to find him, and two junkie lovers in search of the perfect score in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles. Like its protagonists it’s hard-edged and grimy with real heart. It’s the book that truly taught me how to write.

This isn’t a sales pitch. Porno Valley is flawed. It’s a little too long and a little too complex, the pacing drags, and, frankly, I was too enamored with the characters and the world they inhabited to properly attack it. I hadn’t yet learned how to edit ruthlessly and relentlessly, which is what makes writing great. That and patience.

And yet there’s something about this tragic mystery I can’t shake. There’s a lonely, haunting quality to it. I love the characters. They felt real to me when I wrote it and they feel real to me now. Set in 1999/2000, they live in a world where the decline in living standards driven by neoliberalism is becoming hard to ignore, a society that two decades later will teeter on the edge of an abyss. Young junkie lovers Richie and Alabama especially, I think, can sense the abyss coming for them. Their desperation is palpable.

Porno Valley in hardback. I lowkey love that it’s pink.

Porno Valley published in 2021. I have learned a lot about the craft of fiction in that time, and since then I have been endlessly writing and rewriting and editing and polishing the screenplay adaptation. We have traveled the Boulevard of Broken Dreams before, this script and me, and when we spun out in a cloud of dust a little part of me knew that another chance would come, that these characters and their tragic little lives would call out to be seen.

And so I dusted myself off and I hunched over the keyboard and I downed coffee and I blasted music and I made the script better. The result of that and the many, many other rewrites over the past five years is a 90-page screenplay that sheds the novel’s flaws and never stops moving, with dialogue worked on so extensively the characters’ voices shine through most every line.

Perhaps the latter is inevitable when characters whisper in your ear for so long. It took this time for the script to find its true form. This is partly because it was only my third screenplay, and certainly the first good one, but it is also because writing fiction, and screenplays especially, is brutally difficult. As I wrote re fiction as a career,

If you pursue it seriously, it will eventually cost you everything.

This is true. I could not quantify how many hours I have spent alone at a desk, facing a screen and a wall, headphones over my ears, isolated from the world. I have been writing fiction for close to ten years now and for the last few years especially I have been writing or doing something adjacent to the process not far off every available moment not wasted by soul-sucking full-time work.

Then you get the message: Script’s gone out to X and X and X! Will let you know when I hear back! and the old longing resurfaces, that glimmer of hope returning. Maybe the struggle will end, you think. Maybe I won’t have to labor until I’m gray, desperately trying to make as much art as I can in the hours that remain. Maybe I can dedicate my life to art, not just mornings before work and evenings after and long sessions on the weekends never quite long enough, but more, if not all, of my life and still have time left over to get enough sleep, enough exercise, to be less self-involved. Space to breathe.

It wasn’t really written with a typewriter but it looks cool as shit

But that’s not why we make art, is it? “Success” would be nice. It sure would make the days pass easier. My mental health would improve tremendously, along with my relationships. But it’s not the why. We make art because it nourishes the soul. We make art because it’s only when we’re making art that we truly feel alive.

Making art connects you to all of humanity while separating you from everyone around you. It may be both the loneliest and most spiritually fulfilling act there is. Writers in particular, we make art to connect with strangers across space and time. The interaction is abstract but the isolation is concrete.

And yet if you make art long enough, if you lose yourself inside the art of others enough times, you start to see the fabric of the world. You shed your ego. You realize that we are all each other and we are the universe, one cosmic organism experiencing itself forever. Or, as said by my favorite comedian, Bill Hicks:

How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn’t that be newsworthy? Just once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstitions and lies? Just once? I think it would be newsworthy. “Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”

In the scope of that, hope, longing, disappointment all become somewhat trivial. They feed the ego but not the soul. In fact, they tear our minds from our spirit by making the world appear so very real. We become convinced of our existence, chasing after “success” like it matters, like it’s real.

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PERHAPS, AND INDEED most probably, this latest ride down the Boulevard will end the same way: spinning out in a cloud of dust. But I’ve been writing long enough to know that anything can happen at any time to anyone, and the wildest shit happens when nobody expects it.

What goes up must come down, and so these days I don’t pay my hopes too much attention. They only get in the way. All that matters is to make something beautiful while we’re here. We’re all just dreaming, anyway.