Scribble - Revise - Repeat
I grew up ripping around on BMX bikes and watching Star Wars on my bootleg Betamax tape betwixt feeding quarters into Space Duel. I was the kid who picked apart movie magic to see how it all worked. And here I am, decades later, still chasing the same rush - with bigger toys and way more story structure.
You know what's weird? No matter how many TV shows, movies, and video games I've scribbled, I keep getting pulled back to the same damn story.
For me, that story is the rescue. Not exactly sure why. Maybe it's from growing up as an only child in a big brutalist house where my folks rarely spoke, did their own shizz, and I had a ton of time by myself. Maybe I was low-key waiting for The Millenium Falcon to swoop in and save me. Or maybe I wanted to be the hero - the one who pulls someone else from the dark.
I've had a backstage pass to other writers get stuck in their loops - dudes writing about their daddy issues, the misfit who never belonged, or Gleaming The Cube on that endless grind for validation. That last one's evergreen, especially for folks who grew up feeling like the odd one out. We write what's burned into our brains, what keeps us up at night, what we're still trying to figure out.
The A-listers prove this every time they make something new. They might bounce between genres, but their obsessions follow them like shadows.
Spielberg can't stop telling stories about kids looking for their dads or building surrogate families. E.T. phone home? More like "E.T. replace absent father figure."
Nolan's brain is a time machine stuck on regret. Memento, Inception, Interstellar - the man's saying "if I could just go back and fix this one thing..."
Del Toro keeps creating these misunderstood monsters who find their people in the dark corners of magical kingdoms. The dude is one of the nicest and most generous folks I’ve been lucky enough to work with, and yet clearly, he’s spent a lot of time feeling like an outsider.
Scorsese's Catholic guilt is practically its own character in his movies. The man can't escape cycles of violence and redemption if he tries. Lately, it seems like he’s trying to atone for glamorizing villains, but he still can’t stop making them his main characters.
Tarantino's just remaking the same dark souls revenging on each other flick with different costumes and killer soundtracks. And I'm there for it every time!
Even the directors who seem to do everything have that one scab they can’t stop picking at.
This isn't a weakness to solve in therapy. It's your north star. The stories that hit hardest come from the stuff we can't shake loose. So if you keep circling back to the same feels, the same themes, the same core story... don't fight the lure of the abyss. Go deep. That's probably the story you were born to tell.
You may feel like an outsider that Daddy didn’t love, but when you're staring at that blank page, you're not alone. Your obsessions are your secret sauce. That’s why you should ABS. Always. Be. Scribbling.
