Writer's Statement

I use humor to write stories about growth and coming of age through diverse genres, characters, and plots. 

My life experiences have provided an inventory of emotions I would like to exploit through screenwriting. I grew up never meeting my father and living with an abusive stepfather. At 30, I lost a girlfriend to cancer. And at 40 lost another to a drowning accident. I've traveled and lived across the country several times, and I've held every job imaginable from Air Force airman to driving instructor to college professor. I want to capture everything I've felt in life and allow my audiences to feel those same things, even if only through fiction and fantasy. I love movies for their escape from reality, and I want to do the same for others.

I fondly joke that I was a playwright at the age of 11 when I wrote a 13-page play loosely based on the sitcom Happy Days for my sixth-grade class to perform. We never performed it. My teachers told me to bring the play to the theater department when I entered junior high school the next year. But when my stepfather dragged us to another city, I went to a different junior high school and never looked at that play again. Sadly, I didn't pursue writing again until I was an undergrad in college, when I recaptured the joy of creative writing and telling stories. My girlfriend at the time told me "the best gift is the one that's homemade." So, for Christmas that year, I "made" her a short story. It was about a little boy who prematurely learned the truth about Santa Claus (though I didn't have the heart to let the story end so truthfully).

I would have thought my writing career would move in the creative direction. But now in my 50s, I look back at an entire career pursued in technical writing. It was rewarding and secure, and it enabled me to do things like publish a book and begin my current career as a writing professor. But it wasn't exciting. And in my 40s, my technical writer boredom motivated me to take a stab again at creative writing—if nothing else, for a change of pace. I decided on screenwriting at UCLA Extension and learned two things as I pursued their feature-film certificate. The first was that screenwriting has more in common with technical writing than you’d think—I discovered my technical writing improved significantly after I started screenwriting, and I believe it made me become a whole writer. The second thing I learned was that I really wished I had started screenwriting decades ago. I love not only the emotional release of writing a screenplay but also the challenge of plotting its beats and determining the structure and syntax for the script—it's sort of like a puzzle for my technical writer mind.

It's hard for me to identify my favorite genres—I love too many of them. But I find I'm most drawn to writing comedy, horror, and coming of age. If I can mix them, even better. While I aim to write dialog like Aaron Sorkin, I admire the range of Diablo Cody. Who would ever think to follow Juno with Jennifer's Body? Actually, I like to think I would have. They are the range and types of stories I aspire to tell. I wish I wrote Zombieland, Adventureland, and Hancockland (okay, it's Hancock, but it flowed better the other way). I've lost count of the number of times I've watched The Exorcist, A Few Good Men, and Mean Girls. And I stop surfing channels when I stumble upon Forrest Gump, Pitch Perfect, and just about any Hallmark Christmas movie. But these are the movies that entertain me. And it is these types of stories that define me as a screenwriter.