JAMES COHEN: LAND HO! (Week 1)

We'll be hearing from the colonists directly about their experiences and work throughout their stay this month. Our first post is coming from screenwriter James Cohen:

Arriving in Nantucket on the Ferry.

LAND HO!
Ooh. Look. A lighthouse! How beautiful. On Saturday, when we arrived, it was a beacon of hope. I was Ahab, ready to tackle the rewrite. Five days later, I'm Kafka, and this little lighthouse pisses me off. It’s become a harrowing metaphor as I search for story and resolution in the the fog of my mind.

Okay.. I'm being melodramatic. It's really, really nice here. I love it. Everyone’s kind of awesome. The writing is going well. Or at least the thinking is. The plotting…

And I dig the light house. It’s been Instagrammed.

There is a point, kind of, I just haven’t made it yet. Writing is a lot like fishing. I've known this to be true my entire life, having grown up angling trout streams with my father and brother. I imagine that whaling, or scalloping, or whatever goes on here in Nantucket is a similar-ish meditation. These are disciplines that require patience, vision. Eventually, you hook onto something big, wrestle with it, and bring it to shore.

Okay. It's nothing like whaling - which I'm against, by the way - or scalloping, not that I've done that. I think you just grab those with your hand? And maybe I've confused whaling with whale watching, which I'm totally for. Who cares. But writing is like trout fishing. I stand by that. And I am patiently wading the shallow waters of my brain for the end to my script.

I know where it's going. The script, I mean. How I want it to turn out and everything.

Let me start over. I'm writing a screenplay. We all are. That's why we're here. We're screenwriters. In Nantucket. In a colony. That needs funding. Surely, you must know this by now. No?

In a draft or so, my little Moby Dick of a script will be where I want it to be. Which is "done." And if all goes well, this lovely 4-week sojourn will afford me the time and headspace to get it there.

Here's the deal with the draft…

My initial instinct, many moons ago, was to have the two main characters wind up apart. And then for some reason - I think it was common sense - I decided a romantic comedy couldn't end that way, and so I had them wind up together. But now I'm going back to having them apart. I’ve realized that common sense can be bad for storytelling, plus it's so predictably common and sensible. The "catch" is, I never wrote the version where they wind up apart at the very end. I just had it in my head, sort of. It needs to be written. And make sense. Not common sense. Uncommon sense. Fun sense. So that's what I'm doing here. In this farmhouse. In Nantucket. In the off-season. In my pajamas.

Joyce and Kyle will NOT end up together. Period.

There. I said it.

PS – I miss my wife.