Not long ago, I experienced an epiphany—one of those sudden moments of revelation that James Joyce compared to the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.

It came to me, as such godsends often do, under the most commonplace of circumstances—a tutorial with a student who alerted me to the existence of a screenwriting manual humbly entitled Save the Cat.

The book, perfectly designed for the Millennial Generation, is a wonder—so clear in its step-by-step instructions that you don’t even have to read it!

A quick glance at the table of contents tells you everything you need to know.

Make sure your hero does something nice in his introductory scene.

Include the fifteen plot points every script must have.

Take care to place those plot points on the correct page.

Do all these things, and you can’t fail to produce a guaranteed-to-sell screenplay!

If I’d only known!

Oh, the wasted years!

Watching all those movies!

Reading all those scripts!

Fumbling around, clumsily trying to teach myself the craft of the screenplay when all I’d have had to do is peruse Save the Cat.

I’m now embarked on a new adventure as a writer.

I’m attempting to write my first novel.

(Well, my second actually. I did my first back in the eighth grade, but the manuscript has—much to the regret of literary historians, I’m sure—been lost.)

I’m attempting to write my first novel, and I’ve vowed not to repeat the mistakes I made when I fumbled my way into the screen trade.

For help, I’ve turned to an old friend.

Acclaimed novelist Ron Carlson.

Author of ten or twelve books of fiction and director of the creative writing program at UC Irvine, Ron has published what I’m hoping is the fiction writer’s answer to Save the Cat.

He calls it Ron Carlson Writes a Story.

Hmmm.

An odd title.

I myself would have preferred something along the lines of The Twelve- Step System for Writing Great Fiction.

No matter.

Let’s see what Ron considers the first step in writing a story.

Ah!

Finding an idea.

Well, not finding it so much as selecting it.

Ron insists that every experience, whether the author’s own or someone else’s, is a potential seed for a story.

That’s pretty vague, Ron. Can you be more specific?

If an idea, an experience, an image or an event matters to the author, then Ron feels it’s worthy of exploration.

But what are the rules? What are the five elements of a great story idea?

There are no rules, Ron insists, and every idea is different.

But…

All you have to do, he claims, is choose an idea or experience that you the author care about—something that you yourself would like to read about.

Ron chooses, as the subject of his eponymous story, the time he lost a mattress off the back of his pick-up truck.

Uhhh…

…I know Ron knows what he’s doing, but…how many of us are going to want to write about the day we lost a mattress?

How is his choice going to guide us in making our own choices?

Well, perhaps he’ll be more helpful when it comes to developing a character or crafting a plot.

No. Apparently not.

He claims that when he wrote the first word of his piece, he had no idea who was speaking and even less idea where the story was headed!

He insists that writing a story is a journey—a journey of discovery, a journey that requires focus, attention and effort—and that the most important thing a writer must do after writing the first sentence is stay in the room.

Resist the temptation to refill your coffee cup.

Ignore the television screen that beckons from the den.

Forget about the chores crying to be done.

The carpet that needs vacuuming.

The lawn that needs mowing.

Barricade your mind against all the wonderful excuses you can invent not to write and stay in the room.

Stay in the room and write the next sentence and the next and the next.

Stay in the room and watch the characters reveal themselves.

Stay in the room and watch the story unfold.

But…but…but…

Where are the steps, Ron?

Give us some rules!

Some blanks to fill in!

Some dots to connect!

It’s hard for me to admit because Ron is such a good friend, but the fact of the matter is…

…I’m disappointed.

I’d hoped for Seven Days To a Better Novel, and all he’s given me is some malarkey about the mystery of creation and some advice about how to nurse that process along.

I have to face it.

Ron Carlson Writes a Story offers me next to no guidance on how to write my own story.

I wonder.

Do you suppose the For Dummies series includes a volume on crafting fiction?

I certainly hope so.

In fact, I’m going to check into right away.

But in the meantime, I think I’ll send Ron a copy of Save the Cat.

Blake Snyder could certainly teach him a thing or two.

Yes, Ron can claim rave reviews from shabby journals like The New York Times and The Washington Post, but he’s never written anything to compare to Snyder’s Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.

After all, what are a Booklist Starred Review, an NDEA Fellowship in Fiction, a National Society of Arts and Letters Award, or a Ploughshares Cohen Prize alongside a Golden Raspberry for Worst Writer of the Year?

Not long ago, one of the readers of my book contacted me to inquire about the possibility of one-on-one screenwriting lessons.

It’s not something I’d ordinarily consider, but he said that he’d read everything that had ever been written about the subject and that nothing he’d encountered could come close to Confessions of a Hollywood Nobody.

He wanted, he said, to learn from a master of the craft.

It’s hard to say no to a person of such obvious taste and discrimination, and so it was that we arranged to get together for a tutorial.

I asked my student to read, as his first assignment, my own The Last Innocent Man, hoping it might serve as a springboard for our conversations about the art of writing for the screen.

He showed up eager, enthusiastic and full of questions.

His first question?

Why had I failed to save the cat in the scene introducing my hero?

I patiently pointed out that there isn’t any cat in The Last Innocent Man, and he, attempting to suppress his contempt for my appalling ignorance, explained that “saving the cat” is a phrase from a popular book about screenwriting.

The notion, it seems, is that the hero of your story must do something nice in his first scene—something like saving a cat—something that will make the audience like him and sympathize with him.

Oh, my!

What could I say?

I had clearly failed to save the cat in The Last Innocent Man.

When we meet my hero (I’d foolishly thought of him as my protagonist), he is tense, nervous, a criminal attorney awaiting the verdict in the trial of a former Green Beret accused of the bludgeon slaying of his wife.

His client is pretty obviously guilty as charged, but my guy, through dazzling turns of courtroom magic, manages to manipulate the jury into throwing justice out the window and declaring him innocent.

My hero, when he should be out saving cats, is putting monsters back on the street!

Damn!

I don’t know how I could have screwed up so badly.

My one consolation?

I’m not alone in my unforgivable blunder.

Poor Robert Towne did the same thing in Chinatown, which opens with cheap detective J.J. Giddes, full of insincere sympathy, showing an agonized husband raw photos of his unfaithful wife and her lover in bed together. Giddes comes across as someone who probably doesn’t even like cats, let alone save them.

Then, of course, there’s old Joe Stefano, who opened Psycho with his heroine conducting a sleazy affair in a seedy hotel. Probably lots of stray cats in the neighborhood, but does she go out of her way to rescue one of them? No way! Instead she goes on to steal a shitpile of money from one of her boss’s clients.

And what of Walon Green and Sam Peckinpaw, who began The Wild Bunch with their hero leading his gang of outlaws into a small town, knocking over a bank, and precipitating a bloody gun battle. Pike Bishop and his friends are clearly more at home with scorpions than cats.

I blush to admit that, until my student set me straight, I had thought of each and every one of these films as masterworks.

I clearly had a lot to learn about screenwriting.

In fact, it seems that I had made catastrophic mistake after mistake in The Last Innocent Man…as well as in the twenty-four other screenplays I wrote.

My student, now my teacher, generously pointed out that no screenplay should have more than thirty or forty scenes.

The Last Innocent Man has thirty scenes in the first thirty-five pages!

What could I have been thinking?

What about the fifteen beats every screenplay must have?

Oh, my God!

I don’t even know what they are!

Well, my student informed me, you need a statement of your theme on page five.

OH…MY…GOD!!!

All these years I’ve deliberately avoided such statements!

My credo has been “Show. Don’t tell.”

I actually believed that the theme would simply emerge from the action of the piece!

There are, it turns out, fourteen other beats a good screenplay must include, and mine, as my student so astutely pointed out, has only a few of these beats, all of them on the wrong pages!

If only I’d known.

For years, I labored under the delusion that screenwriting is a journey of discovery, that the characters will dictate the action, that the material determines the style and structure of the piece.

And now, I’ve learned that writing a script is really more akin to one of those wonderful paint-by-the-number books that I so enjoyed as a child.

For years, I struggled.

I agonized.

I waited endlessly for my characters to talk to me.

Waited for them to show me what was going to happen.

Waited for them to lead me to the end of their stories.

But I now realize that they gave me nothing.

No hint of where my acts should end.

No clue to where my B-story should begin.

Not even a suggestion about my debate section or my fun and games segment.

By listening to them, I not only failed to save the cat; I failed to write anything that deserves to be called a screenplay.

But thanks to my student, I’ve seen the errors of my way.

I’ve seen the errors of my way, and I make this public vow.

I will read Save the Cat.

I will paint by the numbers.

I will fill in the blanks.

I will connect the dots.

And one of these days, if I get very lucky, I will sell a script to one of the studio idiots who’ve read Save the Cat, attended Robert McKee’s weekend seminar, and now know everything anyone needs to know about the art of writing screenplays.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

…I had respect, job security, and a title—Associate Professor of English!

I spent my days reading and discussing great literary works like Moby-Dick, Heart of Darkness, The Sound and the Fury, and The Grapes of Wrath.

Then I came to Hollywood.

Respect went out the window.

I was now a reader—a nameless drone in the hive of Universal Studios.

As for job security, that too was gone.

In fact, I spent three months unemployed before the Story Analysts Guild allowed me to accept the job that had inspired me to resign my academic post.

And my title?

Well, let’s just say that “reader” doesn’t inspire the same kind of awe as “ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR.”

Frankly, none of this mattered.

I was inside!

I was where I’d dreamed of being all my life.

In my film fanatic’s mind, I had just entered the Kingdom of Heaven,  and I was eager to try my wings.

I must admit, however, that I was somewhat daunted when I received my first assignment—a pile of Judy Blume books topped by Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

It was, of course, a test.

The Story Editor, who had taken a chance hiring me, wanted to start me off with something I couldn’t screw up: the Blume books were born to be “Afterschool Specials” but had no chance whatsoever of making it to the big screen.

I passed the test and worked my way up to more serious projects like The Lords of Discipline and Sophie’s Choice, but I’ve always remembered the humbling experience of my descent from Joseph Conrad to Judy Blume.

So when I came upon Chelsea Handler’s Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, I was an instant fan.

Funny as she is, Chelsea is clearly a woman to be taken seriously, and when I later stumbled upon a Handler interview in which she recommended a book called Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, I had to have it.

The book, by Mason Curry, is an account of the working habits of well-known creative talents—writers, artists, composers and the like.

It is filled with fascinating anecdotes.

Thomas Wolfe fondled his “male configurations” to spur creativity. (No surprise to this reader who has always considered Wolfe’s shameless indulgence in the purplest of prose a form of verbal masturbation.)

Proust, who remembered things past while snugly ensconced in his sheets, had many bedfellows—from Edith Stiwell, who was rumored to find inspiration by lying in an open coffin, to Truman Capote, who described himself as a “completely horizontal writer.”

W.H. Auden began his day with Benzadrine and ended it with Seconal. Edward Abbey started with uppers and finished with downers.

Alcohol was, of course, the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald and, one suspects, for his rivals Hemingway and Faulkner, though both claimed to write sober and drink only in the interval.

But by far the most popular drug of choice, it seems, is coffee. For Beethoven, it was precisely sixty beans per cup. For Balzac, fifty cups per day. For David Lynch, a mere six or seven…augmented by heaps of sugar and a chocolate shake.

What conclusions can one draw from a reading of Daily Rituals?

First and foremost, creative types are eccentrics.

They swim outside the mainstream. They are not “normal,” and it is, perhaps, their status as outsiders that inspires them to re-examine cherished beliefs, to question the norm, to look at life from unique perspectives.

Second, the vast majority of them adhere to strict routine, to disciplined scheduling of their working lives, and they rely upon some sort of external stimulus to get them through their working day.

Why?

The creation of anything—a novel, a play, a sculpture, a dance—is hard, physically as well as mentally demanding. Phillip Roth describes it as “a nightmare.” William Styron, as “hell.”

So it is that writers go to astonishing lengths to find reasons not to write.

The most common solution?

Write every day. Write at the same time every day. Write the same number of words every day. And make sure the coffee pot is always full.

The third and final conclusion to be drawn from Daily Rituals is that most creative types are loners…at least, while they are involved in the impossible task of creation.

They, like Greta Garbo, want to be alone.

They achieve this goal by retreating to a place apart.

For Robinson Jeffers, it was the remote California coast, Tor House and his “tower beyond tragedy.”

For others, it is something as simple as a bedroom, a study, a cabin…with a “DO NOT DISTURB” sign posted outside.

Or a swim in the sea.

Or a walk in an isolated wood.

Writers and other artists want to be alone…alone in the world of their creation, alone with the characters and the images they are creating, undisturbed by the noisy world that constantly threatens to intrude and send their castles in the sky crumbling down to earth.

All of these things are, I suspect, true not just of the greats examined in Daily Rituals, but of lesser talents like Judy Blume and Chelsea Handler.

I know they are true of me, and while my achievements as a writer are modest at best, I’m convinced that there may be value in an account of my own daily rituals, which will be the subject of my next diatribe.