The “Why Not?” Part

I have a milestone birthday this week. I’m still deciding whether to celebrate or not, which brings up a lot of questions. Mainly, why not?

I attended a wonderful wine tasting last week. It’s on my weekly schedule, but somehow the friends who want to go always back out and I’ve never gone alone. This time I did because I’d written about the winery for an online magazine that covers San Miguel's culture and lifestyle and was curious to actually taste the wines.

I made wonderful new wine aficionado friends. The wine labels also made me smile. Each featured an affectionate caricature of one of the winery workers, all happily chubby or "fluffy" as my friend Pen likes to say. Some of my fellow tasters were assiduously taking notes and rating the wines, something I’ve done plenty of. Now I’m more interested in whether a wine surprises me, lingers, or makes me want a full glass.

Much the same thing has happened in my writing.

I recently saw a gig looking for adult-themed vertical scripts. They wanted a 20-minute short that they would carve up, with a hook every two minutes. I thought, “Why not?” I can write twenty pages relatively easily. My younger self would have sweated over whether the opening established theme and tone, whether the first few minutes introduced the protagonist and what needed to change in their life, where the call to action fell, and every structural beat that followed.

I'm still aware of those things. The difference is that I incorporate them instinctively and then go back and carve away anything that isn’t an add. Less is more, not because fewer pages are automatically better, but because everything that remains has to matter.

I finished the short, then realized I wanted to tell the story more cinematically, not just the tight shots and close-ups typical for a vertical format. I turned it into a spec half-hour television series called Unwritten. I had so much fun writing it that I kept going to see where it took me. Five episodes later, I’m letting it linger.

Like that first sip of wine.

Before scoring, what's the experience? Does it conjure a den filled with leather and cigar smoke in Havana, or a late-summer frolic through a field of lavender?

Unwritten is about a novelist who hasn’t written a sentence worth keeping since her bestselling novel five years ago. A flirtation with a superstar DJ twelve years her junior reawakens her senses and her creativity.

Maybe she’s asking herself the same question: Why not?

I still haven’t decided whether to celebrate my birthday. Asking “Why not?” led me to a wine tasting and five episodes of a TV series. It may yet lead me to a party.

Learn about Barrigon Natural Wines here