Rob Kozlowski, Writer of Things

The End

2012-01-23T09:28:00.000-06:00

I think my 33 years of watching football must have ended. Instead of watching the AFC and NFC Championships yesterday, I watched multiple episodes of Downton Abbey.

I just want Anna and Mr. Bates to be happy.

Novel vs. Play

2012-01-20T09:47:00.000-06:00

Nothing against writing plays, mind you, but I think I've discovered precisely why I'm enjoying writing this novel so much. After conceiving of the novel and writing plenty of notes in my journal about it, I began writing on January 2. In the past 18 days I've written about 5,600 words. It's probably not as much output as I was hoping, but I've been enjoying writing. From about 2004 until 2007 I really worked hard to try to be a playwright and have come to the amazing realization that I can't become one because my plays will never be produced, not unless I can produce them myself. I have neither the time nor money for this. I have three jobs and a family with whom I love to spend as much free time as possible.

Writing a play doesn't matter if you don't get produced. The play does not exist if it is not produced. So, in order to become a produced playwright, here are the generally accepted steps:

Get a great GPA with your undergrad degree.
Write plays so you can send samples of your writing to grad schools.
Accept a crippling amount of debt or have access to a lot of money.
Go through the application process of getting to a grad school.
Go to grad school.
Work ass off in grad school, live in poverty, write, write, write, and schmooz like crazy.
Graduate. Move to big city. Submit plays. Make sure you can afford to work very little so you have time to write plays and schmooz like crazy.

There are other ways around this, of course. But I would not hesitate to say this is the generally accepted path. See, I've realized if I'm not produced, I'm not a playwright, because a play that is not produced does not exist yet. Some folks might debate this, but I think I'm right.

Here are the steps to becoming a novelist:

Write novel.

The novel exists. It's down on paper or on your Kindle. In the e-book era, I can self-publish at no cost. Everything that the novel can be? Is. It exists. A play does not exist until it's in production. Do play readings count? No. If you're someone who thinks you have written plays and you have never been produced, you've never written a play.

The one thing that has always bothered me about writing a play is that always in the back of my mind, I think, "What will I write on the cover letter? What is a good synopsis? Which ten pages should I choose to submit?" This is harmful thinking. None of this matters unless I have the time to go to grad school and get an MFA in playwriting and spend a lot of time getting to know a lot of people. Or getting attached to a theater company somehow and convincing them to produce my plays. Or starting my own theater company.

All I'm thinking about now is writing the novel. Maybe this simply means I've "matured" but every time I've tried to go back to an unfinished play, and I've done this a couple of times in the last two months, I can't get started. Because I know it's futile. It's a shame, but it's true. I just don't have the time or resources to be a playwright.

Am I sad about that? A little. I don't feel like I wasted my time trying to write plays because I think any time spent writing makes me a better writer. Even writing this is valuable in its own way. But I'm sticking with text, thank you very much.

5,000 Words

2012-01-17T13:01:00.005-06:00

I've been working on my novel for precisely 15 days. I've written slightly over 5,000 words. Not that I'm gauging the quality of the work by word count, but considering I've spent the last several years not writing, it's definitely a sign that my several years of not writing is truly over at last. Last summer I attempted to start a different novel and that sputtered, although I will definitely revisit in the future. What I'm writing now, very tentatively titled You're Telling Me!, is sticking to the ribs. I'm writing a bit of the novel every day and I'm also writing in my notebook every day.

THIS...IS MY NOTEBOOK:

I love my Moleskine™ notebook. My Moleskine™ notebook is the one status symbol I allow myself. It says, "I'm a writer. BACK OFF!" Not that anyone has been the least bit intimidated when I'm carrying my Moleskine™ notebook. It's more expensive than your traditional, simple little spiral notebook, but it's far more awesome.

Notes on the novel:

I think I may have found my form. First of all, I have not ONCE wondered how I can possibly market this to producers. Half the time I wrote any of the plays I tried to write I kept thinking about what I'd write in my cover letter and synopsis and which ten pages I'd choose to send theaters. This is an unhealthy and foolish way to approach art. We are at a point in 2012 that if no publisher wants my book, I can publish it myself in a Kindle edition at no cost. HA!
I don't like to saddle my prose down with descriptions of my main characters. I'm never particularly fond of writers who need to tell us everything about Person X's physical characteristics down to the bridge of the nose and the tightness of the buttocks. That's not important to me. It never has been.
I wish I could type with my eyes closed.
I can be as silly as I want, and then also not as silly as I want. I'm writing it. I can do whatever I want.

These are important things.

Great Bad Romantic Comedy Idea

2012-01-17T11:36:00.001-06:00

I came up with a great bad romantic comedy idea today: An intellectual property lawyer, played by Matthew McConaghey, falls for a kindergarten teacher played by Kate Hudson. She painted Mickey Mouse on her classroom wall and he's suing her. The bad romantic comedy will be called CEASE AND DESIST.

Write me a check now, unnamed coke-addled movie producer. You're welcome.

Line of the Day

2012-01-16T15:52:00.002-06:00

From the novel I'm working on:

"I love plays about tuberculosis," he said, "but this one I found particularly inspiring."

Unplugged

2012-01-03T21:27:00.001-06:00

We did it. This is for keeps. On Tuesday I canceled our DirecTV service. It had nothing to do with the quality of the service itself, which was surprisingly good. (We didn't lose any signal during last year's blizzard, a storm with enough ferocity to bring snow into our attic.) No, it's the fact that there's nothing on television. Every single cable channel now features reality television competition shows of one stripe or another, whether it's on the History Channel or A&E or TLC or the Food Network or Country Music Television. I have little doubt we'll soon see The Great Farting Contest on CSPAN before the year is out. And while I'll miss Turner Classic Movies, I'm not going to pay $110 a month for Turner Classic Movies.

Hopefully the cable/satellite model of having to pay for hundreds of channels that our dogs aren't stupid enough to watch will go the way of the dodo. Unfortunately, the majority of Americans who watch cable television couldn't beat our dogs at Trivial Pursuit because they wouldn't be able to figure out the peculiar mechanics of how to open the box. Our dogs could probably open the box and win by default. So the idiotic programming and economic model will probably continue.

Broadcast television isn't much better. Last week, I just saw a commercial for a new Rob Schneider sitcom on CBS called "Rob!" featuring the hilarious culture clash that occurs when he marries a Latina. I'm sure the coked-up executives at CBS thought it would be extraordinarily profitable to pair Rob Schneider and Cheech Marin (as his father-in-law) as a comedy team. It's real, by the way. Look.

I don't think I would surprise anyone who knows me that I think anyone who finds this the least bit amusing should be immediately sterilized, and if they have children, have those children taken away from them. And then deported. Rob Schneider has long been a comedian who's about as funny as a slide show of Thalidomide baby photographs. And he's making a living wage doing this, and people will watch and laugh, probably because the laugh track will make them think they should laugh. Whoever these people are, they need to be removed from society because they are a danger to themselves and to us.

I should have prefaced this by saying I have little fondness for the aggressively stupid person. And when I say aggressively stupid, I mean the willfully ignorant pinhead who has absolutely no curiosity about what actually is as opposed to what is told to them by someone on television. These are the lowest form of creature, lower than the blind slugs that crawl through the dirt below our feet and as stupid as a tree. It is, in fact, for people more stupid than trees that most television programming is designed. I am heartened to see, for example, that NBC has brought back Fear Factor, a show designed for people who find Two and a Half Men too intellectually taxing, people for whom being toilet trained will prove to be the greatest accomplishment of their lives.

I have guilty pleasures, mind you, but those are confined to Electric Light Orchestra albums from the late '70s, not something like Toddlers and Tiaras. That show, of course, features abusive mothers at whom we're supposed to laugh instead of demanding they get thrown in jail and have their children taken away from them forever.

I'm not going to miss cable or satellite or whatever you want to call it. I read a book tonight! And I continued working on my novel, which is tentatively titled Chains, Pennsylvania, although that's not really a title, it's a setting, but I have to call it something, so that's what I'm calling it.

I have not turned on the television tonight. The service is disconnected as of Monday. I think we'll be fine.

A Screenplay to Send to Acclaimed British Director Steve McQueen

2011-12-30T10:20:00.000-06:00

I've decided to write a screenplay about human misery, so that critics will love me. The film is called A Pile of Dung and it's about a man with no arms and no legs and no tongue. He lies on top of a pile of dung in an alley. He's had his tongue cut out and his nose cut off and he just lies there and moans. I'm picturing Michael Fassbender for the role. It will be a short screenplay since the film is just the noseless, tongueless torso moaning on top of the pile of dung, but the film will be three hours long.

The Ambitious Play

2011-12-29T09:44:00.001-06:00

Here's something I wrote in April of this year:

The Writer Part One: Revenge of the Writer

2011-12-22T11:01:00.000-06:00

My name is Rob, and I'm a recovered blogger. I began writing a blog in December of 2005, at first for my own amusement, primarily concerning Chicago theater, something for which I had a passion since my conception, because my mom and dad had met each other while acting for a theater company in the '60s. Then, like magic, people started reading the blog and I felt a growing responsibility to the people of the world to continue to write about Chicago theater, especially after Time Out Chicago published a little capsule on my blog at the beginning of 2008.

I wrote funny things, reviewed plays, wrote a few more funny things, reviewed a few more plays, and found myself inundated with press releases and countless invites to plays I could see for free. I saw a lot of plays and i wrote about a lot of plays, but then? Then I just plain got tired.

I confess after the experience of several years of writing about theater that I have a new grudging respect for writers who somehow manage to write about theater over and over again with little or no financial incentive whatsoever, and this counts the critics and writers who are actually paid for their work, since I'm sure very few of them make very much money at all, especially when you break it down by the number of hours they are forced to spend at the plays themselves. Before you start bitching about critics, think about the lives they lead, the time they have to spend away from their loved ones, the busy opening seasons in September and January when they have to see seven shows a week in addition to working full time during the day, and appreciate how they don't all go insane, tearing off their clothes in the middle of Michigan Avenue and jumping in front of a bus.

I felt like doing that and I didn't even spend much time on writing about theater. I became so burned out that I haven't seen a single play since June, which I think is a record for me in the last decade. And I'm still getting free tickets! The nice P.R. folks at Broadway In Chicago, for example, seem to have completely missed that I deleted my theater blog over six months ago and keep dutifully sending me press passes. This is hardly surprising since they continue to distribute press passes to bloggers who can't write, so why not send passes to those who don't?

So now I'm starting over again on the cusp of 2012. What can I write about here? Honestly, I have no idea. I just feel like having somewhere to write things I can share that go beyond what I can contribute to the world's discussions on Twitter. I'm working on a few things. I am a reporter at a financial newspaper by day and teach Moving Image Art at Columbia College and Comedy Writing at the Second City Training Center. I'm polishing up a few plays I started years ago, one called Calvin Exits and two others called Her Mouth Was Full of Faces and Everyone Dies at the End.

My big creative commitment, however, is my first shot at a novel. Actually, that's a lie. It's my second shot. In the summer, I attempted to start a novel called The Ten Houses. While it has potential, I chose to make teenagers the main characters, probably because the setting of the potential novel was based on where I grew up and my memories of the town come from when I was a teenager. I think that was a mistake. I could never identify with teenagers, especially when I was a teenager. I also thought that basing a place on the town where I grew up was somehow cheating myself of the opportunity of creating a whole new world. Granted, the town of Evansdale as I created it in The Ten Houses is far from the actual Hinsdale, Illinois, but I still felt it was something I needed to move beyond.

Here's the first page of The Ten Houses:

This is the story of Evansdale. It was a nice town with a lot of houses with a lot of families. Some of the families were very rich and some were only somewhat rich. There was everything you wanted in a town. There were grocery stores, bookshops, a train station run by Old Mr. Crabtree, whose name was not Old Mr. Crabtree but something long and Polish. There were bakeries and stores for baby clothes, children’s clothes, teenagers’ clothes, grownups’ clothes, old people’s clothes and even dead people’s clothes. There was a high school with a football stadium and another high school without a football stadium. One was called Central and the other one was called South. (The central part of town was the very rich part of town and the south part was only rich.) There were two competing toy stores, one that sold toys for tall children and the other that sold toys to children of average height. There was a video store, a police station, a fire station, a post office, a store near the post office that only sold stamps, a candy store, and plenty of little boutiques where people could buy expensive clothes that would last for a very short time before completely dissolving.

There was even a store that sold movie posters and several restaurants all owned by the Chester family, a very wealthy family that loved to manage restaurants that would last only six months before they would have to replace them with other restaurants.

There was a playground that had a giant Pac-Man that children could play inside pretending they were eaten ghosts and a slide that ended too far above the ground to be safe.

There was even a detective agency owned by a man named Robert Roberts who always walked around wearing a hat and thick glasses and had a slight limp, although which leg he limped on changed depending on the day of the week. He acted like it was the 1940s and never had any work, but he always walked the streets of Evansdale looking for crimes that would never be committed and he would always stay in business even though he never had any money.

There was a shop where you could buy model trains. There was a shop where you could buy paintings of model trains. There was a shop where you could buy paintings of shops where you could buy paintings of model trains. There was even a shop that sold models of all the shops in town. That shop was owned by Henrietta Tittle, one of the last original matriarchs of the town. You could see her behind the counter of the shop, all 89 years of her, wearing a kimono she said she received from Emperor Hirohito himself after they had exhausted themselves in a torrid affair in a grand hotel in Hawaii. Most people thought she was lying but she claimed she had a photo of Hirohito shaving in the hotel room bathroom. It was impossible to tell for sure because his face was covered with shaving cream.

But all that is gone now. This town that used to have hundreds of houses now only has ten. They are ten houses so big they take up an entire town.

This is the story of how that happened and where the people in the hundreds of houses went and who the people in the ten houses were and how they happened to live in those ten houses.

Actually, now that I look at it for the first time in a few months, it's pretty amusing. Perhaps I will revisit another day. But, for now, I'm playing with the idea of a novel about a fictional town in Pennsylvania, a town with two theater companies, a ruthless philanthropist and a wonder dog and their adventures with a playwright who could neither read nor write and the young girl who wanted to destroy all animal life on the planet.

Perhaps this space will be somewhere I can share ideas I feel are worth sharing, and update my friends and family on my writing. I have every intention of finishing this novel in 2012. Whether or not that happens, I have no idea, but after a couple of years of not writing anything that really pleased me, and now that I've turned 40 (something not entirely unforeseen since I turned 39 last year), it's time to find the creative me again. This will manifest itself in all kinds of places, and here's one of them.

Merry Christmas Eve Eve.

The Audition

2011-12-22T10:44:00.000-06:00

I wrote this about a year ago. I like it.