The movie Project Hail Mary is a massive hit, and for the first time in my life, it seems like Hollywood might learn the right lesson from a runaway success:

Namely, that movies should be fun.

For too long, Hollywood has been in a rut, mostly creating only two kinds of films:

• Cynical rip-offs that play on people’s fondness for past successes — endless sequels and remakes and the like.

• And pretentious navel-gazers that appeal to the niche viewers who make up movie award committees.

It wasn’t a crazy strategy. Hollywood was using these two methods to break through the “media clutter” of our current age and get attention for their projects.

And for a while, it worked. But then audiences caught on. The movie studios ran smack into the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Something similar happened in New York, where publishers have long engaged in a panicky rush to ape the previous breakout success. The industry also developed an almost comically ridiculous lack of ideological diversity.

But audiences eventually caught on there too. And when you threw in the distractions of social media — and the rising threat of AI — you soon had two creative industries in absolute freefall.

This is why, as a writer, I’ve felt so pessimistic these past few years.

It was already insanely difficult to sell a major movie or book project to Hollywood or New York. If the two industries were suddenly buying half of what they were buying before — and were acting more conservatively than ever! — was there even any point in writing anything new?

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But lately, I’ve been feeling — what’s the word? Oh, that’s right: optimism.

The entertainment industry has always had a large element of cynicism. After all, movie-making and book publishing are ultimately businesses.

Still, that doesn’t mean that every era is equally cynical.

Or maybe it’s simply a question of strategy — of the Powers That Be figuring out what the audience really wants.

What Hollywood has been doing isn’t working, so I’m making a bold and possibly fanciful prediction:

They’re going to finally start making a lot more movies like Project Hail Mary: fun, original projects with wide appeal — movies that truly engage the emotions and leave the audience feeling good.

Hollywood has prioritized broad “crowd-pleasers” many times in the past, especially in the 50s and early 60s (to compete with the rise of television) and the 80s and 90s (once the studios realized that they could make big bucks from “four-quadrant” blockbusters).

And New York publishing used to prioritize books like this too.

In fairness, I’ve been banging on this same drum for a long time now: why don’t they make more movies and books that people actually like? Why does entertainment so often have to be such a dreary slog?

Then again, I think this shift in sensibility might finally be happening, and it’s more than just the success of Project Hail Mary that has me thinking that.

I recently learned that one of my film projects in development — my most personal film project, and also my favorite one — isn’t dead in the water after all.

And it’s an unabashed crowd-pleaser.

I’m also midway through writing another novel, and while I always love whatever I’m working on at the time I’m writing it, this one feels special.

It’s a crowd-pleaser too, which means my subconscious is telling me something.

Since the reelection of Donald Trump, the world has taken an incredibly dark turn. And in these bleak, scary times, I think people really want to feel good.

Here’s what I think most people no longer want to see:

• Anything with an anti-hero. This has long since become a lazy writing cliché anyway.

• Anything dystopian. Why watch or read stuff like this when you’re living through it?

• Anything with a cynical tone that says it’s pointless or impossible to try to solve our problems. Most of us feel hopeless enough as it is.

Yes, yes, there are exceptions to everything. But as a general rule, if Hollywood wants its entertainment to be popular, why not make popular entertainment?

I’m less convinced that New York publishing is going to employ this same strategy — even if it might work there too. Unfortunately, I think they’ve convinced themselves that there are huge swaths of the public that will simply never read novels anymore, including, er, virtually all males.

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Unfortunately, whether it’s movies or books, producing quality popular entertainment — the kinds of projects that people still watch and read decades after they’re released — is really, really hard.

This is one big reason why movies like Project Hail Mary have been so few and far between. Something can look effortless, but that doesn’t mean it is.

And incidentally, can we please get over this idea that just because something is popular, it can’t also be smart?

Look, maybe my prediction here is wrong, and Hollywood and New York will hasten their own demise by replacing what isn’t landing now with AI-generated slop.

But I’m still convinced of two things:

This strategy really could work, and some movie studio will at least try it.

And for those of us who plan to keep writing, this is the best way to still find some kind of success.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out my other newsletter about my travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com. And order my latest book, below.

When it comes to books, plays, movies, or TV shows, this is obvious. But I think some kind of narrative structure is important to almost anything that involves an audience: speeches, concerts, comedy routines, athletic performances, and even museums.

Everything is more gripping when it has some kind of “build” and a satisfying resolution.

I think the importance of narrative even applies to amusement park rides. A great roller coaster is a cohesive experience, with unexpected twists and turns — literally.

I recently experienced what I think is the best amusement park ride of all time: Journey to the Center of the Earth, the flagship ride at DisneySea, one of two Disney parks in Tokyo, Japan, (and, incidentally, the greatest overall theme park I’ve ever visited).

Like all good stories, Journey to the Center of the Earth begins with great world-building — and in this case, they’ve literally built the world of the story.

It’s called Mysterious Island, and it’s one of the eight “themed” areas of the DisneySea park. It’s a glorious steampunk environment based on the works of Jules Verne, the 19th-century French author of the novels Journey to the Center of the Earth, Mysterious Island, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea — and it even includes an “active” volcano that looms above the area, steaming and occasionally belching flames.

To ride Journey to the Center of the Earth, you enter the volcano and wind your way through a series of exhibits, setting the stage for the adventure to come.

On one hand, exhibits like this usually indicate that the theme park expects long lines (and this ride definitely has them — often lasting many hours, although you can pay to bypass them).

On the other hand, these particular exhibits are extraordinarily well done and really serve as a kind of Act One for the whole ride experience.

Captain Nemo and his fellow scientists have created something called “terravators” — or elevators — which can carry people deep into the subterranean world of the novel Journey to the Center of the Earth.

There’s also some nice foreshadowing: journal entries indicating that scientists have discovered the fossilized eggs of a massive, unknown arthropod.

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Next, you ride one of these terravators down to the subterranean research area, where a great tunnel has already been bored even deeper into the earth.

And the tension keeps building with more foreshadowing: warnings of increased seismic activity in the area. Worse, the scientist overseeing the operation is currently away on a break.

You climb aboard a steam-powered mining vehicle and Act Two begins: you head down deeper still.

Soon you’re surrounded by dazzling gems. Then you enter a spectacular mushroom forest — supplemented by otherworldly life forms.

And regarding the mechanics of the ride, these effects are absolutely astounding. But part of what makes this all feel so extraordinary is that you are literally heading deeper into the earth, in a grand downward spiral.

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Still the tension builds. Sure enough, an earthquake hits, wracking your vehicle. Flames burst up around you. The way ahead is blocked by lava, so you have no choice but to divert into some undiscovered, newly opened chasm.

Now the landscape is truly otherworldly, with even more alien life forms. Lightning flashes in electrified gas clouds on the darkened shore of what looks like a massive subterranean sea. And what’s this? Are those the living egg sacks of that aforementioned massive arthropod?

And then? The creature finally appears — a massive centipede-like creature that seems to live inside the lava. It looms above you, screeching horribly.

Is this the end? Are you doomed?

This is the end of Act Two — and as in all good stories, this is the place where the protagonist’s fortunes seem to be at the absolute lowest. The choice is either rise to meet the occasion and somehow become someone better and stronger or to succumb to these opposing forces and fail in the quest.

But all hope is not lost! The earthquake has opened even more fissures in the earth, allowing you to evade the creature at the last second — although it also means entering the lava tube of the volcano itself...

…and lava suddenly propels you up that tube, ever higher and ever faster.

Finally, you burst out of the flaming crater of the active volcano that looms over Mysterious Island. Then you rapidly circle the entire caldera and return to safety.

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Yes, this is an amusement park ride, so the protagonist — you — don’t make any actual choices. You’re a fairly passive participant.

Then again, the reader of a book or the viewer of a movie is passive too: it’s the protagonist who makes the crucial choices, which the audience witnesses.

And in fairness to the ride, when you’re reading a book or watching a movie, you don’t literally experience anything. Here you do. Imagination is not required.

(My one quibble with the ride is that you disembark your mining vehicle in the same area where you first climbed aboard — which, technically, is deep in the bowels of the earth. But then you immediately exit back out into Mysterious Island, which betrays the parameters of their own established world. But creating a completely separate unloading area to satisfy nitpickers like me is probably an unrealistic expectation, so this is a very small quibble.)

The greater point is, once you open your mind to a broader definition of “story,” you start to see them all around you, even in unusual and surprising places.

Sometimes the tellers of these unorthodox stories aren’t even aware they are telling a story — so these particular stories usually end up fairly or very disappointing.

But sometimes they’re very aware, as the creators of Journey to the Center of the Earth obviously were.

And the results can be absolutely extraordinary.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out my other newsletter about my travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com. And order my latest book, below.

But 1980 was a bad year to become a Beatles fan: John Lennon was murdered in December of that same year.

I’m still a massive fan — so much so that last year, my husband Michael and I went to Liverpool, England, to see the hometown of the band’s four famous members: Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Richard Starkey (who is better known by his stage name, Ringo Starr).

There are lots of reasons why I love the Beatles, but it’s ultimately about their music. Almost every one of their 213+ songs includes some unique or interesting element — like those fantastic staccato violin chords in “Eleanor Rigby,” or the delightful lyrics to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and how, at the end of the song, Desmond and Molly happily trade places, and she goes off to work in the marketplace, and he stays home with the kids — in 1968, about a decade before anyone had even heard the concept of a “stay-at-home husband.”

The Beatles are critical darlings — they’re widely considered the best and most influential force in popular music — but they’re also the best-selling musical act of all time, despite only producing music for eight years.

In other words, they’re one of the few artists in any medium who are arguably “the best ever” at what they did — and also the most popular.

They also illustrate some pretty profound truths about all artists — and all art. But to explain exactly what I mean by this, I have to express a somewhat controversial opinion:

John wasn’t the “cool” Beatle. Paul was.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney were the group’s primary songwriters, and they were both insanely creative but also intensely competitive. They agreed early on to share the songwriting credit on all Beatles songs, and initially, they wrote most of their songs together, each openly acknowledging that the other made him better.

As the years wore on, they still contributed to each other’s songs, but they primarily wrote alone — and their longstanding desire to upstage each other led to increasing musical greatness and sophistication on both sides.

Their artistic rivalry was so great that it arguably eventually even inspired the long-ignored George to start writing incredible songs. Interestingly, George’s delightful “Here Comes the Sun” is the most popular Beatles song on Spotify.

But John has long had the reputation as the “cool” Beatle.

That’s partly due to their demeanors. Paul was always the more optimistic, approachable, and non-threatening one — in real life and in his songs. And, in fairness, some of his post-Beatles work has been decidedly saccharine, which hasn’t helped his legacy.

John, meanwhile, was rebellious and edgy — the Beatle with “attitude.” In 1966, John caused an enormous controversy when he gave an interview where he said:

“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. [The Beatles are] more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first: rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

Also in 1966, despite being married, John began dating an avant-garde artist named Yoko Ono. Soon, John was annoyingly insisting that Yoko sit in on all the Beatles’ formerly sacrosanct recording sessions. John and Yoko were also releasing their own “experimental” records, including a 1968 album of shrieks and strange noises recorded in one night with a photo of the two of them fully naked on the front cover.

In the Beatles, John tended to write harder-edged songs, like “Run for Your Life” and “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” In 1968, for the first single to be released on the Beatles’ new “Apple” record label, John — an open Marxist — pushed his song “Revolution”: a bold riff on radical political activism that even included a cheeky, approving nod to violent revolution.

It’s easy to see why so many people find John so interesting.

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Meanwhile, while John was busy expressing himself — and pushing people’s buttons — Paul was more interested in “uncool” things like discipline, focus, and musical accessibility.

In fact, Ringo Starr himself recently specifically credited the Beatles’ success to Paul’s focus and discipline — his being a “workaholic.”

Back in 1968, Paul wanted one of his songs to be Apple’s first single, with a slightly sanitized version of John’s “Revolution” (disavowing violence) on the B-side.

Paul won the argument, and “Hey, Jude” broke sales records and quickly became known as one of the greatest songs of all time.

For John, self-expression — and, perhaps, provoking a reaction — was the most important thing. Paul was much more of a workhorse, more interested in melody, precision, and — oh, yes — innovation.

I’m glad John got off so many witty one-liners, and he definitely wrote some fantastic music, including three of my all-time favorite Beatles songs: “Girl,” “A Day in the Life,” and “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” He also wrote (with Yoko Ono) my single favorite ex-Beatles song, “Happy Xmas (War is Over).”

But while John was busy being sardonic, Paul was mastering virtually every music genre imaginable — from American country ( “Rocky Raccoon”), to boogie-woogie (“Lady Madonna”), to religious hymns (“Let it Be”), to doo-wop (“Oh! Darling”), to music hall (“Your Mother Should Know”), to romantic ballads (“Michelle” and “Here, There, and Everywhere”) — while also taking the time to write the most-covered song of all time (“Yesterday”) and also, arguably, create the world’s first heavy metal song (“Helter Skelter”).

That incredible eight-song medley on the flip side of Abbey Road? Paul’s idea — and mostly Paul’s songs.

And Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band — arguably the world’s first “concept” album and often considered possibly the greatest album of all time? Paul’s idea and, once again, mostly his work.

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John was especially critical of what he called Paul’s “granny music” — namely, music that didn’t sound like typical rock ‘n roll.

But that criticism seems downright silly — and, I suspect, was the result of deep-seated jealousy — when you realize John meant timeless classics from Paul like “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “She’s Leaving Home,” "The Fool on the Hill,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Honey Pie,” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

Paul sometimes criticized John’s music too. He didn’t like “Revolution 9,” the eight-minute experimental “sound collage” John did with Yoko for The Beatles album (also known as The White Album). John not only wanted to release the “song” as the album’s single, he also wanted it to be the future direction for all Beatles music.

But Paul was much less public with his criticisms. And he was also, well, right: “Revolution 9” is nonsensical and was a terrible direction for the Beatles — self-indulgent and lazy.

To be very clear, it was absolutely the tension and contrast between John and Paul that helped make the Beatles so incredible. John and Paul argued about the first single for Abbey Road too — and John correctly won that argument: “Come Together” over “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” (on a double A-side single with George’s wonderful “Something”).

Even so, all this makes Paul sound pretty cool to me.

And my feelings about their respective “coolness” are only partly about the music. John could also be a real asshole — not just to the wife and child he abandoned in the 60s, but to his fellow bandmates.

The breakup of the Beatles was ugly, and John expressed his resentment of Paul in the lyrics of some of his solo work. In one song, “How Do You Sleep?”, he sings of Paul:

The only thing you done was yesterday
And since you're gone you're just another day

As usual with John, this is clever wordplay, referencing one of Paul’s most popular Beatles songs, “Yesterday,” and also a then-recent McCartney solo hit, “Another Day.”

But “uncool” Paul had the greatest mic-drop moment in the history of pop music when he responded to Lennon’s digs with his own song, “Silly Love Songs,” an infectious ditty that blithely dismissed John’s sour humorlessness and then joyously celebrated Paul’s own (inaccurate) reputation for writing only frothy songs without substance.

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs
And what’s wrong with that, I’d like to know?
Cause here I go again

“Silly Love Songs” quickly became Paul’s 27th Billboard Hot 100 number one hit as a songwriter. His total now stands at 32 number ones — the all-time record.

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And Lennon wasn’t just obnoxious to Paul. In one interview, he also said:

"Let’s say, I think it’s possible for John and Paul to have created [the Beatles] with two other guys. It may not have been possible for George and Ringo to have created it without John and Paul. OK?"

Which, frankly, is 100% true. But it’s also a 100% horrible thing to say about your former bandmates!

Truthfully, I know why the suggestion that John — not Paul — was the “cool” Beatle triggers me. It brings up two ideas about artists and the arts that I hate and that I profoundly disagree with:

• That artistic genius is some romantic, involuntary state of being — not something that comes from discipline, focus, and years of plain old hard work.

• And that artistic genius somehow excuses someone from being a total asshole.

John and Paul did have a reconciliation of sorts. In one of the last interviews before he was killed, John said about Paul:

“He's like a brother. I love him. Families — we certainly have our ups and downs and our quarrels. But at the end of the day, when it's all said and done, I would do anything for him, and I think he would do anything for me.”

And, of course, in “Here Today,” Paul’s stunningly beautiful musical tribute to John after he died, he sang about his former bandmate:

And if I say
I really loved you
And was glad you came along
Then you were here today
For you were in my song

When all was said and done, I think John, Paul, George, and Ringo all “came together” to understand that for the Beatles to become what they were, things had to go down exactly the way they did.

But I also think the personal characteristics of John and Paul — and the dynamic between them — really do illustrate some pretty interesting ideas about artists and art.

They force artists such as myself to ask ourselves some really great questions: What kind of artist do you want to be, and what kind of art are you trying to create? Is innovation more important to you — or is making a big splash? Is the artistic process mostly about inspiration — or is it more about dedication and hard work?

And maybe most importantly of all: as an artist, how are you going to treat other people? Is it more important to be hip and edgy and cool — or be a decent person?

Between John and Paul, I think Paul’s was the better approach.

In fact, the Beatles themselves put my personal sentiments rather nicely in the last lyrics in (almost) the last song on Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles recorded together:

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

And yeah, Paul wrote that.

See also:

A Career in the Arts Isn’t a Normal Job. It’s More Like Being a Professional Athlete.

Madonna vs. Cyndi Lauper: What Their Careers Taught Me About Art

It’s Hard to Explain How Uncool It Used to Be to Be a Fantasy-Loving Dork

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out my other newsletter about my travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com. And order my latest book, below.

I sold my first short story at age 21, and within three years, I was supporting myself with a freelance career: mostly celebrity journalism at first, but then I started selling my novels and winning awards for my screenplays and plays.

I’ve spent most my life around artists, especially writers. And I’ve come to see that most of us are motivated to create art for three different reasons:

1. Self-expression and creativity. This is the biggie: it feels really good to create.

2. Recognition and acclaim. It’s also very validating to have other people appreciate whatever we’ve created.

3. Money. Hey, we all gotta eat.

But it’s not enough simply to want these things. An artist also needs realize some success in at least two out of these three areas — at least if they want to keep working long-term.

And I think this is true at both the professional and amateur level. A pure hobbyist may never make any money, but they still want someone to occasionally come along and say, “Oh, did you paint this? You’re very talented!”

We writers work in isolation. For the first part of our artistic process, we have to be motivated solely by our desire to express ourselves and create. We can dream of recognition and financial success, but that doesn’t come until much later — if it comes at all.

But what if recognition and/or financial success never come? Well, most writers don’t keep going either.

Since the rise of self-publishing, I’ve had a lot of people tell me, “I don’t care if my book sells any copies — I just want it out there.”

Same for Substack newsletters. Many people say, “It’s not about making money — I just want a place to put my thoughts.”

But if their book or newsletter doesn’t sell — and if they’re also not getting lots of positive feedback — very few of these writers keep writing.

This isn’t a judgment on my part. I’m just stating the obvious: it’s easy to say we’re motivated solely by the desire to create, but the reality is more complicated.

We’re human. No one is an island.

But this brings me to where I am as an artist these days.

Regular readers of this Substack newsletter know that for the last few years, I’ve been frustrated by the almost complete implosion of the traditional creative industries in which I’ve worked: New York publishing and Hollywood movie-making.

A few months ago, I said it outright: things are so bleak that it’s now essentially pointless to try to break into writing using any traditional method.

At the same time, I’ve recently been preaching the possibilities of “new media” and alternative methods of distribution.

But honestly? I think things are changing there too.

I self-published a new novel this summer, and during the marketing, I kept hearing the same thing over and over — namely, that novels are dying out.

My book was named Book of the Month by an online reading group with tens of thousands of members. But the moderator admitted to me that participation is way down — so much so that my book won the Book of the Month honor with a mere five votes. And there was virtually no participation in the discussion on the book.

She also said something I heard over and over: “People don’t seem interested in books the way they used to. Even my kids — they used to be such big readers, but not anymore.”

But people didn’t need to say this to me — I could feel it in the air.

Galadriel said it best in The Lord of the Rings: The time of the elves is over.

And by “elves,” I mean “writers of fiction.”

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I don’t need to tell you the reason why: social media, obviously. Even if people were interested in books, most of us are rapidly losing the ability to focus long enough to read one.

And, of course, there’s also AI, which is about to land like a nuclear bomb on whatever remains of the literary landscape.

I’m thrilled that so many people purchased my latest book, and that almost everyone who read it seemed to enjoy it.

But it didn’t make nearly as much of a splash as any of my previous novels, and it didn’t sell as well either, despite the fact that I have the largest social media platform I’ve ever had.

I said before that writers are motivated by three things. In that respect, how did this book stack up in satisfying me?

1. Self-expression and creativity. It was great! This was one of the most satisfying projects I’ve ever written — and I think it’s one of my best.

2. Recognition and acclaim. It wasn’t nothing, but it was also nothing like my previous books.

3. Money. It wasn’t nothing here either, but once again, it was also nothing like my previous books.

So was publishing this book worth it?

Honestly, I’m not sure. But maybe not: I’m not rushing to self-publish another book any time soon.

My primary online platform — the travel newsletter that I write with my husband, Michael — is still doing very well, for which I am extremely grateful. But our growth has stalled, and the traffic has absolutely cratered on one of our syndication partners — the victim of AI replacing content websites and SEO. That means one of our four major revenue streams is disappearing, probably for good.

And my agent is still circulating my graphic novel. But come on: does anyone really think a publisher is going to pay my artist and me big bucks to finish the project when, in six months, they’ll be able to have AI do it all for free?

It’s the same story in almost every creative industry.

This article is turning out to be more depressing than I intended, but the truth is, if you’re an artist in 2025 — or if you’re even interested in the arts — I think maybe you should be depressed.

Look, I’ve been doing this “writing thing” long enough to know that the world is constantly in flux — always changing. The world has rarely been “great” for artists — especially writers — yet somehow, we’ve always found a way to survive.

Hey, even Middle-earth didn’t end when Galadriel and the elves all left for the Undying Lands. It just became something different.

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Here in our world, the “microseries” market is booming — that is, TV episodes of one minute or less, made for modern attention-spans.

And I still think there is “gold” in them-thar social media hills — if you’re willing to play the increasingly craven platform game.

Also, I’m writing this essay based on my own experience — and, er, the experience of literally all of my artist-friends. But your mileage may still vary.

I do think the world has changed, even more than most people realize. Two of the three things that motivate traditional artists — the things that enable us to keep producing — are becoming much harder to realize.

And it’s going to get worse.

So what’s the answer?

I wish I had one. Does anyone know of a good deal on a boat to the Undying Lands?

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out my other newsletter about my travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com. And order my latest book, below.

I met her in 1983, in the first week of my first year of college. It’s a cliché that when people are asked if they’d change anything about their past, they say, “No, because that’s what made me who I am today, and if I changed that, I might not be that person.”

But in this case, it’s true. If I hadn’t met Laura then, I’d be a completely different person today.

We bonded instantly.

Laura was whip-smart — she would go on to get a perfect score on the “Quantitative Reasoning” part of her GRE test. And the conversation between us was always so effortless and energizing — completely boundless.

In fact, we had such a weirdly close bond that everyone wondered why we didn’t date — including Laura, who openly admitted she had a crush on me.

So eventually, I said the 1980s version of, “Let’s unpack that, shall we?” And it took me all night, but I finally got around to admitting that I thought I might be gay.

“You think you’re gay,” she said, “or you are gay?”

“I am gay,” I said — the first time I’d ever said it out loud.

She was, of course, instantly accepting — being fiercely non-judgmental was always Laura’s brand. But she also smiled and said, a bit sardonically, “Well, that clarifies things, doesn’t it?”

It actually clarified things for both of us.

I’d spent my whole life desperately hiding who I was: a self-conscious, overly intellectual, artsy gay dork. But here, finally, was someone I didn’t have to hide from — someone who celebrated the real me.

The summer after I graduated from college, we shared a bedroom in a crappy little house off-campus. One night, we were up late, lost in conversation, and I was lamenting how I was an “adult” now — too old to do things like, say, roll down a grassy hill like a kid.

“That’s not true,” she said. “We could go roll down a grassy hill right now.”

“At three in the morning?” I said.

She sat upright. “Why not?”

So we left the house and walked more than a mile to a downtown park where we found a big grassy hill, and we rolled down it like little kids, again and again, laughing like absolute maniacs.

No longer a kid? I’d never laughed this hard when I was younger.

Unfortunately, we were both adults now, and we soon had our share of adult problems. Our first sexual encounters, which were both amazing, led to an HIV scare for me and an unplanned pregnancy for her.

We also both had relationship problems, including one guy I dated who turned out to be, uhhh, really screwed up.

In fact, one of the few times that Laura felt she had to apologize to me was for encouraging me to stay with that guy.

“I really am sorry,” she said. “I just wanted so badly for things to turn out well between you two.”

Which was pretty much Laura in a nutshell: trying too hard to see the best in other people.

We also both had our share of family drama.

My mother discovered I was gay by snooping through my private things. I’d assumed her reaction would be bad, but it was even worse than I’d expected. Fortunately, I happened to be staying with Laura that weekend, and she was able to talk me down off the ledge.

Later, Laura and I lived together for years, and there were problems with her open adoption, and my career woes, and her marriage, and my mom’s early-onset Alzheimer’s, and her divorce, and on and on and on.

But Laura was always there for me. And while I’ve never been able to be as fiercely non-judgmental as Laura — no one is — I was always on her side.

And there were so many happy times too: skinny-dipping with Maureen up at Priest Lake, that road-trip with Tom to visit Yolanda in California, that eerie moonlit walk with Tim along those train tracks in Eastern Oregon.

At some point, Laura and I started “applauding” nature — we would literally stand back and clap whenever we came upon a scene of unparalleled beauty.

Eventually, Laura moved back to Oregon while Michael and I stayed in Seattle, and it became harder for Laura and me to see each other. Then in 2017, Michael and I left America to become digital nomads, and it became harder still — a weekend at a hot spring once, and another week together two summers ago, when we inner-tubed the Willamette.

We also still chatted online, exchanging book recommendations and openly fearing for the future of America. But it was never enough.

Last June, Laura had been lethargic for a while, and she went to the emergency room — only to discover she had what turned out to be Stage IV Adrenocortical Carcinoma, a rare cancer of the adrenal glands.

She texted me to say, “The good news is you’re in my inner circle, where I share important news as it happens.” Then, sardonic again, she added, “The bad news is I have cancer, and it might be really bad.”

I happened to be in America at the time, and I rushed down to spend a long weekend with her.

Later, when it became clear just how serious things were, Michael and I cut our Asia trip short, planning to return home two months early.

But it wasn’t early enough.

Last Wednesday, with me in Japan and her in hospice, we video-chatted, and she asked me, “Why didn’t we spend more time together these last few years?”

And I thought, Because we were FUCKING IDIOTS!

What if I hadn’t met Laura back in 1983? What if my first “coming out” experience had been one of shock and cruelty? What if Laura hadn’t been there all the times I needed her — a little sardonic but also endlessly compassionate, always determined to see the absolute best in everyone?

These are timelines that I’m glad I never had to endure.

Laura and I used to endlessly ponder the meaning of existence — including what came after death. I was always the dour skeptic. But we still made a solemn promise to each other that whoever died first would try to contact the other — to give them the “answer” to what comes next.

Before she died, I told Laura I had since changed my mind about the existence of life after death, which is true. Maybe it’s self-serving, but at this age, I am now wide open to almost any eventuality, and I told her I was certain that, one way or another, we would see each other again.

Laura died yesterday, and I haven’t heard from her yet. But that’s okay — she’s probably busy exploring the universe of endless possibilities.

Besides, I know we really will be together again. There’s a grassy hill with our name on it, and I plan to spend at least part of eternity rolling down it with Laura, feeling like a kid again, both of us laughing like absolute maniacs.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out my other newsletter about my travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

This region of the world is renowned for being a place of ancient wisdom, and sure enough, I find my thoughts turning to one of the most profound and difficult philosophical questions of all time:

Should Charlie Brown have been allowed to finally kick the football?

Charlie Brown is, of course, the main character in the classic comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz.

And almost every autumn for the 50-year run of the strip, from 1950 to 2000, Schulz would draw a full Sunday comic in which another character, Lucy, would promise to hold a football for Charlie Brown so he could run and kick it.

But every year, Lucy would pull the football away at the last second, and poor Charlie Brown would go flying and land on his back.

Why have I been pondering this whole “football” question now, here in Taipei?

To my surprise, Peanuts is still weirdly popular in Taiwan — especially Snoopy, who has become something of a national icon. A week ago, in one of the nearby malls, we passed a well-attended exhibition of Peanuts memorabilia. There are also Peanuts-themed restaurants, and it’s very common to see Peanuts merchandise in stores.

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What’s behind the popularity?

It’s probably nostalgia, and maybe also the comic strip’s themes of decency and perseverance resonating with the local culture.

But I’m truly not kidding when I say I think the question of whether Charles Schulz should’ve finally let Charlie Brown kick the football is a legitimately profound one.

These days, most people know about Charlie Brown from the animated movies and TV specials, especially three holiday-themed ones: A Charlie Brown Christmas, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

These projects are good — especially A Charlie Brown Christmas — but they don’t capture what made the original comic strip so great, especially in its artistic peak from about 1958 to 1972.

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Schulz’s characters were young children — after 1955, adults famously never appeared in the strip. They’re unseen in the animated specials too, and if they speak, we only hear trombones.

And yet, the humor and themes in the strip are anything but juvenile. Charlie Brown is a hapless, anxious loser, and the other kids are often openly cruel, especially Lucy.

But nothing about the strip or its characters is what you’d expect — not that the neighborhood bully is a girl, or that the strip’s other major female character is Peppermint Patty, the best athlete in town.

Even Lucy isn’t wholly bad because the characters are complex, and the themes are often insanely sophisticated.

Peppermint Patty — who has a reputation these days as a “baby dyke” because she’s such a great athlete — is deeply in love with Charlie Brown, as is her best friend, Marcy. But he’s famously in love with the Little Red-Haired Girl (also unseen, at least in the strip).

Meanwhile, Lucy loves Schroeder, who completely ignores her because he’s obsessed with the composer Beethoven. (Tortured-artist Schroeder is the strip’s actual coded gay character.)

And Sally loves Linus, who only has eyes for his teacher, Miss Othmar — and also the Great Pumpkin, a “Godot”-like character who Linus patiently waits for every year in a pumpkin patch but who never actually shows up.

Literally every character is in love with someone who doesn’t love them back! And they’re all frequently disappointed and miserable, endlessly yearning for something they can never have.

And yet, this existential hell of a comic strip also has a reputation as family-friendly, and appeals to young children, probably because of the inclusion of Charlie Brown’s happy-go-lucky dog, Snoopy.

Whimsical Snoopy was the spoonful of sugar that allowed the bitter medicine of the rest of the strip to go down — and arguably also led to the strip’s artistic decline, when it became more Snoopy-focused (and much more anodyne) from the mid-70s onward.

Honestly, part of me wonders if Snoopy’s “cuteness” is the real reason why the Taiwanese are obsessed with Peanuts. Like Japan and South Korea, which also love Peanuts, they adore cute characters here.

But this brings me back to Lucy repeatedly yanking that football away from Charlie Brown.

Over the decades, Lucy offered all kinds of different explanations for why she does it.

One year, she shakes hands on her promise not to pull the football away, only to later point out, “A woman’s handshake is not legally binding” — which was true in 1963, when the strip first ran.

Another year, she has a muscle spasm — a “ten billion to one” chance.

One year, in a fantastic feminist joke, she openly admits she’s going to pull the football away, and Charlie Brown runs for it anyway, with Lucy later saying, “Men never really listen to what women are saying, do they?”

And in 1979, after making a sacred vow to not pull the football away if Charlie Brown survives an illness, Lucy finally really doesn’t pull it away — but being the loser he is, Charlie Brown misses the ball and kicks Lucy.

Honestly, she kinda deserves it.

Or does she? In 1953, before the strip had evolved into its modern incarnation (and Lucy is younger — the neighborhood pest), Charlie Brown mocks Lucy on the football field, saying, “Little girls don’t belong on football fields! Go home!”

In short, maybe Lucy spent almost the next fifty years getting a kind of karmic retribution.

The more interesting question is: what does it all mean?

In 1993, on a freelance assignment for the Los Angeles Times, I got to interview Charles Schulz. I called up his office, intending to schedule a future interview, but before I could finish speaking, his assistant said, “He’d be happy to talk to you right now” — and immediately patched me through to his art studio, despite my having prepared absolutely nothing.

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Schulz had long been one of my idols, and I was finally getting a chance to talk to him, and here I was, completely unprepared, babbling like a total idiot.

But as I stammered my way through the interview, I quickly learned that the man took his strip extremely seriously.

“I know some people say my strip isn’t as good as it once was,” he told me. “But I think the work I’m doing right now is as good as anything I’ve ever done!”

At the same time, he was fairly cagey about claiming greater meanings, arguing that cartoonists shouldn’t take themselves too seriously.

But there’s a reason why Peanuts is the most successful comic strip of all time — and why so many concepts and images from the strip have entered the vernacular, like Linus and his security blanket, the Kite-Eating Tree, and the Great Pumpkin.

And, yes, Lucy and the football.

Snoopy gave the strip its light, but almost everything else in the strip was about darkness — frustration and defeat.

Even Snoopy had an unending string of disappointments — losing out on love with another dog, mourning his first owner who was forced to give him up (and is later hospitalized (!!!) due to some unnamed illness), his doghouse burning down (and his “Andrew Wyeth” painting destroyed), and on and on.

According to Schulz, life was mostly failure and disappointment.

In fact, the darkest moment in the entire comic may have come in one of these “football” strips. As Lucy holds the football, Charlie Brown wonders how long he’ll have to put up with this annual humiliation, even quoting scripture, saying, “How long, O Lord?”

And after she pulls the football away one more time, Lucy coldly answers: “How long? All your life, Charlie Brown. All your life.”

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Keep in mind: this was supposedly a comic strip for and about little kids!

But scenes like this, of ritualized humiliation, were only one half of the genius of Charles Schulz.

The other half was that even in the face of all these failures and disappointments, none of the characters ever gave up. They never lost their faith that things might one day somehow get better.

Schulz talked about this too, with me and other interviewers.

"Charlie Brown will always keep hoping,” he said in 1967.

For most of his life, Schulz was emphatic that Charlie Brown never get to kick the football — that this was the whole point of the strip.

“Oh, no, definitely not,” he said in 1999, the year before he died. “I couldn’t have Charlie Brown kick that football. That would be a terrible disservice to him after nearly half a century.”

But in one of his last interviews, Schulz admitted he was in tears when he signed his final strip: “All of a sudden I thought, ‘You know, that poor, poor kid, he never even got to kick the football. What a dirty trick — he never had a chance to kick the football.”’

Schulz died the day that final strip ran.

So what’s the answer? Should Charlie Brown have been allowed to finally kick the football?

In the end, I think the answer depends on what you think is the nature of “life.”

Incidentally, have I convinced you that this really is one of the most profound and difficult philosophical questions of all time?

On one hand, some say that life is a tragedy — a sad story where the protagonist ultimately fails. And yeah, no matter what we do, we’re all going to die in the end. At best, we can honestly accept and admit our defeat.

If that’s your take, Charlie Brown can’t kick the football. It’s un-kickable.

This was definitely my take after graduating from university in my early twenties.

On the other hand, some think life can be a comedy — a happy story where the protagonist ultimately succeeds. Sure, we all die in the end, but by never giving up — and, perhaps, by living a life of love and laughter — we can achieve a kind of “victory” even in the face of death.

Failure or success don’t matter. What matters is our attitude in the face of it all.

Those who say that life is a tragedy would argue that this is just a pathetic rationalization.

But increasingly, this second take is what I believe.

Peanuts straddled the line between tragedy and comedy — between Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

But in the end, I think even Schulz would say the comedy won out. It was a comic strip, after all.

Charlie Brown never gave up.

And if that’s the case, it really doesn’t matter if he never kicked that damn football, does it?

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out my other newsletter about my travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com. And order my latest book, below.

A story is an approximation of reality. It’s true that characters in movies sometimes act in ways that they never would in real life — driving across town for a one-minute conversation, or falling in love in the course of a single night.

But it’s more important that a story be economical and entertaining than perfectly realistic. And good writers disguise the contrivances.

Except not always. Here are five incredibly stupid plot twists from five otherwise fantastic movies.

Which goes to show something important: if you get most of a story right — and, more importantly, if you get the emotional heart right — the audience will happily overlook a stupid moment or two:

Julia does something really dumb and is surprised when something really bad happens.

In My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) — one of the best romantic comedies of all time — Julia Roberts plots to sabotage the wedding of her male best friend, because she’s secretly in love with him.

One of the ways she tries to undermine him is by using his fiancée’s father’s computer to send an incriminating email. At the last minute, she doesn’t send it. Later, she goes to delete the email, but the office is closed — but then, of course, it gets sent anyway.

Well, what the hell did she THINK would happen? She literally leaves an unsent email in the “outbox” of a computer!

I suspect the screenwriter had her hesitate before sending the email, and then had it go out “against her will,” to make Roberts’ selfish character slightly more sympathetic — while also showcasing the dazzling “new” technology of email.

But it’s a ridiculous sequence in an otherwise great movie.

How does Superman turn back time?

When I first saw the first Superman (1978), I thought, Wow! You can turn back time by spinning the Earth in the opposite direction?

Then again, I was just a kid.

I think the first Superman is the best of the Supermans, but now I watch the ending — where Lois Lane has died and Superman is determined to somehow bring her back — and I think: This is the dumbest thing I have ever seen.

Voldemort comes up with the most convoluted plan imaginable — and Dumbledore goes with it.

I’m not a fan of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), so maybe this isn’t a bad twist in an otherwise great movie, but I do like two other movies in the series: Azkaban and Half-Blood Prince.

Anyway, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, if Voldemort wanted Harry so bad, why didn’t he have Moody replace, say, Harry’s toothbrush with the portkey? The very first night, Harry grabs his toothbrush and — kablam! — he’s transported to the graveyard with Voldemort. Why the convoluted, year-long plan with the Goblet of Fire and the Triwizard Tournament, which — let’s face it — was pretty unlikely to result in Harry winning anyway?

And — excuse me! — what’s this business about a regular student tournament that includes risks so dangerous that students must routinely die?

Scene: Something extremely strange is going on at Hogwarts with this Goblet of Fire, and it seems very likely that the embodiment of ultimate evil, Voldemort, is somehow involved. Plus, if they continue the tournament, several students, including Dumbledore-fave Harry, could very likely die.

Dumbledore: “I really think we need to see this thing through!”

Aragorn releases the Army of the Dead before the final attack on Mordor.

Many people argue that in The Lord of the Rings movies, Gandalf could have simply asked the giant eagles to fly Frodo directly to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring, thereby eliminating most of the plot.

Eh. If they didn’t do it, I’m willing to assume there’s a good reason

But one of the movie series’ plot holes really does bug me. In Return of the King (2003), Aragorn, outnumbered by the enemy, makes a deal with some traitorous ghosts, promising to declare an ancient vow fulfilled if they help him in an upcoming battle.

The ghosts prove incredibly effective, mowing down an enemy that is helpless against non-physical beings.

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But at the end of the battle, Aragorn releases the ghosts from their vow — despite Gimli warning him that they would be very helpful in defeating the rest of their enemies.

I agree that a man of integrity like Aragorn would honor his pledge — and this is also partly how he proves he’s worthy of being the “king” of the movie’s title.

But why didn’t he make a smarter pledge in the first place — promising to release the ghosts only after they killed the army surrounding Minas Tirith, and also the Orcs gathering inside the gates to Mordor?

Yoda’s statement to Obi-Wan makes absolutely no sense.

The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the middle movie in the first Star Wars trilogy, is full of shocking reveals — most notably, that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father.

But we get another shock when Obi-Wan tells Yoda, “That boy is our last hope.” And Yoda says, “No, there is another” — someone else who is strong in The Force.

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In the following movie, Return of the Jedi, Obi-Wan tells Luke, “The other [Yoda] spoke of is your twin sister [Leia].”

But this makes absolutely no sense given that Yoda spent much of the previous movie telling Luke that he shouldn’t go save Leia — that he needs to complete his all-important Jedi training. At one point, Luke asks Yoda outright if he should just let Han and Leia die, and Yoda says, “If you honor what they fight for? Yes!”

Look, I get it: Luke shouldn’t go to the Cloud City because it’s a trap set by Vader, and Luke isn’t strong enough to defeat him yet.

But if there are literally only two individuals in the entire universe who can save the universe from total catastrophe — Luke and Leia — would Yoda really be so cavalier about letting Leia die? If nothing else, you’d think he would go try to save Leia!

Later still, when Luke tells Leia they’re brother and sister, she says, “I know. Somehow I’ve always known.”

Which also makes no sense, given she gives him romantic kisses in both A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back.

Honorary Mention?

One of the most criticized movie twists of all time is in Independence Day, when Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum defeat the aliens by uploading a computer virus into the mothership’s computer.

The aliens can fly across galaxies and shield themselves from nuclear weapons, but they’re defenseless against computer viruses?

Actually, there are some fairly convincing justifications for this — so I’m not sure this is a stupid plot twist at all.

These are my five least favorite plot twists in otherwise good movies. What are yours?

And don’t forget: if you want a story with great plot twists, order my latest book!

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

Buy Infinite Drift here or here, and there’s more info here.

And if you like it, I’d really appreciate a review on Amazon and GoodReads. It’s impossible to overstate how important those are!

CHAPTER ONE

I’m surrounded by an infinite number of me’s. They’re all around me, rows of them, some facing forward, some back, even above me, all stretching off into eternity.

They’re reflections in the mirrors on the walls and ceiling of the funhouse maze. Everything has a pale green tint from the track LED lighting framing each mirror.

It’s strange to see myself from behind and above. I’m even skinnier than I thought, tall and bony. Paler too. And do I always slouch this bad? I lift my shoulders, standing taller.

The reflections around me stand taller too, all in sync. It’s intimidating, which is stupid, because they’re just reflections. But they’re all breathing like me too, mimicking the quick rise and fall in my chest. It’s like they’re mocking me.

I hear the ragged wheeze of my breath, even over the sound of the carnival outside, the music from the organ grinder, and the screaming of kids on the thrill rides.

Weirdly, that focuses me, calms me down a bit. The images around me look like they’re breathing, but they’re all completely silent. They really are just reflections. There’s an infinite number of them, but still only one me.

I take a step forward, and all the images step forward too, in all different directions. Stupidly, I still didn’t expect any of this, and it makes me dizzy.

But now I see something I didn’t notice before. The images get progressively darker the deeper you go into infinity.

It must have something to do with the light. That’s what these images are — reflections of light bouncing back and forth, and also into my eyes, wavelengths registering in my brain. But there’s only so much light to go around, and before long, it runs out. Infinity mirrors don’t really stretch into infinity.

The darkness at the end of each row is so dark. It gives me the chills. And now it makes the silence of the reflections seem creepy.

Even in a funhouse full of mirrors, I feel completely alone.

Why did I come in here anyway? I can’t believe people think stuff like this is fun.

Something moves in the mirrors — not me, not any of my reflections. There’s someone in this maze with me. A man. Which is no big deal. Of course, there are other people in a funhouse at a carnival. And I just said I didn’t want to be alone.

Except he has a knife. Or does he? I just caught a peek of it, something in his hand, something long and pointed and sharp. He was also pretty far away. Or maybe he was right next to me — it’s impossible to tell the way these mirrors work. I couldn’t see his face. That was dark too, like the end of each of these rows of images. That’s part of what made him look so creepy.

“Ollie?” a voice says, and I jump.

Images flutter all around me, and my best friend, Alex, is standing next to me.

“Whoa,” he says, grinning, surprised I’m so surprised. “Sorry.”

I shrug it off, but I still feel jumpy.

It’s funny, Alex is shorter and smaller than me, but somehow, he still takes up more space — “Asian swole,” he always jokes about himself. At the same time, he’s weightless, impervious to gravity. He’s like light, clean and pure, shining down from above. Everyone loves Alex. Why wouldn’t they? He’s handsome but approachable, a guy’s guy with a sensitive side, confident without being a dick.

“There’s someone else in here,” I say.

“Meaning?”

“There’s someone…” What do I mean? That we’re in some kind of teen slasher flick? Trapped in a mirror maze with a knife-wielding killer? That’s just stupid. “Nothing, never mind.”

I feel his eyes on me. “You okay? This is a funhouse, remember? Fun house?” he adds, emphasizing both words. “As in, a place where you’re supposed to have fun?”

A girl screams, louder than before. It’s too close to be a scream from the thrill rides, but it can’t be what it sounds like, some girl the killer just stabbed.

Alex reacts, rolling his eyes a little. He heard it too, knows that it’s someone with us in the maze. But he didn’t see the guy with the knife, and I didn’t tell him what I saw.

“There you guys are,” another voice says, and I jump again.

More images flicker all around us, and I’m standing next to my other best friend, Raina.

“Oh, sorry,” she says. My surprise has surprised her too.

Raina isn’t light like Alex, but you’d also never mistake her for a reflection in a mirror. She’s too solid. She doesn’t shine down on the world from above, she punches her way forward, right through anything. She calls it Brown Girl Passion, but unlike a lot of people, she’s not all doom-and-gloom and negative about everything. She’s still convinced we can save the world.

“Ollie’s a little jumpier than usual because…” Alex looks at me again. “Well, I’m not really sure why.”

I know I’m totally letting my imagination get away with me. So I shake my head and say, “It’s nothing. I thought I saw—”

I see him in the mirrors again, the man with the knife.

“A knife!” I say, pointing.

Alex and Raina turn, but he’s already gone again. It was just another flash, a couple of long rows of dark killers come and gone.

“There’s someone in here with us,” I say. “And he has a knife.”

Alex and Raina turn back, staring at me now. Their eyes narrow. They’re not looking around for the man with the knife. They don’t even believe he’s here.

“I’m serious!” I say. “I saw him.”

Raina looks at Alex, and some kind of understanding passes between them. They nod, one after the other.

“Okay,” she says. “Why don’t we just go?”

“I know it sounds crazy,” I say. “But I saw him.” I see him again, an image of a man jumping from one mirror to the next. His reflection is bigger now. “Look! Please?”

They turn, and they finally do see him. I can see his face now too. Older but not old, with a salt-and-pepper beard. But I don’t see the knife anymore, and he’s not even looking our way. He looks more like someone’s friendly uncle than a killer, and I can tell Alex and Raina aren’t impressed. They think he’s just a guy.

“Fine,” I say quickly. “Let’s go.” I pull Alex and Raina after me, away from the man.

Except the maze is doing that thing with the mirrors where directions aren’t what they seem. Objects may be closer than they appear.

I turn a corner, and the man with the beard is in front of us, not even fifteen feet away. At least he’s still looking away.

“This way!” I say, pulling Alex and Raina back again, around a different corner in the maze.

He’s in front of us again, now barely ten feet away. How is this even possible?

He’s staring right at us too. At me. He knows I know.

Is this even him or is it just another reflection? At this point, I’m not sure. My whole body is sweating, sticky. I feel like a trap designed to catch flies — except I’m the one who’s stuck. If we go back, I might lead us right smack into him. On the other hand, we can’t stay where we are.

I see the knife again, metal and pointed, rising upward. It glints in the green of the LED lights.

“Oh, my God!” I say, breathless.

I turn, yanking on both Alex and Raina. “We have to go!”

But now I feel them grabbing me, holding me back.

“Ollie, no…” Alex says. “It’s okay.”

I struggle to get away. What are they doing? Can’t they see we’re in danger? I fight them with all my strength.

But Alex and Raina try hard to hold me back.

“Alex, stop!” Raina commands, so firmly that I finally do.

The man in the mirror hasn’t noticed us, isn’t even really looking my way. I think he’s a reflection after all. He’s talking to some little girl in pink rubber boots. His daughter? He turns and reaches down to grab her hand, and in his other hand, he’s holding an umbrella.

Umbrella?

He’s holding it in the middle, so the pointed metal tip sticks out like, well, a knife. Is this what I saw before, what I thought was a knife?

“It’s no big deal,” Alex says gently. “It does look a lot like a knife. Anyone could have made the same mistake.”

* * *

I’m burning with shame. I really thought an umbrella was a knife?

We leave the maze. It’s three turns and we’re out, now not confusing at all. We walk away in silence, Alex and Raina leading me to the park exit. They seem to know there’s no chance of my being amused in this amusement park tonight.

As we pass through the exit gate, a woman presses a hand-stamp onto the back of my left hand, a sign I already paid if I want to come back in again.

“No, it’s okay!” Raina says quickly. “We won’t be—”

Too late, I’ve already been branded. The woman doesn’t bother stamping Raina or Alex.

We walk on, silent again. The carnival is one of those traveling ones, only in town for a few days, and they set it up in a big vacant lot along the river. There wasn’t any parking on the street near the park, and we didn’t want to pay ten bucks at the makeshift carnival lot, so we parked farther away, somewhere ahead of us in the empty downtown.

The streets and sidewalks are mostly deserted, and it’s dark out, but I’m fine with this because I can’t deal with Alex and Raina looking at me right now.

“That was fun,” Alex says.

“It was,” Raina agrees.

They mean the carnival, and they’re not being sarcastic. They’re pretending like I didn’t just freak out in the mirror maze, and I know the reason why. Eight months ago, my little brother Dylan died in a skateboarding accident. I was the only other person there, the only person who saw what happened. I haven’t really been the same ever since.

“But carnivals are never as great as they look on TV or in the movies,” Alex goes on.

“Well, it’s good there are no more freak shows or caged animals,” Raina says.

“Oh, sure,” Alex says. “But there are also none of those colorful old tents, or those big paper-mâché sculptures of, like, jesters and clowns. Then again, maybe there never were. That’s probably just Hollywood.”

My friends are trying to cheer me up, distract me, and I know I should be grateful. The three of us have a long history. Alex and I met in the third grade, and we immediately became best buds. Then in the eighth grade, he started dating Raina, and the three of us began hanging out together, which I kind of resented at first, maybe because I had a little crush on Alex, and it wasn’t just me and him anymore. But I ended up liking Raina more than I expected, and I guess she liked me too, because when she and Alex broke up, I’m pretty sure it was because she had a crush on me, except I was seeing this other girl at the time, and I thought of Raina as more of a friend anyway. In the end, we all got over it, and the three of us ended up being super tight. And since then, we’ve never been anything more than friends.

But we’re not so super tight now. These last eight months, I haven’t really been myself. That thing that happened tonight in the mirror maze? It’s maybe sort of happened before. It’s not like I see knife-wielding killers everywhere, but there was that one time I thought someone was trying to set a bomb off in the bowling alley. And that time in that restaurant where I got it in my head the chef had put broken glass in our calzones. They were just onions.

Thing is, they never really seem like panic attacks at the time. They always seem real, different from anything that came before.

“I bet the food was better too,” Alex is saying. “Does anyone really like corn dogs? And crazy-salted popcorn? I do like cotton candy though.”

It’s all about Dylan’s death. I can’t seem to move on, and I’m not sure why. And Raina and Alex know that, so they treat me differently now. Like they have to watch out for me, almost like they’re my parents, and I’m the kid. They keep doing it because we’re best friends. Or were best friends. These days, they’re doing it out of some kind of weird sense of obligation.

“Where’s the car?” Raina says. “I didn’t think we were this far.” Now she’s trying to change the subject, which is probably just as well. I’m happy to forget the carnival altogether.

“It’s this way,” Alex says, but he sounds unsure.

We’re in the oldest part of downtown, walking along a street lined with old brick buildings that have been turned into restaurants and art galleries. It’s after nine on Saturday night, and everything is closed, except for one place across the street. There’s a blue neon sign in the window that says, “Open.”

I wonder if they left the light on by accident, but no, there are lights on inside too. Soft ones.

It’s a spa of some kind. There’s another sign in the window, also neon but with stylized lettering. It says, “A new kind of relaxation.” And the sign above the storefront reads, “Infinite Drift.”

Infinity isn’t real. Sure, it goes on for a while, but then it ends in darkness. I know that now.

“We didn’t walk this far to the carnival,” Raina says. “Did we?”

The carnival again. I thought we’d moved on from that.

“What’s that?” I ask, meaning the open shop across the street.

“Huh?” Raina looks. “Oh, sensory deprivation tanks. They’re filled with warm water, and you get inside, and it’s really dark.”

“Yeah, my dad did that once,” Alex says. “Not here, but another place. He said it was cool. Not what he expected.”

I look down at the hand-stamp from the carnival. I think it’s a word inside of a circle, but it smeared when they stamped it, and I can’t read what it says. I touch it, but now it’s dried that way. I’ve never seen it in full light, so I’m not even sure what color it is. Green, I think.

I look up and say, “We should do it.”

“Do what?” Alex says, puzzled.

“Those tanks,” I say. “Sounds like fun.”

“You mean tonight?” Raina says, also confused.

“Why not?”

Raina and Alex don’t say anything, but I can tell they’re looking at each other in the dark.

“Are you sure?” Raina says at last.

I kind of spoke without thinking, but suddenly, I am sure we should do it. I’m tired of Raina and Alex thinking of me as this pathetic guy they need to coddle and distract — a little kid they have to take care of. I want the three of us to be super tight again. I know it’s going to take more than our doing this one thing to get Alex and Raina to trust me, to think of me as normal again, but I have to start somewhere. I don’t want this night to be about what happened back in the funhouse.

“Of course, I’m sure,” I say. “Come on, let’s just do it.”

I start across the street, and I’m worried Alex and Raina won’t follow, but they do, and I’m already excited.

We’ll do these stupid sensory deprivation tanks, and everything will be fine, and I won’t freak out at all, and Raina and Alex will realize my panic attacks are finally over. And before I know it, everything will go back to exactly the way it was before.

Buy Infinite Drift here or here, and there’s more info here.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

Now an artist himself, he’s written 83 number-one songs and is considered to be one of the most commercially successful songwriters of all time.

Meanwhile, you also have artists like Ari Aster and Jordan Peele — uncompromising filmmakers who questioned convention and didn’t concern themselves in the slightest with what the market or audience wanted.

As a result, they both broke new ground with their bold debut films: Hereditary and Get Out, respectively.

How much should an artist care about “the market” anyway? It’s literally one of the oldest questions in the arts: the conflict between art and commerce.

As artists, should we consider the audience at all — how they might receive the work in question, and whether the project might make us money? Or should we act entirely on artistic impulse, following our visions wherever they might lead, with no thought whatsoever to how the project will be received?

Conventional wisdom says there’s a spectrum: on one end, there is pure artistry, which is where all artists should try to be, because it’s where the best art always comes from.

At the other end of the spectrum is pure hackery, which we artists should fight at all costs, because the only thing that ever comes from this place is derivative or formulaic crap.

But honestly? I mostly reject this framing. The truth is, I think plenty of bad art has come even from a place of so-called artistic purity.

In fact, after their brilliant debut films, both Ari Aster and Jordan Peele were given carte blanche to make whatever movies they wanted.

And I think their subsequent films have been increasingly pretentious and self-indulgent — sometimes even virtually unwatchable.

Meanwhile, Ashley Gorley — that songwriter with all those hit records — clearly honed his craft before he even attempted a professional career, which is something I don’t think nearly enough artists do, and while I think some of his songs sound fairly generic, he sometimes shakes it up too. He’s actually considered one of the more innovative and groundbreaking songwriters working in Nashville today.

This is the way I’ve always approached my own art: existing in the tension somewhere between art and commerce — and I don’t think the “commerce” part of it is entirely bad.

One part of the artistic pursuit is, yes, self-expression. But another part is connection — communication with the audience. And if that’s your goal, it’s not insane to sometimes consider exactly what that connection might be.

In other words, I think it’s worth occasionally asking myself questions like: Will people understand this? Will anyone be interested in reading or watching it?

These questions aren’t that far from the question that every artist should always be asking: Is my vision fundamentally sound? Is this project “working”?

This isn’t to say that an artist should be open to these kinds of “market” and “audience” questions at every part of the artistic process. The truth is, when I’m in the middle of my first draft, I try hard to reside in that place of artistic purity, letting the needs of the story and the characters dictate exactly where the story is going, without regard for how the story might be received.

But I also don’t think it’s bad to set aside time to ask those “audience” and “market” questions too.

For me, that time comes in the “conceiving and outlining” stage, before I start writing the actual story. I think: Is this story worth writing?

Because, let’s face it, I write for a living, and my name isn’t “Christopher Nolan” — someone whose name alone will guarantee some kind of paycheck.

In other words, I don’t have the luxury of spending six months or a year working on a project that doesn’t sell — or even one that is an obvious “hard sell.”

And once I’m done writing the first draft of a project, I ask those oh-so-practical audience and marketing questions all over again.

But, yes, I’m also asking if my project is working — if my original confused mess of an idea is coalescing into something decent.

What does all this look like, practically speaking?

My latest novel, Infinite Drift — to be released in September 2025 — is the story of a teenager who, on a lark, gets into a “sensory deprivation” tank. But when he gets out again, the world is different in strange little ways. Later, when he tries the tank again, the world becomes even more different — and he has the strange feeling that someone is watching him.

Now he has to figure out what’s really going on. Has he crossed over into another dimension? Or is he going insane?

When I first came up with the idea, I had the same thought I always do: Do I really want to spend a year or so of my life writing this? Does the story seem like a worthwhile use of time?

But my next thoughts were about, yeah, the audience. Was there a market for this story? Did anyone else want a book like this?

I also thought about my author brand. I’m known for my books about gay teens — so maybe this character should be gay too?

Hold on, I thought. Since it’s a story about different dimensions and multiple possibilities, it might make more sense to make him bisexual. Yes! That epiphany made the story work much better, and in fact, it helped me clarify my theme.

But what about that aspect of multiple dimensions? Everything Everywhere All at Once hadn’t come out yet, and Star Trek and Marvel hadn’t gone full “multiverse” yet either, but there were still plenty of stories of alternative dimensions — there was clearly something in the air.

Now I thought, Hmmm. With all this talk of multiple dimensions, what if my story isn’t that exactly, but everyone thinks it is? How could I use that to play with the readers’ expectations?

Ultimately, of course, the artist’s process doesn’t matter. What matters is the resulting art — whether it’s any good or not.

But when it comes to books and movies that I read and watch, it seems like bad art results from the artist not seeming to care enough about the audience, as often as it does from the artist caring too much.

I think the place to be is the space between art and commerce.

In my case, it hasn’t meant dumbing my stories down or making them more formulaic.

No, I think it’s helped make them better.

P.S. Does Infinite Drift sound interesting? Check it out below:

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

Even worse, the movie turned out to be bad.

In my defense, I’ve been very busy with other writing projects.

But I am extremely happy to announce that I will soon be releasing another novel — Infinite Drift, a YA supernatural thriller and my fifteenth novel in a little over twenty years. Even better, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written.

So maybe I’m not such a writing-sluggard after all.

Here’s the jacket, which I think is pretty damn cool:

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And here’s the blurb:

"It's a tank full of warm water. What's the worst that could happen?"

Seventeen-year-old Ollie is out with his best friends on a Saturday night, and they decide to try the "sensory deprivation" tanks at a store called Infinite Drift.

But when he gets out again, the world seems vaguely… different. And it feels like he's being watched.

Could he have somehow crossed over into a different dimension? Or is he going insane? After all, he's still distraught over the death of his little brother eight months earlier — an event no one knows he accidentally caused.

Ollie tries to "reset" things by going back into the tank. This time, he emerges into a world where the Yellowstone "supervolcano" erupted four years earlier, almost wiping out human civilization, and one of his best friends is dead.

But Ollie's little brother is alive again.

Unfortunately, Ollie is being watched — by the robot-like creation of a cosmic monitoring station left in operation by a civilization that died out eons ago. And the being is ruthlessly trying to eliminate a strange "disruption" in the universe: Ollie!

And so he has no choice but to go back into the tank yet again…

Infinite Drift is the latest book from Brent Hartinger, the author of the LGBTQ teen classic Geography Club, but it's unlike anything he's ever written before: a page-turning mind-bender with a bonkers bisexual love triangle.

Sound intriguing? The book won’t be out until September, but you’re in luck: the ebook version is available for preorder, and the print version will be available soon.

PREORDER THE BOOK AT AMAZON

PREORDER THE BOOK AT BARNES AND NOBLE

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Here’s the series overview:

In The Ferryman series, twelve-year-old “control freak” Ellie mistakenly climbs aboard the boat of a mysterious cloaked man, the Ferryman. The Ferryman paddles Ellie onto the Great Flow, a mystical waterway that connects all living things throughout the universe, guiding her into a series of dark adventures in strange but fascinating locations, including a journey to the center of the universe itself. Each book in The Ferryman series involves a stand-alone mystery, as Ellie also tries to unravel the true agenda of the Ferryman, and piece together the point of all the adventures.

I liked the mix of fantasy and mystery, and that the project was darker than most kids’ books. I also liked that the main character was neurodivergent-ish, but that this was not at all the point of the book.

I wrote the first book in the series, The Ferryman: City of Gold, and outlined the next two books, and I loved it more than anything I’d ever written.

I sent it to my agent, Amy Brewer, at the Metamorphosis Agency.

She loved it too, even as she also offered me her usual long list of brutal yet brilliant editorial notes for improvement.

But she also said, sadly, “Middle grade is a really hard sell right now. And fantasy might be even worse.”

I made her suggested revisions, but being my usual foolishly optimistic self, I ignored her words of caution about the marketplace.

Even so, she agreed to send it out to editors.

Or, rather, she tried to send it out. For the first time in her career, my agent could get hardly any editors even to read the damn thing. She’s generally as brutally honest about the market as she is about my books, but even she was surprised by how bleak things had become.

(This experience was part of the reason why I wrote this depressing article back in 2023.)

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I was pretty demoralized. But I said before that I am foolishly optimistic, and I recalled my agent mentioning something in a Zoom chat a few weeks before: that graphic novels were selling, even in middle grade.

I said to her: “What if I rewrote this story as a series of graphic novels?”

“That would be great,” she said. “But do you know anything about graphic novels?”

“Absolutely!” I said, lying through my teeth.

The truth is, I read graphic novels, but I didn’t know how to write or illustrate them.

Which wasn’t to say I couldn’t learn.

And I did learn, doing a deep dive into the mechanics of genre. It helped a lot that I’m an experienced screenwriter, trained to think visually, and I’ve also done some storyboarding.

Then I rewrote my own story as a graphic novel “script.”

However, I doubted that editors would be any more interested in a graphic novel script than they had been in the novel itself; I at least needed some sample pages.

I approached some established illustrators, but their quotes were far higher than expected: hundreds of dollars per page. I couldn’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on a spec project — I’m foolishly optimistic, but not that foolishly optimistic.

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At this point, I confess I explored the possibility of AI-generated art. But two things put me off.

First, at that point, the technology simply wasn’t there yet, not for a continuous story.

Second, my friends in the graphic novel publishing community also told me privately that there was currently a huge backlash against anything AI-related and that editors would very negatively judge a project that used it, even for placeholder-art.

(Even a year later, I suspect this is much less true, at least deep within the bowels of the industry. With the industry in such dire straits — and with public attitudes on AI shifting so rapidly — I suspect editors are now actively exploring all options that will save them money.)

Anyway, next I started interviewing aspiring illustrators — at Upwork. I was still paying them, but these were rates I could afford — the agreement being that if the project sold to a publisher, and the editor liked their work, there might be a bigger, better-paying job later on.

The finished artwork turned out far better than I expected.

And now here we are, my agent and I, ready to submit the project and its sample pages to editors.

What’s the point of my sharing all this? Well, it’s partly to share the artwork, below, which I really do think is sensational. And to brag about learning a new skill set, which I’m very proud to have done.

But this whole story is also a pretty good illustration of what I wrote last month: that if you want to make it in a creative field in 2025, you can’t just play by the old rules. You have to take risks and think outside the box — while also keeping your ear to the ground and doggedly pursuing any realistic possibility that comes your way.

And I’ve also written how important it is to share your story online and on social media — to tell the story behind your stories — helping to drum up interest and support.

So here we are!

What do I think the chances are that this project will ever get picked up and see the light of day?

Well, I still think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written. And I am still foolishly optimistic in general.

But it’s a ridiculously crazy time in the industry right now, so I guess we’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope.

I do have some exciting news about a different book that will be published later this year, but that will have to wait a few weeks.

In the meantime, as promised, here is some of the art from my would-be graphic novel.

First, the first two pages:

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Now we skip ahead a bit, to three pages at the end of the third chapter:

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

Almost two years ago, I wrote: “It's Not You. It's Really, Really Hard to Get a Major Book or Movie Deal Right Now.”

A few months later, I asked: “Is It Still Worth It for Writers to Put Up with All the Bullshit?”

I admit that mine was a fairly pessimistic take. At the time, it was something of an open question how much of the dire creative landscape had to do with changes in technology and shifting business models — and how much of it had to do with the Hollywood writers’ strike and Covid.

After all, maybe things would eventually go back to normal?

But they didn’t. It really was all about those technological changes, and they have now completely disrupted the book and movie industries.

In fact, things are so utterly transformed that I’m making a bold pronouncement:

It’s now essentially pointless for aspiring writers to try to break into either industry using any traditional method.

I think the evidence for my pronouncement is overwhelming.

In Hollywood, querying producers, agents, or managers has long been a long shot. But recently, even “for pay” services that claimed to offer access to Hollywood insiders — screenplay contests and sites where you pay to list your vetted project — have been shutting down en masse.

To be sure, the actual worth of these various services was always suspect. But it seems noteworthy that even the folks selling mostly false hopes are admitting outright that things are so dire in Hollywood right now that you can’t even pay someone to consider your project.

It’s worth mentioning that experienced, employed screen and TV writers are also being fired en masse. The entire Hollywood filmmaking ecosystem is in free fall.

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Hard numbers are harder to come by in the mysterious world of New York Publishing, but grim anecdotes abound, and one thing is certain: AI-created novels are coming at us fast — even before the arrival of AI-generated feature films.

Oh, and attention spans are collapsing; due to our phones and social media, people are reading fewer and fewer books.

So the situation is hopeless, right? To quote Roy Scheider in Jaws, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

On one hand, these trends are all fairly terrifying. I’m especially concerned about AI and the whole “declining attention spans” thing.

Plus, I love books and movies, and I hate to see their heyday fading away.

But weirdly, I’m not that upset by the current creative status quo. In a way, I’m even kind of excited.

That’s partly because the existing book and movie industries have become so unbelievably insular. They also create far too much derivative crap.

Ironically, these “disruptive” new technologies often do a far better job of finding and promoting original writers.

To be clear, there’s plenty of derivative crap on Substack and YouTube, but there’s also some truly interesting stuff. I’m less excited by what self-publishing has become, but that's a viable option now too.

Better yet, all these new technologies have finally given determined writers like me a consistently decent income. Even better, we’re in charge — no longer at the mercy of corporate folks who don’t really have our career or even our creative interests at heart.

In other words, to quote Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, “When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.”

For many writers, these new technologies have been the window.

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All this means the advice I give to aspiring writers has changed: don’t bother with sample scripts anymore, or queries to producers, or literary conferences, or even trying to get an agent for your novel. Those “old school” methods are simply not how most writers find success in 2025.

Instead, you should just…create.

Writing success used to be about the hustle of desperately trying to interest some indifferent-to-hostile gatekeeper in your work; now it's about the hustle of selling that work directly to the audience.

Pick a platform that best suits your particular talents — whether it’s YouTube for video, or self-publishing for fiction, or Substack for some combination of the two. And then try to prove there really is an audience for whatever you have to offer.

To (mis)quote Teri Garr in Tootsie, “You’re responsible for your own orgasm.”

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But you still want to attract the interest of someone in Hollywood or New York Publishing, you say?

Ironically, creating your own online success is now almost certainly the best way to do that. But this way, they’ll come to you. And at this point, they won't be indifferent or hostile.

And if that movie producer or publishing editor never does come calling?

Well, you’ll still be on a bigger boat with the window open, having the best, most satisfying orgasm of your life.

See also…

The Secrets to Being a Successful Writer

How Do You Successfully Self-Publish Your Book?

I've Realized Something Big About My Writing Career — and There's an Interesting Take-Away for Aspiring Writers

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

Three days after its release, my editor called me to say, “Good news! Your book is selling so strongly that we’re going into a second printing. And in between the time we decided to go into that second printing, those books sold out — even though they aren’t printed yet — so now we’re going into a third printing!”

Within a month, we’d been contacted by four producers inquiring about the movie rights — and we had many more inquiries in the months that followed. (A feature film was finally released in 2014.)

All the while, I was inundated with literally thousands of fan letters and emails from happy readers.

At the same time, Geography Club received only fair-to-good industry reviews and won no major awards. And it currently has a middling 3.7 rating on Goodreads.

Subsequent books of mine got stronger reviews and did win awards — and most of these books also have much higher Goodreads ratings.

But I also didn’t get nearly as much fan mail, and most of those books didn’t sell nearly as many copies.

Which is all a pretty good illustration of something that took me decades to learn as a writer: you can’t please everyone.

More importantly, you shouldn’t even try. As a storyteller, that shouldn’t be your goal.

We all want to be successful, of course.

But what is “success” anyway?

Reviews? They’re not completely irrelevant, but every artist — including me! — has a story of a well-reviewed project that didn’t connect with audiences.

Beyond that, I think most artists also acknowledge that some projects get rave reviews because critics think they “should” get rave reviews — because they’re about an “important” or underserved subject matter, not necessarily because the work in question is all that good.

And online ratings? Don’t get me started.

Here’s a fun fact about Goodreads: my self-published books are always rated a half a star or more higher than my traditionally published books — and that’s even when I’m self-publishing a reprint edition of an earlier mainstream book.

Why would the exact same book get completely different ratings?

Who knows? Maybe it’s different covers, or maybe it has to do with how a traditionally published book is typically exposed to a broader, more “skeptical” audience.

Even the barometers of popular success can be surprisingly ambiguous. You can cite numbers like “box office success” and “total number of books sold,” but for these figures to mean anything at all, you also have to know how much the project cost to produce and how much was spent on marketing.

What were the financial expectations of the movie studio or book publisher?

Unfortunately, while the movie studio or book publisher always knows this, they definitely don’t share it with the writer.

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I think the same question applies even to self-published authors. I’ve heard of plenty of folks who have sold thousands of books — but to do that, they also had to spend thousands of dollars on online advertising.

And they’re not going to tell you this either, because part of their marketing strategy is to portray themselves as “successful” as possible.

None of which means there’s no such thing as writing “success” — or that writers can’t feel it when it happens.

And it definitely is a feeling. Success in the arts can be maddeningly elusive, but it’s still very obvious when it finally happens.

My book, Geography Club, was very obviously a success — not because of reviews, or awards, or even necessarily sales.

It was a success because it had an impact: it created a fandom and inspired others, and it was part of an early wave of books that shifted the trajectory of YA literature — which, in turn, also shifted television and movies.

I mean, hey, maybe it even changed the world a little tiny bit.

I don’t necessarily see my other books as “failures.” Most of them found at least some passionate fans.

Which is what the writing process is really all about, right? Creating passion and having an impact — connecting with an audience?

But after thirty years in this business, I’ve realized something counterintuitive: you don’t connect with people by trying to connect with everyone. At least, I never have.

It’s a weird kind of paradox.

Once you’ve had success, and you realize how nice it is, it’s almost impossible not to think, How the hell do I extend or recreate this?

It can really mess with your mind.

But it’s also a trap, because you become hyper-aware of trends, and fan expectations, and exactly how your career seems to be doing compared to your writing peers.

And ironically, I think all of these things are in direct contradiction to the thing that probably gave you that success in the first place.

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Part of the problem with chasing trends in the arts is that most of us aren’t fast enough to write and produce anything to meet the trend — nothing of quality anyway.

By the time your project is done, the world will likely have moved on. There’s also a high chance that audiences will view your work as precisely what it is: a cynical rip-off.

More importantly, if you’re chasing trends, you’ll never have much of an impact. At best, you’ll be riding the coattails of someone else’s impact.

On the contrary, to have an impact, I think you need to attempt something new — or at least put a great new twist on some older idea.

It’s called creative writing, remember?

I think part of the reason why so many people were so excited by Geography Club was because, well, maybe they hadn’t seen anything exactly like it before.

That’s the reason I wrote the book: because most of the gay teen books I’d read up until then had been so earnest, or too literary and depressing, or just not fun or funny enough for my taste.

Look, I can’t prove that what excites audiences — what creates an impact — is originality and authenticity. Lord knows that plenty of cynical rip-offs do find some success. And it’s equally true that plenty of “great” works get ignored — either because they’re ahead of their time, or maybe because they’re simply marketed badly.

But I know that sometimes originality and authenticity sell.

The real question is, why are you writing? What kind of writer do you want to be?

If you’re in it for the money, or even the fame, please know that there are much easier ways to get what you want. Have you considered reality TV?

But if you’re writing to express yourself and to maybe also have an impact on the world, well, why not ask more of the world — and yourself?

It’s the opposite of trying to please everyone. It’s about writing what you think is relevant or interesting regardless of whether anyone else is interested.

It’s about, yeah, pleasing yourself.

Here’s the cold, hard truth about this approach: the audience might find you where you are, and you will have what is very obviously a big success.

Or maybe they won’t.

But failure was always a possibility anyway; you can never guarantee success. Writing is literally an art, not a science, and no amount of trying to game the system is going to change that — not even with AI, at least not for decades to come.

At least my way, you’ll have a chance of having a big impact on the world.

And it’ll also probably be much easier to live with yourself.

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P.S. People often ask me what my favorites of my own books are. It isn’t Geography Club, which wouldn’t even make my top ten.

Here are my three favorites:

• Barefoot in the City of Broken Dreams: This novel for adults is about the main character from Geography Club, now in his twenties and trying to make it as a screenwriter in Los Angeles. It’s my most autobiographical book, based on what happened to me when I moved to Los Angeles to try to make it as a screenwriter. It wasn’t until my experience was over that I realized I had essentially lived the story of the classic movie about Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard. Except — spoiler alert! — I didn’t die at the end.

• Project Pay Day: This is my stab at a middle grade novel — with lots of humor, mystery, and adventure. But it’s also about a particular moment between childhood and adulthood. When I was fifteen years old, I had a lot of the freedom of adulthood but with almost none of the responsibility, and I really didn’t want it to end. I think this is a fairly common feeling, but I felt like I’d never read exactly that before.

• The Otto Digmore Difference: This is another adult book, about a burn survivor with a disfigured face trying to make it as an actor in Hollywood. Books almost never turn out as well as you imagine when you first start writing them. But this one did.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

According to the Washington Post, parties are dead. When people do show up at social gatherings, things rarely take off anyway — too many folks sitting to one side staring at their phones.

The Wall Street Journal adds that it’s now socially acceptable — even something to brag about on social media — to cancel your plans with other people at the last second. Self-care and all that.

The two newspapers blame these new social mores on America’s political polarization — who wants to socialize with people on “the other side” anyway? They say it’s also the lingering after-effects of Covid.

Please. That’s not it at all. Why are both newspapers pretending not to see what’s really going on here?

I hate to be That Guy, but yeah, it’s smartphones and social media. Too many Americans now live almost entirely online. Why bother interacting with actual human beings when you can have all your social needs met by that ever-fascinating little device in your hand?

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Talk to any American teacher, and they’ll all tell you the same thing: kids are increasingly addicted to their phones — as in literally addicted. They’re now so used to the dopamine hits that come from social media that they go through actual symptoms of withdrawal whenever they’re separated from their phones.

I’d argue another part of the problem is America’s hyper-individualism, which is currently manifested in our country’s strange obsession with what some call “therapy culture” — a perversion of actual therapy. Therapy culture says the most important thing is that we all focus obsessively on ourselves, being hyper-aware of our own individual wants and needs.

If other people can’t get on board, they can just suck it.

Lately, social media and therapy culture are obviously reinforcing each other. That’s the only way anyone could end up thinking the incredibly stupid idea that it’s no big deal to cancel on a friend at the last minute — and then brag about it on social media, no less.

The greater problem is that social media isn’t really real; it’s the illusion of intimacy. It gives people what we want — exactly what we want, to keep us forever engaged and looking at ads — but not what we need, which is sometimes to be challenged and genuinely surprised.

It’s also important to sometimes be bored.

As for therapy culture, well, I’ve spent the last eight years traveling the world as a digital nomad, and it’s incredibly obvious to me how, in other countries, the happiest people are the ones where the communities are close-knit, and the families are tight. Always.

And when I return to America — ground zero for therapy culture and social media — I’m struck by how miserable everyone is, especially the kids.

These things are related.

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Sure, there’s always a place for examination of the self, and women and minorities definitely have some legitimate grievances with some of the social codes of the past.

But here’s the Big Picture: what most of us really want in life is to be loved and accepted by the people around us — to be part of something greater than ourselves. And the only way you do that is to be part of something greater than yourself — by taking an interest in other people.

We have no choice but to go to the party that no one seems to want to go to anymore because it’s ohhhhh… sooooo… exhausting.

Real people are sometimes exhausting. That's the whole point. But by dealing with them, we learn resilience. We also get the satisfaction of making Deep Connections.

And as an added bonus, when we’re there for other people during their hard times, they’ll show up for ours. We are all stronger together.

Also, these sometimes-frustrating real-world interactions are literally what make life interesting.

As great as cat videos are, actual cats are always better.

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No person is an island. And by pretending that we are, we end up miserable and alone. Whoever could have predicted that?

I mean, other than literally every writer and poet who ever lived.

The fact that contemporary America has landed in such a ridiculous place makes me very sad, even as I realize that this whole essay is making me sound like a total crank.

Look, I’m not saying throw away your phone. These days, it’s essentially impossible to live without it anyway.

But I am saying go to the damn party. Or, better still, throw a party. Or, if you’re an introvert like me, make it a smaller get-together.

Oh, and unless you have a really good excuse, stop canceling on your friends.

I swear to God, you’ll be much happier when you do.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

That narrow creek even had a salmon run. Every autumn, these massive silver fish would swim upstream to spawn. Afterward, these glorious creatures would die and lie rotting in the water and on the banks of the stream.

It was just about the most fantastic thing I had ever seen. It was such a weird contrast, these massive fish in that little creek.

I loved those salmon so much.

But the longer I lived near that creek, the more that wilderness was paved over for more suburbs — and the fewer salmon returned every year to spawn.

When I was in the seventh grade, I did my school “science fair” project on salmon, using the creek below our house as my case study. As part of my research, I had the water quality of the creek tested.

Unfortunately, the results came back very poor. According to the report, the quality was not good enough to support salmon: too much run-off from the surrounding roads, probably, which had affected the oxygen in the water.

I wrote all this up as part of my project. But I was more concerned about the salmon than I was about winning a ribbon, so I also wrote a pointed letter to the city mayor, demanding that something be done to save the salmon.

A week or so later, my science teacher pulled me out of class into the hallway, very upset. “Did you write to the mayor about your science fair project?” he demanded.

I admitted that I had, and I started to explain why when my teacher interrupted me. “Well, I just got off the phone with the mayor’s office, and they’re very upset with you!”

“But in my project, I tested the water quality in the stream, and it’s—”

“Yes, I know your report! You tested the water in one place at one time of year! Do you really think the city doesn’t closely monitor the water in that stream? The mayor’s office assures me that everything is fine. Did you write to anyone else?”

“Well, I was going to write a letter to the editor of the newspa—”

“Don’t you dare!” he said. “Brent, I don’t understand how you could be so careless! You didn’t learn the most important lesson of this science fair, which is that science is about caution — about being thoughtful. Anyway, this was just a school project, and you’re just a kid!”

“I am so sorry!” I said to my teacher.

My teacher was right — I was just a kid. I’d never felt so mortified. The adults knew much better than I did — obviously. At least it was a relief to find out that the water in the stream was fine, that the salmon were going to be okay. But how could I have been so stupid?

Needless to say, I didn’t win a ribbon in that year’s science fair.

But the following year, only two salmon came back to that little creek below our house. And the year after that, there were none. I never saw any of those beautiful silver salmon ever again.

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And I experienced the mother of all teachable moments — even if a big part of what I learned is that you can’t necessarily trust your teacher.

Here are some of the many other things I learned:

• Adults really don’t know everything.

• Sometimes people will lie to protect their own asses — even governments.

• Listen to your gut — it’s an incredibly valuable tool.

• In science and life, logic and passion are both really important.

I also felt really guilty. I loved those salmon so much, and I had seen what was happening to them. I had known the truth. But I had — so stupidly! so foolishly! — let myself be intimidated into silence.

Sure, I was just a naive kid, but that hadn’t mattered to those salmon. I’d let them down, and they’d paid the ultimate price.

This failure of mine haunted me.

Maybe it’s why I soon turned to a life of activism. At one point, I helped found what turned out to be the world’s third gay-straight youth alliance. I also helped found a local AIDS organization.

And often, I even felt like I’d made a bit of a difference to the world, making it a slightly better place.

But the story of those salmon isn’t over yet.

Years later, my husband Michael and I returned to my hometown — in part, to help my father with my mother, who had developed Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease. One afternoon, I saw a flyer for a local group trying to restore the salmon run in that little creek below my parents’ house.

I couldn’t wait to join.

It turned out to be a very small group — just three of us showing up consistently. And after we did our water quality studies, we learned the creek still couldn’t sustain a run of coho salmon, which is what the salmon of my youth had been. Coho spend the first year of their lives in the streams where they’re born.

But that creek could possibly support a run of a different species, chum salmon, which hatch and immediately swim for the ocean. And, in fact, the stream had also once been home to a run of these salmon too.

And so, working with biologists and the local government, we did a series of stream clean-ups. We hacked out invasive species and planted native vegetation. And we eventually reintroduced a run of chum salmon to that little creek.

A few years later, I watched the first of the adult salmon return from the run we had introduced. Now they come back every December.

I said before I’ve been doing activism my whole life, and it’s often been very satisfying, especially whenever I helped specific people solve specific problems.

But nothing has ever made me feel as empowered as reintroducing that run of salmon to that little stream.

Yes, it was partly the connection I felt to those fish — relieving some of the guilt I felt for having let them down before.

But another part of it was the specific, manageable nature of the project: there was a problem, and we solved it. We made the problem…stop being a problem!

And as an added bonus, it was very obviously true that if the three of us hadn’t done it, no one else would’ve.

I’ve spent my whole life thinking about the salmon in the creek below my house as a kid, but I’ve been thinking about them even more since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

If you think what Trump and his supporters are doing to America right now is normal, or if you even approve, my message here isn’t for you.

But I’m shocked and horrified by the stupidity, the cruelty, the lies, and the lawlessness. It seems clear that Trump and Elon Musk are embarking on a project to transform the United States of America into an anti-democratic, authoritarian-style government modeled after Viktor Orbán’s “soft-fascism” in Hungary.

And it’s all very overwhelming — which is, of course, precisely the point: to make people feel powerless, like the wholesale transformation of our system of government and the complete upending of the post-war world order is…inevitable.

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But there are really two different problems here.

The first is stopping what’s happening to America, and I don’t yet have a clear answer to that.

But the second problem is fending off that feeling of powerlessness, and I do have an answer there. I also know that the only way we can hope to solve that first problem is to find a solution to the second problem.

The answer to this second problem? Do something specific — and it’s okay to start small. Here are some lists of specific things that anyone can do to fight to save our democracy.

If my experience with those salmon is any indication, the best issues are ones that are personal to you.

And if the problem you're trying to solve is something achievable, and you do manage to achieve it, I suspect you’ll feel the exact opposite of powerless.

An online friend recently helped organize a local protest for the first time in her life. Attendance was better than expected, and she felt great.

Another friend lives in a conservative state where there’s already been an onslaught of book challenges at libraries and schools, so she joined an anti-censorship group. She immediately felt better.

As for me, I’m a writer, so I’ll probably write more articles like this. It probably won’t take much for me to feel better either — just a person or two inspired by the story of me and those salmon in that creek below my house when I was a kid.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

For writers drawn to journalism or wanting to write traditionally published books or traditionally produced movies or TV shows, well, it really is the worst of times. And all indications are that on this side of things, it’s going to get worse and never get better.

The reason why is simple and obvious: rather than reading books or newspapers, or watching movies or even TV, people now spend time on social media. I’d argue social media has also reduced attention spans, especially among young people.

At the same time, the rise of social media has created massive new opportunities for writers — and major new revenue streams. This is what I mean by saying that, in a way, it’s “the best of times” for some writers right now.

In the past three years, YouTube paid out $70 billion to content creators posting on that platform.

And that’s just the money earned in ad-share revenue. In 2025, posters on YouTube can also make money with sponsorships, affiliate links, merchandising, and many other opportunities.

And, of course, YouTube is just one social media platform. Other platforms creating revenue for creators include Instagram, TikTok, X, Substack, Patreon, Medium, OnlyFans, and many more.

For comparison purposes, Hollywood pays all screen and TV writers less than five hundred million dollars a year.

But for a writer to flourish in this bold new world of social media platforms, he or she has to understand how things work.

In a way, it’s still very much about storytelling. The more compelling your story on social media, the more money you make — literally. Indeed, the whole point is to go “viral” so that as many people as possible will share and experience your story.

And here’s something I never thought I’d admit about social media: these different platforms really do encourage creativity — storytelling creativity but also a kind of entrepreneurial ingenuity.

In Margo’s Got Money Troubles, the zeitgeist-y new novel by Rufi Thorpe, a young mother desperately needs money, so she starts an account on the amateur porn site OnlyFans. Her first few fans respond to it because of her unusual approach to eroticism.

Problem is, she quickly realizes that while the money is good on OnlyFans, there’s no discoverability — no way to go viral. She solves the dilemma by realizing she can go viral on Instagram and TikTok, especially if she creates ever-more-compelling content, and that exposure will feed directly to her OnlyFans page.

In other words, she comes to understand how media works in 2025: how it’s ultimately about understanding and manipulating stories — always with one eye on how to monetize one’s success.

To take a real-world example, there’s a reason why Demi Moore is probably going to win the Best Actress Oscar for The Substance at this year’s Academy Awards: because her personal life-experience is a really good story. She started telling it in her heartfelt but also shrewd acceptance speech when she won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical Film, which instantly went viral across almost all social media platforms.

She talked about how, despite being a huge star in the 1990s, she was never taken seriously as an actress — that, in fact, she’d never won a single acting award before that Golden Globe.

Once she’d established that, and once it had gone viral, there was really only one way for her story to end: for her to now go on and win the Oscar. Moore is creating very compelling social media content — and now she’s going to reap the rewards.

Likewise, I knew the movies X and Longlegs were going to be big hits when I read on social media about their stunt castings, even before I’d heard the movies’ plots — the same woman playing the younger protagonist and the older villain in X, and Nicholas Cage unrecognizable as a bonkers serial killer in Longlegs.

Finally, there’s a reason why Donald Trump is president of the United States right now, and Kamala Harris isn’t. During the campaign, he told an outrageous and admittedly attention-getting story: the United States is in rapid decline because of criminal immigrants, unqualified Blacks, and insane transgender people.

Meanwhile, Democrats are floundering because while they’re pretty great at governing, they’re terrible at telling stories. Frankly, because they still don’t understand modern media, they’re not telling any story at all. At best, they’re still talking about issues and all the abstract laws that Trump is breaking — precisely the kinds of “boring” things that never go viral.

This last example might offend you. You might argue that Trump is lying — that he’s nothing but a racist demagogue.

And I’d agree with you! But I still think Trump understands modern media in a deeply intuitive way — far better than the Democrats.

You also might be disturbed by what this all says about America in 2025: that we’re so stupid and short-sided that we’ll believe an outrageous lie over the more boring truth, especially if presented as part of an entertaining narrative. Or, at the very least, we’re obsessed with attention-getting gimmicks in place of stories of quality and substance.

I’d mostly agree with this too.

That said, this is the world we’ve all collectively chosen to inhabit — and that is now being further forced onto us by seemingly all-powerful media companies whether we want it or not.

All this said, you can still create stories of quality and substance.

But to sell those stories to the public, well, you’re much better off if there’s something instantly recognizable either about the story or about you that you can use to pitch the story on social media.

I’ve written before about how I struggled in my own writing career — until I realized that as a digital nomad, I could tell the story of my travels around the world, ultimately creating a large platform in the form of a very successful travel newsletter.

Then I used the success of that particular story to help sell some “old media” projects: two upcoming travel-related novels — and hopefully, a feature film as well.

Have I convinced you how successful storytelling works in 2025?

If so, you might be asking yourself: even if one concedes what I’m saying here, isn’t AI poised to completely upend media and storytelling all over again, making everything I’m saying here moot?

And all I can say in response is: Yeah — and probably sooner than we think.

But all we can do about that is wait and see and hopefully figure out what to do about it when it finally happens.

See also…

The Secrets to Being a Successful Writer — and More Importantly: How Much Money Do I Make?

How Do You Successfully Self-Publish Your Book?

It’s Not You. It’s Really, Really Hard to Get a Major Book or Movie Deal Right Now

Is It Still Worth It for Writers to Put Up with All the Bullshit?

I've Realized Something Big About My Writing Career — and There's an Interesting Take-Away for Aspiring Writers

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

Back in the mid-90s, I wrote the novel that would eventually become Geography Club, and I sent it out to agents and editors.

Everyone rejected the book — literally, hundreds of people. Most of them said they liked the project but told me some variation of the same thing: “It won’t sell — there’s just no market for a book about gay teenagers.”

I did finally land an agent, and she sent it to HarperCollins. Everyone there loved the book too, but as usual, they were convinced it wouldn’t sell any copies. Still, one editor pushed hard, and he finally managed to get me a publishing deal, albeit with a tiny advance.

When the book was released in 2003, no one had any expectations for the book at all.

But two days later, my editor called. “Good news!” he said. “The book is selling so strongly that we’ve sold out the first printing, so we’ve decided to go into a second printing. And in between the time we decided to go into a second printing, all those books sold out too, even though they’re not printed yet, so now we’re going into a third printing!”

Over the next few weeks, I received five different offers from movie producers who wanted to adapt my book for the movies. And suddenly, HarperCollins wanted more books from me too.

I was, for lack of a better phrase, an overnight success.

A lot of artists really hate the expression “overnight success” — for good reason. It’s true that some writers or actors sometimes become successful in a very short span of time, but that quick explosion of fame usually only comes after years or even decades of intense practice and soul-killing rejection.

That was definitely true in my case.

That said, a career in the arts is pretty unusual in that you really can find major success in a day or two. Is there any other situation like that?

Sure, anyone can “go viral” on social media and end up being seen by millions of people. But social media fame usually leaves as fast as it comes.

And many jobs can result in great new opportunities — a politician can win an important election, or an office worker can get a big promotion. But most of the time, these successes don’t come completely out of the blue, not like they do in the arts.

I’ve written before about how a career in the arts is most similar to the experience of elite athletes. Some Olympic athletes can even find success not just overnight but in the course of a few seconds.

I’ve also written a lot about how weird a career in the arts is — but I’ve mostly focused on the negative. It’s weird in really good ways too.

The fact that massive success can come virtually overnight is one really good way.

I also know this kind of “instant” success happens quite often in the arts — not just because I’ve experienced it, but because I’ve witnessed it happen to so many of my friends and colleagues.

I used to teach creative writing at Vermont College, and two of my best students, Jandy Nelson and Julie Berry, went on to win YA literature’s most high profile award, the Printz Award. Neither “overnight” success surprised me in the least.

Back when I edited content websites, one of my fellow editors once showed me a no-budget video series she had just started to run, starring a promising young comedian named Kate McKinnon.

And an online writer-friend of mine, Matt McMann, has been disappointed lately that his publisher, Penguin Random House, chose not to publish his next series of books — only to wake up over the holidays to find that Escape From Grimstone Manor, the first book in his existing middle grade series, Monsterious, had landed on the USA Today Bestseller list.

Of course, stories of “overnight success” not only don’t dwell on what came before the sudden breakthrough, but they also don’t mention what comes after — how mainstream success doesn’t always feel like you thought it would, and how maintaining it can be maddeningly elusive.

Here’s the story of how my own career tanked after the breakout success of Geography Club (if you keep scrolling down, you’ll see that it ultimately has a happy ending — kinda-sorta).

They also did end up making a movie version of Geography Club, but that didn’t turn out the way I expected either.

As for Matt McMann’s book landing on that bestseller list, well, it hasn’t caused the editors at Penguin Random House to change their minds about not publishing his next series.

Yet! That’s the thing about a career in the arts and “overnight successes”: just because that kind of sudden success happens once doesn’t mean it can’t happen again further down the line.

When a second overnight success happens a long time after the first one, it’s usually called a “comeback.”

A comeback is a lot like an overnight success, except you tend to be a lot wiser when it happens — at least wise enough to appreciate your success better the second time around.

That wisdom is really important — so important that I should probably let it be the subject of some future post.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

Here is a partial list of the things that annoy me about the 1985 movie Back to the Future:

• It opens with that cheap, lazy sight gag about a massive amp blowing Michael J. Fox across the room.

• Michael J. Fox’s family doesn’t look anything like his family, or any real biological family, would look.

• When Marty goes back in time, most of the major characters are played by actors who aren’t even remotely convincing as teenagers.

• The movie tries way too hard to make Marty “cool” — with the skateboard, the guitar-playing, and the beautiful girlfriend. But Michael J. Fox is much better playing slightly desperate — the dork character, or at least someone dork-adjacent.

• Crispin Glover’s performance is terrible, always completely out of sync with the other actors and incredibly distracting.

• The lightning bolt strikes the clock at exactly 10:04 PM. Why not 10:04 and eighteen seconds? Because then Doc Brown’s plan would fail.

I’m also not crazy about the parts where the movie reveals that black people didn’t actually invent rock music or that a main character creepily watching a woman undress just makes him a lovable goof. But hey, times change.

Anyway, I could go on, but I think you get my point.

But ultimately, none of this matters. Back to the Future is still very obviously one of the greatest movies of all time.

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The movie’s central concept is not just clever; it’s also somehow both extremely simple and thematically very rich.

A teenager goes back in time thirty years to when his parents were his age, only to accidentally disrupt their falling in love. Now he has to do two things: get his parents to somehow fall in love anyway so he and his future family members won’t cease to exist, and also get himself back to the future.

And while Back to the Future occasionally contains lazy writing, it also includes some genuinely fantastic material.

Many jokes are inspired, like when someone in the 50s sees Marty’s puffy down jacket and asks why he’s wearing a life preserver. And how Lorraine thinks Marty’s name is “Calvin Klein” because that’s what is prominently written on the waistband of his modern-day underwear.

This latter joke is doubly funny because it causes Marty to realize his own mother was sneaking a peek at his underwear — that she’s hot for him.

Then there’s that fantastic sequence at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, where Marty goes on a screamin’ guitar solo that would be perfectly normal in 1985…

…only look up and see the utterly baffled 1955 crowd.

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This is hilarious because, well, it’s hilarious, but also because it feels like exactly what would happen in this (bonkers) situation. It captures, yes, a profound truth.

There’s a lot of emotional truth in Back to the Future: how Marty’s mother portrays her own teen years compared to how they actually were. How Marty’s father acted when he was younger set him on a trajectory for his whole life — but that maybe that trajectory can be reversed.

Back to the Future also has some incredibly efficient storytelling. The movie repeatedly finds clever visual ways to establish the stakes and keep the story moving.

How does Marty know he has disrupted the future? Because his brother and sister are slowly fading from a photograph he carries. How does Marty know exactly when the clock tower will be struck by lightning? Because his girlfriend Jennifer wrote her number on the back of a flyer from the Save the Clock Tower Preservation Society, which Marty has taken with him into the past.

A lot of the so-called “plot holes” in the Back to the Future? They’re just people being overly picky about time travel stories, which are paradoxical and complicated almost by definition.

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Look, there are parts of Back to the Future that I wish weren’t so lazy. Do we really need the distracting joke about Huey Lewis’ uptight school teacher snottily rejecting his own song?

At the same time, I also recognize these are just my opinions.

For what it’s worth, I have experience writing something that would go on to become a minor classic, and I can say with absolute certainty that when you’re working on something like that, you’re really not thinking about how hundreds of thousands of people will later experience it, some of them going through it with a fine-tooth comb, even writing judgy online essays about it.

You’re just doing the best you can, trying to get the project done on time while taking seriously the comments of the five or six people who read it in advance and took the time to give you serious notes.

Here’s my greater point: if you get the big things right on something you’re writing — if your concept is truly exceptional and you mostly pull it off — people won’t care if it’s not perfect. They’ll just see the great stuff and be really happy. Because honestly, true greatness is extremely rare.

And if you also get the emotional truth of your story right?

Well, hell. People might still talk about your project forty years after it comes out.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

A very loose story.

Basically, you start in what they say is an abandoned paint factory that once saw the appearance of strange, otherworldly mushrooms. It turns out the mushrooms have opened a portal, which you enter, that leads to a dystopian realm called Meridia.

But Meridia’s mostly unseen survivors have banded together to create something called the Dream Factory, where they have been mixing the mysterious fungi with the elements of fire, water, earth, and air, creating a fifth element called “aether” that has made an interdimensional crack leading to a place you ultimately visit called the OUTERverse.

In terms of visuals, it’s all pretty well done. It’s hard not to appreciate the craft and expense that went into these installations. And I like that it’s intereactive-ish: you can occasionally turn dials and read messages, and there is a secret passage or two to discover.

But I confess, my interest fell pretty quickly. And by the end, I was more or less bored.

The problem is that it’s all exposition: background and world-building. It’s intriguing and could be the set-up to a cool story. But there’s nothing to engage you — no stakes, tension, or even any characters, except for a few costumed staff members who make a cryptic comment or two but mostly stand around looking bored.

It’s like walking around inside a video game where there’s no danger to your character and also no goal. That can be interesting too — for about five minutes. After that, it doesn’t matter how cool the graphics are.

Wake the Tiger reminded me how every time a new Jurassic Park movie comes out, I think, “Okay, I’m sure this movie is terrible, but at least the special effects will be great. They’ll be lots of cool dinosaurs!”

And then I see it, and yeah, the dinosaurs always look great, but the movie is always terrible, and after five minutes, I’m bored out of my mind.

(I did think the last Jurassic Park movie — the one where Laura Dern and Sam Neill came back — wasn’t terrible. But it also annoyed me because it was just good enough that it probably means there’ll now be fifteen more Jurassic Park movies.)

Anyway, I never learn. Although maybe I have finally learned about superhero movies because I haven’t seen one in about ten years.

I think what finally killed superhero movies for me was the realization that even if something happens — if there is something interesting in one particular movie — there aren’t really any stakes because the franchise owners won’t allow it. Every movie is part of a never-ending “paracosm,” and everything will always be reset or rebooted — or, oh, wait, never mind, the story I just watched doesn’t matter because it took place in some alternative dimension.

For me, it’s so obviously the sound and the fury signifying nothing.

The greater point is that I find spectacle without a compelling story boring. To hold my attention for more than five minutes, I need to care about what I’m experiencing — to feel something.

Is it just me? I’ve definitely always been a “plot” guy.

As a writer of fiction, I’ve always seen myself, first and foremost, as a storyteller. The way I see it, character and story are two sides of the same coin: story illustrates character, and character creates story. Why must this story be about this character?

And where is this story going? How will this particular sequence of events delight or shock or move my audience? How do I create an ending that will be completely unexpected yet seem inevitable in retrospect? And does everything hang together and make sense?

This is how I feel as a media consumer, too. Sure, in novels, I can appreciate beautiful language and quirky characters. And in movies, I can enjoy good acting and great special effects.

But for me, these are all just tools to serve a greater purpose: the story itself. No matter how amazing these individual pieces might be, I get equally frustrated when there’s virtually no plot (as in a lot of literary fiction and arthouse movies) as when the plot is perfunctory or cliche (as in a lot of genre fiction and popcorn films).

A good story is hard. I think that's why so many arthouse films, literary novels, genre books, and popcorn movies don't have one. In my opinion, a truly compelling story is just about the hardest thing a writer can do.

The same goes for “amazement parks,” too, I guess.

But maybe this all really is just me. What do others think?

P.S. Britain’s Wake the Tiger is so similar to Meow Wolf, an attraction in America, that the latter’s creators are suing the former for copyright infringement. My husband Michael has seen both and agrees that Wake the Tiger is a total ripoff.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

And toward the end of Tolkien’s “prequel” book, The Hobbit, the half-bear half-man being known as Beorn roars like “drums and guns.”

Hold on! Are these the right metaphors? Middle Earth, where these books are set, is a pre-industrial society. They didn’t have trains and guns, did they?

Meanwhile, in The Power That Preserves, the third book in Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant fantasy series (and some of my favorite books of all time), an evil horde attacks the ancient castle of Revelstone with a massive catapult that hurls an evil black concoction at the keep — an amount of liquid “as large as a Stonedowner’s home.”

This metaphor makes more sense. After all, a “Stonedowner” is a kind of craftsman who resides in the world of Revelstone, and since they work with stone, their houses would be very large indeed.

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What makes an acceptable metaphor in a fantasy novel anyway? And what kind of other references are okay? If a book exists in a medieval setting, can the author ever mention technology, even in passing?

Sure, it’s an obscure question, but I think it opens up a fascinating discussion. What kind of references are okay in any given novel? Must everything cited exist in the world of that novel?

Like almost everything in fiction, it all depends.

Good stories all have an internal logic and consistency (even if that internal logic might be illogical and inconsistent for the purposes of the story).

When it comes to metaphors and references, the most important question is: who is the story’s narrator? And — to a lesser degree — who is he or she telling the story to?

Novels are stories, and all stories are told from a particular “point of view” — although that point of view might be omniscient, like God, knowing everything there is to know about the story, even what every character is thinking or feeling at any given time. This point of view is technically called “third person omniscient.”

The perspective of most stories, especially more modern ones, is much more limited.

In stories told in “first person” — where “I” am telling a story that happened to “me” — the reader only knows the thoughts and feelings of the narrator (and in the case of an “unreliable narrator,” even that information may be inaccurate or incomplete). What the other characters are thinking or feeling is entirely speculation on the part of that “first person” narrator.

But these days, even most “third person” novels are usually fairly limited: the narrator often only knows the thoughts and feelings of one character at a time — though that perspective often shifts from chapter to chapter or section to section.

All novels also have a specific audience. Sometimes it’s just “any human who wants to experience this story.” But sometimes the audience is more specific, and the story is written in the form of a letter or other communication to a specific person or people — like how Dracula by Bram Stoker is written as a series of letters and diary entries, and how The Martian is written as a series of log entries by the astronaut main character.

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A novel’s narrator and its perceived audience combine to determine what references make sense in a fantasy novel.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series, the perspective is a bit confusing. The books are written in a somewhat limited third person, but the conceit is that the events contained therein actually happened in some pre-historical age, and they were written down by the protagonists of the books — Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam — in the form of memoirs. But they were written in an ancient language which was “translated” by the author, J.R.R. Tolkien, for a modern audience.

In other words, in the world of these novels, the references to “trains” and “guns” in these ancient stories were added by translator-Tolkien to make things make a bit more sense for us, the reader.

Meanwhile, in The Power That Preserves, we witness that attack on Revelstone from the point of view of a secondary character, Lord Morham, who is a resident of the land in which the castle exists. Since we’re seeing things from his point of view, it makes sense that he sees that massive amount of the ugly black concoction in a way that he understands.

If we had witnessed the attack from the point of view of the book’s main protagonist, Thomas Covenant, he’s from the “real” world, transported to the world of Lord Morham by magic. As such, he might have seen that black liquid hurling at Revelstone like, well, an express train.

Every successful story, fantasy or not, has a similar internal consistency and logic.

This seems like a good time to mention something called the “objective correlative,” which is a term popularized by the poet and literary critic T.S. Eliot to describe the idea that great authors don’t merely “tell” the reader what a character is feeling and experiencing. No, they literally show the reader by writing the character’s surroundings — his or her entire world! — in a way that is consistent with the character’s emotions and characteristics. In doing so, they make the reader feel the same emotion.

If a character is depressed, his or her entire world might be described as flat and colorless. The metaphors, therefore, might be dark and gloomy.

In The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin, the second book in another classic fantasy series, The Earthsea Cycle, we open on images of silence and darkness — “One high horn shrilled and ceased” and “great webs and blackness” — as a frightened young girl, Tenar, is taken from her parents and declared to be the reincarnation of a high priestess, doomed to spend her life serving a cruel religion overseeing an ancient complex of tombs and dictating specific methods of torture for those brought for punishment.

But by the end of the novel, after the wizard Ged gets Tenar to realize the folly of her dark service and helps engineer her freedom, she is surrounded by sounds and images of openness — even if it’s a bittersweet kind of freedom:

A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had [before becoming a priestess]. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free…. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

In other words, the entire plot of the novel — and virtually every metaphor in the book — illustrates the emotional state of the main character. And the description of the novel is used to provoke a similar emotional reaction in the reader.

There aren’t a lot of hard and fast rules in writing fiction, but this might be one: the point of description is never just to describe something the way we, the author, see it. No, the point is to describe it in a way that’s consistent with the narrator, character, and audience — and that creates an emotional response inside the reader.

That’s why we writers do everything — even create the different metaphors in our fantasy novels.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.