#1 - Alex Marden

Written By David Wappel
“I started writing at the top of every page ‘I give you permission to fuck this up’”

Alex joins us from his home in North Hollywood, CA to discuss:

  • writing first drafts longhand

  • the expectations we put on ourselves

  • the greatest character in science-fiction

  • and more!

Full Episode Transcription

Alex Marden: I tend to visualize the stories I'm writing from the first frame. I'll imagine what it's going to end up looking like when it's fully produced. And I'll do that over and over and over again, over weeks, maybe sometimes months, for at least one project over the years, I would just start with frame one. And I would just try to imagine it in order as far into it as I could until I hit a roadblock. I think that comes from acting classes, which I started taking when I was in third grade through college. So rehearsing and trying to like first imagine and then physicalize, what I'm writing ends up being a huge part of the process before anything gets on the page.

David Wappel: Okay, great. So you've imagined it and you're ready to write it. What do you do?

AM: I use pilot V five pens on legal pads or composition notebooks. Because I like the time it takes me to physically write things by hand. When I'm on the computer, my gross words a minute, my GWAM, is pretty high. It's like 120 140. If I'm really on a roll, it's faster than I think. So I'll run out of things I'm writing. If I'm writing longhand, I have to be more considered with what I'm writing and really think through what the next thought was going to be.

DW: Okay, so if you have a pen preference, how did you end up with that one?

AM: I had to borrow a pen from somebody in high school. And I just really liked that pen, and then spent years trying to hunt down where to find those pens. So I'll buy boxes of pilot V five at a time, so that if it runs out of ink, I've just got another one I can pick up. Okay, cool. So you take this long hand draft, and then you type it up in a screenwriting software. And obviously, that's an extra step of work to type it up. And I'm curious if what you feel like you gain from doing that, what do you get out of the process, the whole point of transcribing from handwritten into a digital space is to give me a chance to polish and refine as I'm going, I just tried to really cut it to the bone to keep the pacing as tight as possible.

DW: Okay, so essentially, you're creating another draft as you type it up. And maybe you're not changing story stuff, but you're cleaning it up and taking care of some spacing and stuff like that. And one of the things that I'm always struck by when I read your work is how clean it is, it seems like if you're going to use a line, you use every word available to you on that line, even things like dialogue, it gives a very clean look.

AM: So I'll spend some time in dialogue. Like if there is one dangling word on a line, I'll play with the diction of a character to see if I can reduce or expand a line of dialogue so that it actually fills a page better. And dialogue is particularly thorny, because the margins are so tight. But that's a fun puzzle. For me, my brain is broken in the exact right way where it's like, that's actually part of the fun process for me is playing with how a character is expressing themselves in a way that fits within the restrictions. I've heard before. The warning that you're not supposed to do that you shouldn't write in voice in dialect, but I think sometimes it does make a character feel more natural, and it makes the dialogue feel more natural. Plus the Coen brothers get away with it. And you know, why not steal from the best?

DW: Well, absolutely. Now, across your various projects in the script, what sort of things show up consistently? What are you interested in as an artist?

AM: A character theme that I think pops up pretty regularly is an anxiety that what other people believe you're capable of restricts what you're actually able to do, a lot of my characters end up grappling with other people's assumptions about them other people's perceptions of them. And trying to wriggle out of the restrictions of that. I think it's a form of alienation that I found really compelling about science fiction when I was growing up. And it's one of the things that led me into writing.

DW: Okay, so tell me more about that. Tell me more about growing up and the science fiction you were reading.

AM: So I grew up in North Carolina, and I come from a Jewish family, we were really sort of proud of our Alien Nation that like, Oh, were some of the only Jewish people in our community, were some of the only people with dark hair in our community. And even from preschool, my family was watching Star Trek The Next Generation, and I almost immediately glommed on to Worf. He can't hide the fact that he's an alien among the mostly human crew because he's got these forehead ridges, really angry, powerful, masculine presence, but he's raised by Russian Jews. He's an orphan. And so that's sort of like not only the open, emotional mess of his anger, but also literally linking it in the context of an alignment with Jewish culture. I felt like I saw myself in that character from a really young age, and that I think, lured me into writing the world Starfleet Academy chapter books about dwarfs early lessons when he joined Starfleet. And I started like kind of cranking out Star Trek and Doctor Who fan fiction from a really young age,

DW: You know, until he just said it. I'm not actually sure I understood the implications of Worf not just being Klingon, but being raised by humans.

AM: I truly, truly believe worth is one of the greatest characters in fiction for that reason, that no matter what space he's in, he feels alienated every space he goes into. There's constantly a question of what is the core truth of his identity? What does he take from space to space, when he is in cling on spaces, he's not cling on enough, because he was raised by humans when he's in a human space. He's not human enough, because biologically, he has clung on to urges and impulses. And so trying to figure out what honor means for him and trying to figure out what dignity and what peace mean for him what it means to express himself in a really honest way. And the fact that they were able to tell so many stories about him, over seven seasons of next generation, and then they bring them over into Deep Space Nine, and they do another four seasons with him, you really do get over time, this incredible journey of this guy trying to figure out where he belongs.

DW: Now talking about some of your own writing. Now, I read a recent script from you read memory, which is a script about reincarnation. And I know that you had had this idea for a while. So I'm curious how the story changed since the initial idea when you first conceived it until now, this most recent script that you just finished

AM: For a long time, the reincarnation script I was working on, I knew exactly how that was going to add over time, the way that television was being produced changed. So the idea I had for the ending and college ended up shifting into about the top of that, too. And I had to figure out a totally different ending that jammed me up for a while.

DW: Okay, so tell me about the way that television changed since the initial inception of this pilot.

AM: When I first started studying TV writing, the shows I was really responding to were shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episodic television with some serialized character arcs, now you get fewer episodes, they're almost exclusively serialized. And there is a trend for withholding information from the audience until about two thirds, maybe three quarters of the way through the season. It's a nice lore to keep people, you know, binging the episodes. But I think it's depth for storytelling, because you're essentially just lying to your audience and trying to say, Oh, the whole point of the story is the intrigue of it. It undermines a lot of the characters, it's something that like for Game of Thrones, at the peak of its popularity, people were so thrilled because you never knew week to week, you'll never believe who died this week. It's so unpredictable. The thing is stories should be predictable, like Winnie the Pooh, the chapter headings tell you Pooh gets stuck in a tree. And it doesn't tell you everything about the plot, but it gives you enough information going into the story that you know what to expect, and you can start predicting things. And I think that's actually a really crucial purpose about stories is to teach people actions have consequences, and you should be able to anticipate those consequences. I try to build that into my writing, because I think it's actually really important, there should be a certain degree of predictability. And then if you can still surprise people with either how characters act, what crises befall them, I think that's a much richer thing than just trying to withhold a twist from your audience. Well,

DW: I know this is something that you and I have talked at length about before the question of whether spoilers actually ruin a story. And if I understand you, it's not that spoilers themselves are bad, but the sort of cultural over indexing of I can't know anything about this or it won't be good. And the way that seeped into the mode of storytelling itself.

AM: I think, spoiler phobia is damaging storytelling. The idea that the point of a story is that you don't know what happens next, actually has real world ramifications for how you navigate the world, especially politically, the fact that apparently Trump came out of nowhere, you know, yeah, it seems like it comes out of nowhere, if everything that you are watching, whether it's fiction, or the news is telling you, no one could have anticipated this thing happening. And yeah, you could. It is, it is predictable in some, in some senses, I think.

DW: And this idea has changed the way that you write.

AM: So the way I'd initially envisioned the end of the pilot for the reincarnation script was I have this character. He's very religious, he doesn't want to believe in reincarnation because his wife has passed away. So the whole point of that first episode was to get him to a point where he's willing to acknowledge Yes, reincarnation exists. And that means my wife is out there somewhere and I have to find her. In order to facilitate that ending. There was a tease throughout the episode that he kept calling his wife and you would never see her and you just be leaving messages on her voicemail. So you'd hear her voice and you'd say Hi, honey, I'm sorry, I missed you. So by the end of the episode, when he goes to the cemetery and sees her tombstone, you realize him saying, I'm sorry, I missed you. Like it had another layer to it. He missed his wife when I got to the point where I finished the draft within the last year. And let's see Have enough shows kind of play with that, like will withhold things from the audience will tease them, you'll never quite know what's going on. And I got so sick of it, that I put the reveal that his wife was dead so much earlier in the script because I wanted to play more with the specifics of that character and what he believed and what that that drove him to do, rather than trying to tease the audience with what do you think is going on? Because it's a lot less interesting to me. I think it's better to have questions about the characters and how they're treating each other than it is to have questions about the world. Not knowing how people are going to react to each other, I think is a lot more exciting than not knowing how people are going to adapt to constantly shifting rules in the world around.

DW: Okay now shifting gears a bit, I know that you're a big music guy, and I want to ask you about music and how you use it in your process.

AM: I have hundreds and hundreds of playlists on Spotify, and a specific one. That's for the stories I'm working on. And when I looked at the one for the Houdini's, I remembered that I literally had a song for each scene. So that when I was really in the last polish of the draft, before I started sending it out to people, I would press play and then just go through it scene by scene with the music sort of matching the tone.

DW: But I know that it's not always just about tone matching for you write you have others that are about character.

AM: I have a playlist for the Doctor Who companion I wrote for my spec script that like what would have been on her iPod?

DW: And how about for your reincarnation script? Do you have a playlist for that one? What is that one look like?

AM: Eclectic I feel like would be the polite way to say it. Dissociative is probably more accurate. There were so many ideas and themes I wanted to try to play with. And that script said there's a sequence where it's just the same song being covered over and over and over and over again. But then that didn't quite work. So I was trying to find songs that focused on spirituality or repetitions of like Indigo Girls, Galileo, which is a song about reincarnation, there are ones that are very specifically tied into the themes of it, it isn't refined the same way that some of the other playlists are. But it does sort of reflect the full chaos of what the process of writing that script was.

DW: And so do you listen to these playlists while you're writing.

AM: Not even during the writing itself, but just the period in my life in which that story is sort of first of mine that that playlist will be played a lot. And then if I have to take a break from the story, often the thing that leads me back into it is hearing that song that initially inspired it again, I'll be like, oh, right, there was a character living there that I need to sort of give more attention to.

DW: Now I know you have a script about Harry Houdini, and I'm curious, what kind of music did you collect? For that one?

AM: For The Houdini script, the entire sound of it was almost entirely Hans Zimmer's Sherlock Holmes scores. So I sort of pieced together random tracks from both of those soundtracks to match each scene so that as I was editing it, I would get the I think you had a similar thing for your playlist that it would like take you through a journey?

DW: Yeah, I do. I create a playlist that sort of totally reflects the journey of that script, and usually a feature because that's what I write most. And I try to capture everything in a single playlist. So it feels like you know, you go on a bit of a ride. But I do always try to keep it about an hour, because that's how long a normal writing session is for me. So I'll sit down, I'll start the playlist when it's over, then I can stand up and say, Okay, that was one writing session. So it not only helps me keep the vibes front and center, but it also becomes a useful tool for tracking my time. Speaking of useful tools, do you have any rituals or habits that help you in your process?

AM: Since I do my first drafts on paper with a pen, and I'll get precious about words I'm using, I'm like, sort of afraid of sullying the blank page, you want it to be perfect, because you're trying to make sure that it communicates clearly from head to page. So I've started writing at the top of every page, I give you permission to fuck this up, just to give myself a little bit more freedom to play around and to try things and experiment.

DW: Oh that's really great. Any other rituals that you've developed over the years?

AM: To stop myself from getting jammed up on trying to identify exactly the right word I gotten to a practice of, if I know kind of the vibe of the word, I'll use three similar words that sort of will triangulate the, if I know somebody's moving quickly, like running, jogging, sprinting, and I'll hyphenate them so that I know when I get into the next draft, and I'm transcribing that into the digital space, I'll know Since it's like this long hyphenated triple word. I'm gonna have to take some time with that in the edit and find exactly the right word. I don't know if it's like a ritual. Exactly. But it's a practice that keeps me moving so that you can keep playing. There's the writer hat, there's the editor hat, there's a director hat, there's an actor hat and coming from an actor perspective, and envisioning what the final product is going to be. It's really not the time to do that work. Like you need to be in a generative space where you're trying things so yeah, that practices away, keep the writer hat firmly on, we're going to play zone. This isn't supposed to be perfect.

DW: Okay, so that's when things are clicking and you're generating. But something I want to ask about, because we've talked about it before, is guilt over not having pages.

AM: I tend to be really hard on myself about not having pages, which can then result in quite a lot of writer's block, because I'm just punishing myself for not writing and then the pressure keeps building and I don't write the guilt around, that doesn't tend to touch the playlisting. Because that feels like actually a pretty crucial part of my process. It's like refining tone and sort of like finding something true about what I'm writing is playing with the music soundscape of it. But the thinking time before I sit down and write that I'm really hard on myself about and that can really jam me up when I'm trying to write,

DW: Well, that's something you've really explored in yourself, and you've been candid about going to therapy, and I always appreciate how you're self critical without the self judgment. Could you talk a little bit about that?

AM: I've been going to therapy for many years. And the first time I went, it was because I had writer's block. And I was beating myself up over not writing. So I went in saying, Why am I not writing? So a lot of the work I've done in therapy is just sort of a remove guilt from the process, because it's not helping anything, and be understand what it is I'm trying to process so that when I am ready to write isn't necessarily such a burden.

DW: Well, look, I mean, I'm not gonna pretend to play therapist, but I think that if you're writing the top of your craft, you should always be bumping up against the thoughts and ideas and feelings that you don't necessarily have completely figured out. And I guess what I'm saying is, maybe that's not necessarily a burden, that's just part of your process.

AM: Like, I don't accept that about myself, I want to be more prolific the fact that I take so long on individual projects and trying to figure out the little details of it, like it haunts me. My therapist told me recently, that for a lot of people, the thing that will really jam them up when they're trying to get chores or errands or just general tasks done is it starts feeling more complicated than it is. So people have to start narrowing it down into simpler tasks, I kind of do the opposite. where I want it more complicated. It's not that it feels more complicated. To me, it's like, if it's a simple task, I will make it more complicated for myself, because there's something about the puzzle solving of it that I found satisfying. But that does get in the way of my writing process, because then I will hit that point in my script and be like, I have to start making lots of decisions now. And I don't like I shouldn't just be able to like, barrel ahead, throw something on the page and then edit it later. But I won't do that. I want it to be complicated. And that really isn't conducive for having pages.

DW: Okay, this is really interesting for me, because with your latest script, ReMemory, I felt like there were very few complications in terms of plot conflict. Was this something you were conscious of going into this one, I guess, how did your predisposition towards overcompensation affect your reincarnation pilot?

AM: So ReMemory the challenge of that was that it actually was probably the most grounded thing I've ever written, I tend to write a lot of very escapist a science fiction. And with rememory, the premise of it is that it is our world with this one key difference, which is that there is now a pill that allows you to recover memories from your past lives. And with that one difference, all of the systems of our world now have questions that they need to answer how is the justice system affected by it? How is the health care system affected by it? How is religion affected by like, you know, now we know scientifically there isn't a heaven, people get reincarnated. In earlier drafts, it was a lot more like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where there was a medical headgear technology that they would put over your head to scan or trigger synapses. I guess I did spend some time trying to come up with a technobabble solution about how it worked. But I realized after a while that part of it doesn't actually interest me that much. And ultimately, isn't that important? Particularly because the common theme I want to explore is if what people believe about you ends up limiting what you're capable of being. Another huge question comes up who were you in past lives? Do you believe what you are being told about your past lives? Do you believe that reincarnation is real? Or do you want to stick with the world as it was before this pill was made widely available? So much belief and ambiguity was driving the conflicts and the story that it was easier to not overcomplicate it, it wasn't necessary to the complications were coming from the choices, the characters were making the lies that they were telling themselves in order to preserve what they wanted to believe?

DW: Well yeah, that sounds like that character theme you mentioned that pops up regularly. When did you first start noticing that this was something that you were interested in?

AM: I think probably around the time I was in middle school, frankly, the experience of growing up and being so focused on alienation because Jewish family in North Carolina, that sense of oh, maybe we don't necessarily belong here. I was already really focused on the idea that what other people believed I was capable of might limit what I can do. But that's a big anxiety. And it takes a long time to sort of deconstruct it enough to write about it in a sensible way. I think the other half of it too, is not just being aware of it. But articulating it. I think if there's another piece of it that is contributing to writer's block for me, it's worrying that I'm not expressing these deep anxieties in a way that anybody else is going to recognize or understand or empathize with. So a lot of thought goes into, like, is this the right word? To summarize this feeling? Is this the right character to voice these concerns? I don't think it's quite the same thing as the over complications of figuring out the rules of the world. But it is a lot of fretting over how do we present the idea that I'm really worried about in a way that anyone else is going to recognize it and be like, oh, yeah, I see that it's because that's what ultimately, the goal of what I'm writing is, is trying to build a community around, "Well, I see the world a certain way, are you there with me?"

DW: And I know that something very meaningful to you the fact that possibly you can change people through a sort of transmission of ideas.

AM: I do think that's part of why I like to do my first drafts longhand, because it feels more spiritual in a way that it's like, there's something that is transmitting from my head down my arms onto a page. And that creates a new reality, so to speak, like you are sort of warping the world around you by creating something, we've all felt that power that when the story reaches out and actually connects with you, the idea of the magic of writing is about those connections ultimately.

DW: I always appreciate how much you recognize the sort of responsibility you have around not just what you put out into the world, but how you put it out into the world.

AM: Therapy has been a huge part of the process for me just in terms of trying to break down what the things I'm worried about, and how to articulate them.

DW: Well, and hopefully help with the writer's block, too.

AM: After I started going to therapy, it wasn't like the writer's block stopped, I've finished other projects since then. But you know, you go through phases in life where things get more stressful, and it's harder to focus on your work. And usually when that happens, I forget all of the work I've done around it already. And I'll come back to my therapist and be like, I don't know why I'm not writing. I wish I could self regulate by just sitting down and finishing a script. And therapists I've worked with have then given me the homework of okay, well now you're not allowed to write that's your homework. You can't right now. So now what? And the answer inevitably is I come up with a new story idea.

DW: Of course, right? I mean, that's how it always is. Now, why do you think you find it so limiting when you don't have these restrictions on being allowed to write?

AM: I think the self punishing reflex comes from the expectation I set for myself that I'm supposed to be reading, but these pages are supposed to just be cranking out, you know, you're not a real writer, unless you write every day. And the thinking about it, the imagining it the making the platelets, that is part of the writing every day, it's not pages, but you weren't making decisions, you're crafting your world, you're better understanding these things. Yeah,

DW: I want to go back to something I mentioned earlier, which is that you have a very clean look, you're you're relatively sparse on the page. And I'm curious, is that a conscious choice? Or did you just always write that way?

AM: So it's interesting, because you'd asked about my feelings on spoiler phobia. And I'm saying I prefer a lot of specifics. I don't think withholding information with the audience is necessarily great for your story. But characters don't always have self awareness. So they won't always be telling you specifically what is really happening either internally or between people. That feels true to me, I think that's how people tend to communicate. So my stage directions tend to be very, very stripped down into focus on rhythm and tone. And that leaves space for you as the reader or the viewer to interpret like, Okay, I think this person is lying to themselves about something or, Oh, clearly, they're being driven by this thing. And they don't know it. I have gotten notes that people wish my stage directions didn't spell out more particularly than the reincarnation script. Because the ambiguity of belief was such a big theme and that people wanted more specifics about the rules of how the drug is supposed to work, and how people are really feeling I'm okay, I think with people having questions about what motivations are, as long as there's a finite number of motives that people can detect, it's like, I don't I don't know, are they driven by this, or by this, if they're way off base? Obviously, that's a crucial note that there's more specificity I do need to flesh out more rules. But typically, I think having some confusion about what people are actually feeling and thinking is, is human, I'd much rather a mystery about that driving you to come back next week and see like maybe I can piece together what this person is actually thinking, what is this person's psychology and what is their philosophy? More than the mystery of what are the rules of this place? And how do we how do we solve the crisis that's going on? And

DW: I feel that's reflective in your work, your characters always feel very alive, like they have stuff going on outside of the narrative. And sometimes those things outside become plot points, but not always. Sometimes they just inform sort of how that character is dealing with whatever's going on in any given moment. How do you figure out which of those details to tell the audience in which to sort of just let us discover and which to just kind of not care about at all?

AM: It's something that I am still trying to puzzle out myself. I think everybody does. It's like, okay, so if you are just writing a family drama dining room scene, you don't necessarily know what your characters are bringing into it. Did they have a car crash earlier today? Are they getting a divorce? Did they just get promoted at work, and they really want somebody to know about it. All of those things that are driving at how characters are bouncing off of each other and interacting with each other. You don't have to spell it out. You let them express themselves and let that create the conflict and the tension.

DW: That's really interesting, because you primarily work in a genre space, but you're bringing genre elements into a lot of all say, everyday situations.

AM: The first therapist I worked with, I told her that I write science fiction and a lot of escapist stuff. And she went, Oh, that surprises me. I said, Why what's that supposed to mean? She says, Oh, I just assumed you would have written family drama around the dining room table. I was like, why would you think that about me? Again, it's like what people believe you're capable of ends up what does that mean? It did affect the reincarnation script because it stripped away a lot of what would have been a more Buffy style adventure about a supernatural or science fiction element. And it made it more about how people are interacting around the super natural science fiction element.

DW: And what do you do when you're stuck? And I don't mean like in a rut or a funk. But literally, you've got a problem and you don't yet see the solution. How do you solve it?

AM: Shameless pilfering? I'll go back to episodes of TV shows are the movies, the books of the comics that got me excited about writing in the first place, the music, the playlist that I was putting together that sort of inspired the original thing. And I'll usually try to find something structurally that I can apply into my script that might just keep things moving. Any examples for the reincarnation script? True Blood was always a really big Touchstone because structurally, it was a very similar project. Trueblood has this huge ensemble of characters that are all adapting to this one crucial difference. It's our world, but we know there are vampires. So applying that on to my project about reincarnation, it's our world. But there's one crucial difference. We all know reincarnation exists. I actually took the pilot of Tru Blood and I tried to break it down scene by scene, not necessarily for story structure, but just observing. What character information do we get at each point in each scene, because there were so many characters that get introduced in that pilot, it's a soap opera, stealing some of that mentality, some of that attitude, some of that approach to how characters get introduced and how they interact with each other ends up being really useful. And obviously, you know, reading Doctor Who spec I think any spec, you just you've got to go back to the source material, what works like what are the tropes from that show you steal shamelessly in order to keep things moving?

DW: I know, you're a big fan of Doctor Who, which is a show about an alien that's essentially immortal. And I know because we've watched it together, that you're also a big fan of Highlander, the TV series, which is also about immortals. And so my question is, were you always drawn to ideas around immortality? And what do you think's going on there?

AM: My mom is a writer too. And it was actually her interest in Highlander. She and my dad were really into that show. And in talking about the themes of immortality in it, one thing that my family and I talk about a lot is the main character in Highlander Duncan MacLeod, because he's 400 years old, he has this constant question of how is he going to adapt to things changing around him? Because that, you know, I keep saying my distaste for spoiler phobia is about the rules keep changing. Highlander does it this way, that's very character driven, literally, history changes around him. It's not that you never know what's going to happen. It's that things change over time. The identity question that drives that story is fascinating to me. And I think it applies to all these other stories about immortality. And I ended up kind of addressing those identity questions in various ways in my writing, what is it that is core about our identities that we carry with us from place to place from time to time,

DW: Which in a way goes back to what you explore in rememory? How often do you go back to Highlander to Doctor Who to Star Trek, you know, these foundational stories for you?

AM: There's another nonfiction book that my mom has talked about a lot called nothing remains the same about how it's useful to revisit the same stories, the same texts, the same movies at various points in our life, because we change over time, and we'll get different things out of revisiting it. I'm always terrified of that, especially with my favorite parts of Doctor Who that was so important to me when I was in 10th grade watching those Christopher Eccleston episodes. And now I'm like, I just watched it, and just a TV show now, and it's not that special to me anymore. What does that mean about me is that I lose something of myself. So far, I'm very relieved to say every time I re watch those episodes, I'm like, Oh, this is still perfect television. And I think that speaks to something that is core about me. There's something about that story that just resonates so deeply with me that it makes me feel like oh, there's a place for me in the universe.

DW: Well I mean, this is a story about a character that literally physically changes. It's baked into the premise of The Show, the doctor is forced to reckon with their ever changing identity. So this character is constantly dealing with the very question that you're always thinking about.

AM: We have to figure out what it is we hold on to and what we let go of in order to continue being part of the world around us and to continue having a community of people that we can sort of interact with because if you do stick with everything that defines you, if you can't let go of anything, that makes you obsolete. And that scares me.

David Wappel