96: When Do You, Release The Kraken?

A little over Thirty years ago, I was fortunate enough to attend a Film and Screenwriting Course at the Aspen Writers Conference. The course was taught by Ira Wood, a Fiction Novelist who went to Hollywood to write a Screenplay for his best selling novel The Kitchen Man. He used two books by Syd Field, Screenplay, and The Screenwriter’s Workbook, as a course syllabus. I was immediately enamored to the course by the beginning quote. “Writing is a personal responsibility -- either you do it, or you don’t.” I didn’t know at the time just how prophetic that quote would become in my writing life. You see I chose the latter, not to write for many years. All the essentials were there for my writing success. I chose not to write. I wanted to write. I had the ability to attend the best writing classes the motivation to do so and to participate in the process. However, like many people have told me in my life, Al you are your own worst enemy. I let life get in my writing way. Oh yeah I dabbled with poems here, a fiction story there, I said things like, “Writing is just a hobby, it’s not what I do for my living!” No wonder writing has just been my hobby and has never become what I do for a living. I don’t need to have an Avalanche roll over me, to get the point. I guess unless you structure you life around your writing and not the opposite it will always be a hobby and not a living. Now that I have retired it is time to move forward with years of writing projects. Working on several long range projects. My short stories about my mentor will be woven into a novel about my early writing years and later years in Colorado and finish in Cortina, Italy. The location of the 2026 Winter Olympics, Milano Cortina.

Both Ira Wood and Syd Field have said, “A screenplay is s story told with pictures.” I have just decided to go back to the Film and Screenwriting notebooks pull out my screenplay about The sale of Arapahoe Basin to the Ralston Purina Corporation in 1978 and polish the opening act that I have already written and to finish the project. (I am not foolish enough to think it a simple task! You must Conquer it or it will forever Conquer you.)

 So Picture this, I feel like Poseidon in the new re-make movie Clash of the Titans and I’m the God of my own destiny and I’m getting ready to say, “Release the Kraken.” 

Albert Bianchine