Talking as Fast as I Can

  I’ll just have to make it work.

  I was in Atlanta, and it was the night before we were about to start filming the movie Middle School, based on the books by James Patterson and Chris Tebbetts. At the cast dinner, I was thrillingly and frighteningly seated next to James Patterson himself—the author of countless thrillers, epic franchises that became Hollywood blockbusters, and a surprising number of children’s books. So I couldn’t help but ask him the question he’s probably been asked a million times: “How do you do it?”

  He turned to me and said, “Keep going, keep going, keep going.”

  Whoa. That pretty much says it all, I guess.

  One day in 2011, I was sitting in my trailer after finishing a day of work on Parenthood. I had filmed a few scenes that morning, but we’d gotten through them fairly quickly. I’d already worked out that day, spoken to my dad, answered some emails, and had lunch. It was too early to start making dinner, and I didn’t quite feel like going home yet. I realized that for the first time in what felt like years, I had something I almost never had: extra time on my hands. When I was in high school and college, there were always a million homework assignments due, projects I needed to work on, plays and musicals to rehearse. After school, out in the real world, there was also always something hanging over my head: making enough money to pay the rent, pounding the pavement all over New York, and, later, driving all over Los Angeles, trying to get people to hire me, trying to land somewhere even a little bit permanent so that I didn’t wake up every morning with a pit in my stomach, wondering where my next paycheck was coming from. When I finally did land somewhere, on Gilmore Girls, there was hardly time to notice. The years I spent there were packed full: dialogue to memorize, long hours of filming, and all that went into publicizing the show. During the summers between seasons of the show, I hadn’t wanted to rest either. I did movies and plays whenever I could, anxious to keep the momentum up. Keep going, keep going, keep going.

  So that day in my Parenthood trailer, the realization that I had free time was an odd feeling, and an unfamiliar one. And there was something else too. For a moment I couldn’t pin it down. It was almost as if someone else was in the room. Finally it came to me. It was a…voice, I guess? When it finally spoke, it asked me something unexpected.

  Did you, um, make it? the voice whispered, surprised.

  As a working actor, you’re always being asked when it was that you finally knew you’d “made it.” Most actors I know, myself included, respond with something resembling “never.” Acting is such a precarious profession that most of us wisely never relax, never stop watching our backs, never feel we have true job security. Even if the evidence is to the contrary, most of us feel we aren’t yet safe. If necessary, I could pick up a tray tomorrow and take your order—I remember those years like no time has passed. I never take this career for granted. There are far more actors who worked for a while and disappeared than there are actors who’ve stuck around for decades.

  So when I tell you that a whispery voice in my ear asked me if I’d “made it,” I don’t at all mean in the red-carpet interviewer sense. I don’t mean it as in I saw my face on the side of a bus, or I won an award, or I just bought my fourth Ferrari. And it was then I knew I’d made it! I mean it in a subtler sense. The voice suggested that maybe the time had come to accept that I didn’t have to wake up every day with ulcer-inducing terror over where my next meal was coming from. Again, this was in 2011. I’d been supporting myself steadily as an actor since 1996, and the idea that maybe this was going to work out after all was occurring to me for the very first time. Actors: how therapists stay in business!

  I mean, what was I thinking back then, when I decided to go into acting? Really, who did I think I was? Show business? Who does that? Starting out, I hadn’t known anyone with even the vaguest connection to this mysterious world.

  In high school, I had the lead in the musical my junior year (You remember Hello, Dolly!) but didn’t get the lead my senior year, and I remember thinking, I’ve peaked. It’s all over. So I wondered what had kept me going after that, through thousands of rejections and with no way of knowing I’d be sitting in a trailer on the Universal lot one day twenty years later with my bills relatively paid and time on my hands.

  I pictured the brownstone in Brooklyn I’d lived in after grad school with Kathy, my best friend from college. I remembered some of the jobs I’d taken to make ends meet: catering and waitressing and working as a tutor, answering phones as a temp and trying to sell CPR lessons over the phone. I kept all my appointments in a Filofax day planner, pagers were considered novel technology, and Times Square was still full of X-rated movies. Things had changed so much since then. I had changed so much. Far from being asked about “making it,” I’d found that the question that came up most often back then was some version of “When will you be giving this ridiculous pipe dream up?” Back then, I’d asked myself this with alarming frequency as well. When you have no credits on your résumé, there’s no proof yet one way or the other. There’s no way to know if the time you’re spending will someday prove to be time you spent paying your dues or time you spent fooling yourself.

  While I didn’t want to write about myself exactly, I wondered if maybe a story of dreaming big, growing up, and forging a career was sort of universal. I hadn’t given myself a time limit as an actor, but others I know did, and it occurred to me that might create a ticking clock that would help structure the story. I opened a Word document and started a…what? I didn’t even know what it was yet.

  It turned out to be a novel. Someday, Someday, Maybe is about a young girl named Franny Banks who comes to New York City to follow her dream of becoming an actress. Aided by the pages of her Filofax date book, we follow a year in her life (sort of like A Year in the Life!), at the end of which she’s vowed to give up and move back home if she doesn’t find success. Set in the 1990s, it takes place in a New York City that has changed a great deal since then. The first thing I wrote was an anxiety dream that Franny has the night before an audition. It ended up also being one of the first things I cut. But over the next few weeks, I just kept going, kept going, kept going. It was a thrilling novelty to have something I could work on just by myself. I didn’t need a set or a script or another actor. I loved my main character, Franny, of course, but it was just as fun to create the others. My friend Kathy was sort of the inspiration for Jane, but then Jane started taking on a life of her own. James Franklin, a bad-boy type whom Franny falls for, wasn’t based on anyone in particular. He was inspired by some of the very actor-y actors I’ve known and have always been intrigued by, the ones who seem like they’re never not playing the character of “extremely deep artiste.” Barney Sparks, Franny’s first agent, was nothing like any agent I ever had. I just liked the idea of her starting out with someone who’d been in the business a long time and who spoke in clichés that were also sincerely heartfelt. So while my original inspiration was personal, it wasn’t really “about” me. Even if I’d wanted to use more details from my life at the time, I didn’t keep a diary and my memory isn’t that good. And when I started working on it, I had no particular goal in mind. It wasn’t a calculated play to cash in on some backstory of mine. I was just enjoying trying something new that was creative, something that allowed me to connect with another time and place.

  In fact, I went out of my way to make the characters not resemble anyone from my real life. I would never want the real people I work with to feel parodied or exploited. It’s one of the things that slowed me down considerably on my second novel (more on that in a moment). I’d think, oh, a fun character would be an outspoken publicist who’s always sending Franny to D-list events in order to “get seen.” But then I don’t want anyone to assume I’m parodying the publicist I’m working with, who’s a man, so maybe I’ll change the publicist to a woman. But, I don’t want anyone to think I’m making fun of that one female publicist…You see the problem.

  The first hundred pages just spille
d out. They were a pleasure and a breeze, and to date that’s the last time writing anything has ever come so easily. One day I mentioned to my agent that I’d been working on something, just for fun, and he asked me to send it to him, which I did, with apologies. It was very rough, I told him. I hadn’t even proofread it for typos, I told him. But he read my scrappy pages and, without telling me, forwarded them to one of the best and best-known book agents at ICM and in the galaxy, Esther Newberg.

  I’d only met Esther once, years before. Since then I’ve come to know her as an excellent dinner date and raconteur. Esther is smart, stylish, and a devoted Red Sox fan. But what I knew about her then was mostly that she hailed from the No Bullshit School of Agenting. (This should be an actual school—someone call Shark Tank!) Many agents have attended its sister campus, the Amazing Amazing School, a related but very different institution where even the three lines you had on that Friday night sitcom were so impressive they should earn you an Emmy. These agents are pleasant to deal with, but their comments require some translation on your part. Over time, you learn that “you’re amazing” means you’re just okay, “the ratings are great” means your show is getting cancelled, and “you look fantastic” means you’ve gained weight. I’ll write it all up for you in another helpful chart! No Bullshit is by far my favorite school.

  My conversation with Esther went something like this:

  ESTHER: I read your pages.

  ME: Oh, wow, really? They’re not even—

  ESTHER: I can get you a lot of money if I sell this book to certain people.

  ME: Are you kidding? That’s great! I mean, I wasn’t even doing it for the—

  ESTHER: But I don’t want to sell it to those people.

  ME: Oh, no? Uh, okay.

  ESTHER: Because you know what else these people would buy from you?

  ME: No, I don’t—

  ESTHER: Monkey doodles.

  ME: Monkey…?

  ESTHER: Yes. From you, they’d buy a book of monkey crayon doodles. They’d buy a cookbook covering just nuts. They’d buy the confessions of your split ends. And you know why?

  ME: Um, no…

  ESTHER: The Today show. [Hi, Tamryn!]

  ME: The Today show? [Hi, Willie!]

  ESTHER: The Today show. [Hi, Carson! Filling in again, Jenna?] You can get booked as a guest on the Today show. [Hi, Al!] You can get a spot on Ellen. Books are hard to sell, and you have these ways to promote a book, and that’s the main reason these certain people would buy your book. I don’t want to sell this book to those people.

  ME (deflated): Oh, okay. Makes sense, I guess. Well, thanks anyway, I really appre—

  ESTHER (mysteriously): But there are other people.

  ME: Other…?

  ESTHER: Well, there are three. Three other people.

  ME: In all of publishing?

  ESTHER: Three people—editors, I mean—whom I would trust with this. Three people who would only take it on because they believed in you and the book. But if one of them doesn’t take it, I think we should wait. Unless you want me to call the monkey doodle people…

  ME: No, no. I wasn’t even—I was just sitting in my trailer one day and—

  ESTHER: Well, then, we’ll see what the people say.

  ME: Okay! Let me just clean up the pages first, and—

  ESTHER: I already sent the pages to the people.

  ME: You already—

  ESTHER: I’ll let you know. (Click.)

  Suddenly my solo trailer project had become a new way in which I’d potentially set myself up for more rejection. Suddenly I was waiting to see if I’d be accepted into another competitive world where people I’d never met would have opinions about my work. Why didn’t I pick up knitting? Why didn’t I take a sailing class instead? Pottery? Why was I torturing myself? I felt nervous and neurotic. Would I be accepted? Maybe we should call the monkey doodle people? After all, an entire cookbook of nut recipes wasn’t a terrible idea. And maybe my split ends would be healed if only they had the chance to speak out!

  Writers: how therapists buy summer homes.

  I don’t remember if all three editors were interested. (Two were. I think three? Let’s say they all were. Who can stop me? It’s my book—I’m drunk with power!) But the proposal letter sent by my current editor, Jennifer E. Smith, jumped out at me, and made her the clear choice.

  Jen is a talented YA author. She’s from Chicago. She talks very fast. When Jen and I first met in person, I told her the story of writing my senior thesis as an English major in college. I confessed that I turned it in late after writing it directly in a word processor and correcting my typos and mistakes with Wite-Out. I just barely scraped by, deadline-wise. Jen—who was also an English major—laughed but looked slightly spooked by this information. She admitted to me that she was so well organized in college that she finished her senior thesis two weeks early, but she lied about it and pretended to still be working up to the deadline because she didn’t want her friends to feel bad or think she was too much of a geek.

  She may have been concerned about my deadline issues, but I thought this made us the perfect match. Ever see a buddy movie where one guy is the ne’er-do-well loose cannon and the other guy is too? No? Exactly. What’s the fun of the ne’er-do-well loose cannon without the buttoned-up friend/brother/other cop who’s trying to ensure he stays within the law? I was the Eddie Murphy to her Nick Nolte! The Bruce Willis to her Sam Jackson! The Hooch to her Turner! Sorry—it seems I stopped going to the movies in 1989.

  The good news was that I’d been paired with an ideal partner. The bad news was that the minute I sold the book and it became an assignment with a deadline and people counting on me, I sort of froze up. This resulted in writing sessions where I stared at the blank computer screen with my heart thumping and a metallic taste in my mouth—my new definition of the boots of time marching all over me. To cope, I went down Google rabbit holes involving outdoor patio furniture and artisanal Korean pepper sauces. I’d write three lines, erase four, and look up which fish sauce to use when making nuoc cham. (Red Boat 40°N, 50°N if you can find it. Nuoc cham is a Vietnamese dipping sauce that calls for sambal oelek, an Indonesian chili paste, but I also sometimes use the Korean chili paste gochujang, and I find if you chop the ginger very fine you can—NOW DO YOU SEE WHY MY BOOK TOOK SO LONG? Also, the best time to buy patio furniture on sale is at the end of the summer or early fall. Spring is when they get you!)

  Jen has become a friend as well as an invaluable person in my work life. Sometimes she tells me I need to throw something out. Sometimes she tells me I need to dig deeper. But early on, the main challenge was simply getting me to fill up more pages. “Just give me something,” she’d say. “Don’t worry too much. If you hit a rough patch, skip over it. You can go back and make it perfect later, but first you need a draft. I can’t edit a blank page.” Eventually I learned that, in the beginning at least, it was better for me to be finished than to try to be perfect. I had to get out of my own way. It wasn’t that the voice in my head—the one telling me my pages weren’t good enough—went away, exactly. I just didn’t let it stop me. An important tool against self-doubt is just to ignore it. Forge ahead anyway. Just keep going, keep going, keep going.

  I gave myself the goal of writing one thousand words a day. Sometimes I hit it, sometimes not. I had no routine—I wrote at work between scenes, at the kitchen table, on airplanes. My process was nonlinear and often chaotic. If I hit a scene or a plot point that stumped me, I’d put the missing scene in bold so I would remember to come back to it later: Dan wedding scene to come. Sometimes I didn’t even know what the missing scene might be: Franny says blah blah something here. Talk about medical, medical!

  I was filling every free minute, working harder than I had in years. So it was surprising that when I told people I was writing a novel, the two questions I got most often were “Is anyone helping you?” and “Are you doing that all by yourself?” You know, the same questions male authors get aske
d! I guess there is a tradition of memoirs sometimes being ghostwritten. (Chuck—make sure this part really seems like I wrote it. And remind me to delete this note!) But fiction? There seemed to be some bias I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  The book was far from perfect, but eventually it was done. Letting go of it was the strangest thing. I’d feel happy with a passage one week, but a week later I’d find things about it I wanted to change. I realized that the practice of writing the book had actually, slowly and over time, made me a better writer. So I’d see parts that I’d done months back and realize I could now do better. Which meant I wanted to keep revising. But when does the revising end? I’d committed to a publishing date, for one thing, but even if I hadn’t, at some point you have to let it go or it isn’t a book for sale, it’s a pile of papers on your desk. The actor equivalent of this would be to film a scene, then watch it and think, why’d I do that with my hands? That shirt isn’t flattering, I’m not as connected as I could be—let’s go back and do it again. You could keep improving that one scene over and over, but the movie would never get made. “I’m going to pull this out of your hands now,” Jen finally said.

  Promoting the book was a new experience too. I did some signings at bookstores and got to be interviewed onstage by Anna Quindlen, one of my favorite authors. I was asked to (forced to) join Twitter, which I dreaded at first, but have come to (mostly) enjoy. I figured doing interviews would be the least revelatory experience, since I was used to those. But in subtle ways, I found the same “Who helped you?” tone was back once again.

  The biggest example of this was an interview I did with a national newspaper. For starters, the journalist came to the interview a bit gruff. He didn’t seem particularly familiar with my work or generally psyched to be there. It was a lunch interview, and he seemed annoyed at having to order something. I decided that I’d win him over with my sparkling personality! This is a very bad way to start an interview. You are not there to entertain like a clown at a kid’s birthday party. Actually, maybe that’s not a bad analogy. This party was about to turn a little scary and maybe even end in tears.