Breaking the Tether: My Writer’s Journey

I’d like to tell you the story of a young boy named Wylie Sowden.

The beginning of the story

Wylie was brought into the world on a cold October morning — a scraggly-haired, wimpish boy, full of innocence, promise, and curiosity. He was an artist to his core with an imagination to move mountains. He had a good heart. Back then, he couldn’t have known how much he was about to suffer.

When Wylie is 16, his brother, Michael, drowns off the coast of Marin County. Devastated, Wylie convinces himself that he was responsible for it. He was there when it happened. He could have done something, but he was too afraid. The guilt swallows him whole. In his grief, Wylie becomes self-destructive. He sacrifices his own happiness for the sake of repentance, leading him into several perilous scenarios…

One day, Wylie wakes up to find himself stranded in an abandoned parking garage he doesn’t recognize — a mysterious voice in his head telling him to complete various tasks… Wait. No, scratch that. Way too heady.

(Image courtesy of Two Dreamers via Pexels)

One day, Wylie wakes up with the ability to blink people out of existence with his eyes. Well, how does that remotely relate to anything?

One day, Wylie wakes up tied to a chair in a basement, slowly uncovering a tight-knit conspiracy between a family of mafia brothers, a shapeshifting reporter, and a psychopathic casino owner. WHO are all these CHARACTERS?

One day, Wylie wakes up. Yep. In juvenile detention. Sure. He confronts embodied representations of the five stages of – Yeah, no, absolutely not.

One day… Wylie wakes up… and Michael returns as an amorphous, faceless ghost, attached to Wylie’s hip by a tether. Hey… A ghostly, incorporeal tether… That could work. How better to show off Wylie’s unending guilt and the bond between brothers than a literal representation of said bond? A tether.

Tethered to indecision

(Image courtesy of Reafon Gates via Pexels)

I had 10 months to write the screenplay for “Tether” in the year I completed my Master’s degree. I had about fifteen, sixteen, seventeen different narratives, squashed into a turmoil of indecision, fighting for attention. My first draft was completed two weeks before the final submission deadline. That’s… insane.

Wylie and Michael had existed from the beginning. The brotherly relationship and the themes of grief and acceptance were at its core. Still, I found myself unable to bring a single draft to completion, uncertainty eating away the months like wildfire. To this day, I’ve wondered how this happened. Did I dislike the ideas I was creating? Hardly. Did I doubt they would make a good story? Not necessarily. On reflection, my indecision was spurned by something entirely different.

From the outset of any scriptwriting degree, you will be taught about the three-act structure and all its variations. The hero’s journey, the relationships between archetypes, the importance of fatal flaws, wants and needs, genre conventions, plotting, pace, and so on. The so-called “master tools” of storytelling — the structure.

I urge you to disregard all these things. Absorb them, internalize them. Discard them.

Structure and flow fighting for attention

You may often hear the first pass of a script referred to as the “vomit draft.” A writer is encouraged to write continuously, effectively vomiting their ideas onto the page. Get their unrefined marble on the plinth before they start to carve it, so to speak. While this sounds good on paper, the execution can be daunting and there’s a reason for that:

Structure interrupts the flow.

Of course, structure is vital, especially later on in the process. It must be introduced to refine a story. But in the early stages, it’s a serious roadblock that threatens individuality, especially for creatives. Any official scriptwriting resource will teach you to write “properly,” enforcing a systematic standard for what makes a “good” story. The inciting incident must happen by page 10, and the turning point by page 30. We must know all our major characters and their motivations before disrupting the equilibrium. The protagonist must confront their flaws and choose values over desires, yadda yadda yadda. All these techniques are tried and tested. They work. They’re commercial. Surely they will aid a writer looking to craft their first smash hit?

Let go for the first draft

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: any idea that you propose for a project is highly unlikely to translate into a final product. Never get too attached to ideas. In the end, I was too attached to Wylie. He had two ghosts haunting him: Michael, tethered to his hip, pulling him around, fueling his pain, and then me… tethered to his hip, pulling him around, fueling his pain. I determined that his journey had to make sense and have merit when a plethora of narratives presented themselves as alternatives. Any one of these ideas could have provided a diving board into a different conflict, a different protagonist, a different world.

I didn’t finish a single one of them.

I couldn’t make them fit inside the structural conventions I was being fed throughout the course. I ruled them out, thinking they were too conceptual, too convoluted. I was making excuses for starting over. I thought that I was making efficient decisions for the merit of the story.

In reality, the journey of bringing a vomit draft to completion will reveal what your story is meant to be. You must allow yourself to fail so that ideas can evolve and change.

This is not exclusive to screenwriting. Novelists, playwrights, poets, comedians, actors, artists, dancers — all creatives are bound by the conventions of structure. A level of detachment is healthy and inspiring in the early stages of emerging work.

The discipline of imperfection

Any writer worth their salt should practice a discipline of imperfection. Get comfortable with terrible writing. Develop fully drawn characters that are destined for the chopping block. Build wonders and erect dreams, knowing they’ll come crashing down. A good friend of mine once said that “there’s no good writing, only rewriting” and this could not be more fundamental. Your project will always be improving but a full page is more motivating than a blank one.

Never let the idea of the best be the enemy of the better.

Finally, an ending

Wylie’s story ends on the beach where it began, confronting the site of Michael’s death. Still tethered to his brother’s ghost, Wylie strides into the waves and imagines one of his drawings descending from the sky – a life-size illustration of Voyager 1. He knows that Michael’s greatest love was space. The idea of exploring the cosmos. Now, he can give Michael a chance. The ghost boards the spacecraft, soaring up into the stars. The tether pulls tighter and tighter until finally… it snaps.

Untethered

I cried, writing those final scenes. The moment of breaking the tether was very meaningful to me. It was a form of acceptance, much like Wylie’s. I had concluded a project of massive scale while still acknowledging and accepting its imperfections, wishing goodbye to ideas abandoned along the way. Finally, I knew that Wylie had a form of happiness. 

After everything that I’d put him through, he deserved that.

He deserved an ending.

(Image courtesy of Seymasungr via Pexels)

The writer’s journey is different for everyone. Some prefer to plot every minute detail before setting pen to paper. Others prefer to dive in headfirst, improvise, and let the words unleash themselves. Inevitably, structure must be enforced in the end. But never shy away from chaos. Leave yourself room for wonder. Shut off the conscious brain, if just for a moment, for I firmly believe that everyone has a meaningful story to reveal.

You just might not be aware of it.