Introducing Patrick Lee, Serial Resolver

Today the Pens are thrilled to be hosting Patrick Lee, the new year's hot new debut thriller writer.

Lee Child calls THE BREACH "Audacious and terrifying-- and uncannily believable."

Patrick says that since THE BREACH landed on the bookshelves only a few days ago, he's still too geeked about it to do much of anything productive, with the obvious exception of guest-blogging. Learn more about Patrick and his book here.






New Decade's Day

by Patrick Lee

This week's topic fits me pretty well; I make a lot of resolutions. Actually, I should amend that: what I really do is make the same resolution, for years on end, until it comes true. So I'm a... serial resolution maker? Serial resolver. There you go.

To avoid starting the decade on a depressing note, I'll skip over the resolution I made in vain all through high-school. Hey, I had braces. And glasses. And I hadn't filled out yet.

So let's start with New Year's Day in 1995. Eighteen years old, just kicking around the idea of trying to be a screenwriter. My resolution that year was straightforward, if presumptuous: sell a screenplay.

I jumped into it with an idea I thought had amazing potential. I couldn't believe no one had done it yet. There'd been all kinds of violent movies about aliens and zombies and werewolves and vampires, but there was something obvious missing from the lineup:

Bigfoot.

Sure, there'd been movies featuring bigfeet (?) of one kind or another. Harry and the Hendersons, The Legend of Boggy Creek... and possibly a few others. (Given that Amazon.com didn't exist yet, and I wouldn't be online anyway until mid-1996, I lacked the ability to easily discover that, in fact, there were dozens of craptastic movies built on the premise of people getting killed by bigfoot.) It was too perfect to pass up. I rolled up my sleeves and got writing.

Long about August of that year I printed off my masterpiece, a 200-page brick of dot-matrix brilliance. I'd read somewhere that 110 pages was about right for a script, but as long as it was 200 pages of awesomeness, who would complain?

First crack in the armor: a friend read it and, after some awkward throat-clearing, offered two pieces of encouraging feedback. (1) "Typing up that many pages of anything is a pretty big accomplishment." (2) "I'll say this for it: a dark comedy about bigfoot is at least original."

New Year's resolution, 1996: sell a screenplay.

New Year's resolution, 1997: sell a screenplay.

New Year's resolution, 1998: sell a screenplay.

New Year's resolution, 1999: sell a screenplay.

The thing is, the one in 1999 actually came true. In fact it came true nineteen days after I made it, with a script I'd written over a year earlier and had been trying to sell ever since. I think, by that time, I'd developed a useful philosophy: there are only so many ways to screw something up, and after you exhaust enough of them, you stumble onto one of the ways to not screw it up.

Granted, this is not a workable philosophy for airline pilots or suspension bridge engineers. But it's not bad for writers.

Sadly, that first sold script never got made. So, New Year's resolution, 2000: sell another screenplay. Missed it that year.

New Year's resolution, 2001: sell another screenplay. That year I managed to get sale number two. But, as before, no greenlight. Aww.

You've probably noticed a pattern in my resolutions, by now. That pattern continued for a few years beyond 2001, but after a while things changed. In retrospect, they should've changed sooner. Maybe that's one of the drawbacks to resolve: it can keep you moving toward a certain goal, even if you don't necessarily want that goal anymore.

I love movies, no doubt about it. I really, really wanted every script to sell, and I would've given anything for either of the two I sold to go into production. But by the midpoint of this past decade, even as I felt like I had a better grasp on what made screenwriting work (I had ten years' worth of mistakes to learn from by then), I just couldn't help noticing a few things. Like the fact that I had hundreds of books, and only a couple dozen DVDs. Like the fact that, sometimes, just for fun, I'd write a first chapter or two of some hypothetical novel, and it would only take a few hours, and it would be surprisingly fun, and when I'd read that material a month later I'd still like it.

Hmm, the clues were all pointing somewhere. But where?

Then there was this: when I'd read an interview of a big-name screenwriter, or listen to one speaking on the audio commentary of a DVD, I always got the feeling that he or she loved the actual process of screenwriting, and not just the potential end result. Which was exactly the way I felt... about writing books. Not so much on scripts. (Admittedly, though, the end result with scripts is one hell of a tempting goal.)

So...

New Year's resolution, 2007: Write at least two novels. (For once I decided on a resolution that was entirely under my control.) Which I did. And please don't throw anything at me, but with the first book I got an agent (the deity-like Janet Reid), and with the second book I got a deal with HarperCollins. That book hit the stands three days ago. So it's possible that all those people saying "Do what you really enjoy" aren't just screwing with you.

New Year's resolution, 2010: Keep writing books. And eat fewer Doritos. I'll manage one of the two.