I began to write more seriously after seeing that movie. I began to experiment, trying and fumbling with my novice voice to try and say something, anything in a narrative form.
My throat is hung like a horse. My gigantic tonsils are strep magnets and they often conspire to knock me out for a week at a time. When I was thirteen I got my umpteenth case of strep, which kept me home for a week. Going stir crazy, I went down to my father's computer and began writing. I wrote a two page essay drawing a parallel between my Cesarean-section birth and a scene from Friday the 13th. Subsequent chapters detailed more events in my life and those in it: my parents, my sister, my first time eating a non-Kosher meal, my first experience with homophobic discrimination, and so on. After a few days I had a dozen chapters. When I got back to school I kept writing, using study hall time to work. I had been absent from my biology class for months since I was terrified of female authority figures, so I kept skipping the class and stayed in study hall to write. I was still emulating some of my favorite writers, namely Stephen King and Dave Barry. But slowly I was learning how to say what I wanted and how I wanted to say it. I wrote a three act play and inserted it into the book. I wrote about how I perceived the world around me and what I felt about what society was doing to me. When I came up for air I was fourteen and had a two hundred and fifty page manuscript.
That semester I was taking a creative writing class. On a whim (more likely not doing the homework) I turned in the first chapter of my book as an assignment.
My high school had two magnet programs; science and math and a humanities program. I was in the latter, which included advanced courses in literature, social sciences, and television production/media studies. I always had my friends both in the program and out read my work. I've always enjoyed shock value and I happily catered to the bizarre and often obscene senses of humor of myself and my friends. Mostly, I got off entertaining people with my writing. Twice before my writing had incensed the faculty because it was, at times, ludicrously libelous material. While no one really believed the English teacher was carrying Satan's love child it was certainly not a nice thing for me to put in my Christmas card. I liked pissing people off because it meant that first, they were reading and listening, and second that they were reacting to something I wrote.
Soon after I turned in my chapter I was called into the principal's office. I was informed that a uniform ban of all my writing was being instituted. I could not show anyone on campus my writing and all material prepared for classes was to be handed directly to the faculty. When I asked why this was happening I was told Kafka-esque "you know exactly why." I didn't. At the time I had no idea just how far I had pushed these people. The creative writing teacher had read my chapter and thought I was writing a rape scene. She freaked out and blew the whistle to the administration. This, in conjunction with my other two offenses caused the principal to ban my writing. I went to my social studies teacher for help and coincidentally, a journalist was present doing a puff piece on the magnet program. She heard what had happened to me and jumped on the story.
I was then informed that the school was launching an assault against me by way of full evaluations of my academic career and my mental capabilities. My guidance counselor was very little help, making it sound as if grand inquisitions were a regular activity.
Here's a tip: don't put a Jewish boy with a complex about his mother in a small room with eight authoritative women charged with criticizing and deconstructing his motivations. You may not get an accurate emotional barometer. At best you can hope the kid doesn't wet himself.
The story broke front page on the Montgomery County Journal. People started talking. I was invited to go on a radio talk show. I got nothing but support from the Washington D.C. commuter audience. I also got a letter from the ACLU offering assistance.
After a letter from the ACLU and a whole shitload of letters of protest from parents, citizens, and students the principal recanted his ban and released a statement denying the whole affair. I didn't win, but the matter was settled and went away. I got to enjoy my local celebrity status until I suffered an emotional collapse a few weeks later.
My father's criticism of the opening chapter stayed with me. He said the worst you could say about the piece was that it wasn't very well written. He perfectly he summarized that situation. While people were busy either defending me or attacking me, no one simply said that I was a young writer who could use a good mentor to develop my craft. Eventually I realized that I still had a lot to learn if I was going to be a professional writer. I needed to communicate effectively, learn more about who I was, and equip myself with better tools with which to both dissect and analyze the world around me.
In the middle of the whole ban affair I began to vomit daily. Doctors who rehydrated me at the hospital didn't know why. After a month, my father was told that I probably needed a therapist and not a dietician.
I entered therapy twice a week. I realized some of the reasons I had been miserable, even amidst the remarkable turn of events that had sprung up. I hated my life; it was out of my control. My family was insane, my scholastic career was in the toilet, and I had no peers that I could socialize with on an intimate level. (All of my friends were older, and therefore graduating high school and leaving.) I was frustrated and stretched thin, I was puking because if I couldn't get out of my life, at least my lunch could. The psychiatrist I saw helped me out of this pit. He gave me exceptional tools that I desperately needed to deal with my world, and he encouraged me to look for ways out. He suggested that even though I had skipped a grade in elementary school, and was at a "gifted" school, perhaps it still wasn't enough of a challenge. He suggested applying for college.
My sister's guidance counselor had heard me on the radio and knew of an early entrance college that was specifically designed for teenagers who were getting obliterated and lost in high school. With the support of my shrink, father, and stepmother (girlfriend at the time), I began the application process.
I barely remember the rest of tenth grade, but it didn't matter because I never went back to high school. I entered Simon's Rock College of Bard, and moved to western Massachusetts.
Over the next several years I learned that I was nowhere near as smart as I thought I was, that we'd up in some way or another and there is no such thing as normal, and perhaps most importantly I was encouraged to express myself emotionally and thoughtfully. After dazzling people with shock value to cover up a lack of skill, I finally started to find my real voice and discovered that I had something original to say. That unique voice combined with a thrill of shock value has come to define my fiction.
I lived in London for my junior year of college. I left for the UK just a few weeks after a student bought a rifle and killed a student, a teacher, and wounded four others at Simon's Rock. This was in 1992, again affirming that the Simon's Rock community gets a head start on everything. I was working in Washington, D.C. at the time, saving money to go abroad when it happened. I was detached from my community, unable to grieve fully before jumping on a plane and being thrust into a totally strange environment. The student who was killed was a friend, Galen Gibson. We spent many evenings working as sound engineers together for performances and shows. We would wrap cable while discussing the universe and our relationship to cheese. Galen's father wrote a book after the shootings, Gone Boy, which detailed his and his family's reactions to the loss of Galen and the violent manner in which it occurred. Gregory Gibson talks with the studnets, with gun owners, and even with the family of the boy who committed the murders in a touching and poingnant way. Gregory Gibson's story is from a man who was compelled to find his voice, when no one could give him answers.
Due to financial reasons I had to leave college a semester before I was to start on my senior thesis. I moved back to Washington D.C. with my father and stepmother and worked my ass off to earn the money needed to move to Los Angeles.
I started working in computer sales because the money was good and I had a strange knack for how the stupid putty bastards worked. I also knew how to take complicated things and have a non-technical person understand them. I had the ability to find common ground with people and the ability to make emotions and thoughts clear to someone. The biggest cause of arguments between couples? Miscommunication of feelings. My gift of interpretation originated from never wanting to be misunderstood again the way I was as a teenager. I sold computers using metaphors and analogies. I made emotional connections for people and I helped them through the insanity that is the modern age. I developed relationships with customers to the point where they would refer me to all of their friends, and they wouldn't talk to a single other soul in the store. Without following any corporate sales strategy, I was consistently the top salesman in the store and I felt that I never had to sacrifice my integrity doing it.
I discovered that I was using my writing skills to be a Renaissance geek. A therapist of technology. I had enough money to move to Los Angeles in April of 1994.
It took me a year to write my first screenplay. Having left before my senior thesis I was lost when it came to constructing a long format work. I had to go it alone, learn a new medium, as well as create three dimensional charactrs that created believable plot. My first draft of Not a Love Story, was so autobiographical that it hurt to write it, and yet was also a cathartic process that was desperately clawing its way out. I went back and re-read the piece and realized that although I had successfully put my demons out on paper it didn't make a good movie. Five drafts later it reached a point where it operates independently as a story with characters that sound like echoes of my past intermingled with exciting story and character development. I learned how to write from the heart and cloak my truths in a fictional narrative.
I recognize how much I have to learn and how much there is for me to know. I'm still growing as a person and as a writer. I'm still looking for new ways to reach people. To write something that speaks to someone, something that transcends a narrative style and speaks a common truth about being human is the ultimate goal. I do it with humor, shock, psuedoscience, and a hell of a lot of bullshit.