FSB Author Article
Writing with Four Hands
By Logan and Noah
Miller,
Authors of Either You're in or You're in the Way: Two
Brothers, Twelve Months, and One Filmmaking Hell-Ride to Keep a
Promise to Their Father
When shooting a movie, every faculty is humming at its highest frequency. You don't sleep. It's intoxicating. You're operating on the edge of delirium and grandiose promises of immortality. You think that if you do everything right the gift of the gods is attainable. And then it ends. And there you are each morning. Alone again.
We were left with an emotional hangover
after we finished directing "Touching Home," a movie about
us and our father. Less than a year earlier our father had passed
away in jail. On that day, we had made a vow to him that we would
make our movie -- and we had just realized that commitment. We were
supposed to be happy now. But we were miserable. For the last 350
days all our thoughts had been on the mission, the team of people we
were working with. Now our thoughts were focused inward and it was a
tough place to be.
But the torment wasn't enough . . .
So we decided to dive into another long-shot mission: Write a book about our movie making hell-ride.
Where would we find the time? After all, we were still making the movie -- post-production, editing. We searched for days. And then found it in the sleeping patterns of our editor, Academy Award nominee Robert Dalva.
You see, Robert is a night man. Not a party man, just a guy that goes to bed late. We are morning men -- we go to bed early and rise early, like man before electricity. Robert showed up at our house each day at 11am, where we were cutting picture downstairs. This gave us several hours to write each morning before he showed up.
And we write with four hands, which sometimes takes twice as long.
One man types
while the other writes freehand. Then we blend it. We only have one
computer so space and time are limited. Logan is the typer and Noah
is the hand writer. And it's never pretty. One bro furiously smashing
plastic squares, the other furiously carving ink onto paper. Later,
the two are brought together in a clash of abusive language, each
brother claiming the other is bipolar, illegitimate, the bastard son
of an entire city. That their mother sang lullabies to one and
terrible songs to the other. That his diaper was rarely changed and
it ruined his brain. That he has written absolute tripe. That it
belongs in the trash heap of failed street poets. We yell and scream.
We throw chairs and hot cups of coffee. Punch holes in the sheet rock
. . . And somehow, before Robert arrived, we had embedded words into
the memory of our computer.
Writing the book brought back the
excitement, allowed us to relive the boom and noise, the chaos and
uncertainty. It unleashed the dopamine gush, washed the drug over the
brain, gave us another goal.
We started
writing in mid-April 2007 and had an ugly draft by October. We cut
through it with a chainsaw and by February 2008 it was prettier and
ready to product test. We gave the draft to a few trusted friends,
one of them being National Bestselling author, Tess Uriza Holthe.
Tess and the crew liked the manuscript -- and they are a very tough
bunch. Tess gave the manuscript to her agent, Mary Ann Naples. It was
an unpleasant week, the mental sauna -- the self-inflicted
victimization that all writers suffer when waiting to hear what an
agent thinks of their work. It gives you the stomach jungle; hot
rivers, chimps, and hairy insects howling in your gut. Then Mary Ann
called and said that she really liked our manuscript and our
temperature left the tropics. She gave us some notes, we went back
into the manuscript, smoothed out some things, and then it was ready
to send to publishers.
Matthew Benjamin, an editor at Collins
Publishing Group, read our manuscript the morning it was sent out and
then tossed it up the ladder to the President of Collins, Steven
Ross, who took it home that night. The following day they made us an
offer -- and we took it. They were extremely enthusiastic about our
book and we were equally enthusiastic about being paid. It had taken
us nearly ten years of writing diligently, working one mindless job
after another, to finally get a paycheck for mental work. It was time
to move on from Top Ramen. Of course, we'll revisit the noodle
delicacy, but out of choice, rather than necessity.
So we
signed the contract with Collins and began working with Matthew on
turning the book into something the entire world would appreciate --
another delusion. And now we're done. We wrote the Acknowledgments
last week.
It was our intention to
make a movie, not write a book. By accident, we did both.
And
now we're here. Wherever that is. Somewhere between obscurity and the
rocket ride.
©2009 Logan and Noah Miller, authors of
Either
You're in or You're in the Way: Two Brothers, Twelve Months, and One
Filmmaking Hell-Ride to Keep a Promise to Their Father
Author Bio
Logan and Noah Miller, identical twins raised as roofers
in northern California, dreamed of
being baseball stars. When that dream failed, they found professional
success as bingo callers. Always staying together, the brothers were
briefly suckered into the world of modeling, somehow avoided the
circus, and finally with seventeen credit cards, pursued a career in
filmmaking. In 2006, the brothers were awarded the Panavision New
Filmmaker Grant, and their screenwriting, directorial, and acting debut
Touching Home premiered at the San Francisco International Film
Festival in 2008. They live in northern California and hold no degrees.
For more information on the book please visit http://www.inorintheway.com/