Guest Post: When Your Only Weapon Is Inaction by Dennis Palumbo

Writer Dennis Palumbo gives quarantined writers permission and perspective amid COVID-19.

“One of the problems that is endemic to this situation is, we have an enemy, this virus, and the weapon we use against the enemy is inaction, just sitting in your house. I think that’s very hard on the psyche.”

With the COVID-19 pandemic in its third month in the US, Connect spoke to psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo about recurring themes in his therapy practice with writers who are under extended stay-at-home orders and grappling with an entertainment industry on indefinite pause.

For three decades, Palumbo has been a licensed psychotherapist for working writers and others in creative fields. To the therapy setting Palumbo brings his own experience as a sitcom writer, screenwriter, and, more recently, crime novelist (2018’s Head Wounds is the fifth installment in his Daniel Rinaldi series). Palumbo’s non-fiction book Writing from the Inside Out (2000) was an adaptation and expansion of his regular columns for Written By.

You’re both a therapist for other writers and a writer yourself. So how is your writing going?

Dennis Palumbo: I’m a little more desultory because, like anyone else, I feel some of the stress of the uncertainty of this. Plus, you know, dealing with deliveries and putting on my mask and gloves when I go to get the mail. It’s certainly having an effect on my patients. My own writing is going ok. I have patients who are writing up a storm and I have patients who can’t focus for more than ten minutes. Because they’re thinking about the pandemic, and especially if they have young children they’re doing home schooling or trying to keep them entertained. Plus, there’s the omnipresent media. I have patients who just cannot stop watching CNN. As this thing has gone on and on, one of the first things I’m recommending to people is to very much curtail their watching of the news.

It’s a slippery slope between staying informed and getting lost in it all.

Palumbo: Check it in the morning and then check it in the evening to make sure there hasn’t been an alien invasion or something. Other than that, I think one of the problems that is endemic to this situation is, we have an enemy, this virus, and the weapon we use against the enemy is inaction, just sitting in your house. I think that’s very hard on the psyche. We have a fight-or-flight mechanism. When someone throws a rock at you, you pick up a rock and throw it back, or else you run away. And we can’t run away, we have to stay in the house, and we can’t fight it. So I think our cortisol levels are always being elevated because we’re in a state where there’s no tool we can use against the virus, other than staying put. I think the body doesn’t like that. The psyche certainly doesn’t like it. So no matter how busy you are, either with your children or with your writing, this sense of impotence contributes to depression and anxiety. And then you add to that, there’s no end date. Most people don’t like uncertainty. One of the real problems with the quarantine is the uncertainty.

So much of anxiety is typically about what you invent in your mind, but COVID-19 is a very real external crisis. How does this affect the tenor and substance of your practice?

Palumbo: It’s sort of like a background hum that’s always there even if you’re not talking about it. The way most therapy sessions go, the first ten minutes the person talks about how they’re dealing with the pandemic, they had a good week, a bad week. But even if we then go into other issues after that, this is always there. People say, “Oh, well, if your patients are writers they’re all used to being alone in a house.” Well, 60% of them write for television, so they’re used to going to rooms, number one. And number two, they still want to be able to go out and have coffee or lunch with a friend. So it’s a palpable thing that invades everyone’s consciousness all the time.

And writers are like antenna. The raw materials of a writer’s life is their feelings and their ideas, and the meanings they give to their feelings and ideas. If it’s permeated by something from the outside, then you’re really going to be sensitive to it. The uncertainty around when the quarantine will end, as well as what life will look like in the future, exacerbates a person’s inclination toward either depression or anxiety. One of the hallmarks of depression is the belief that nothing you do will make you feel any better, and how you’re feeling now is how you’re always going to feel. Because there’s no end in sight, it reinforces those two aspects of depression.

So it’s ok to spend the entire session talking about the pandemic?

Palumbo: That 50 minutes belongs to you. A lot of people worry that their careers are going to get sputtered out and maybe not come back again. It’s the same fears that writers always have in a strike, particularly people who had something that was going. Look at the people whose pilots didn’t get made. You go from the elation of getting a pilot script greenlit to production, to a pandemic hits and no one’s making a pilot.

You mentioned that some of your patients are writing up a storm, and some aren’t. What about the added stress and guilt of, “Oh, I should be writing more right now.”

Palumbo: For many, many years in my practice, almost to a person, every writer says, “Boy if I had the time, I would write my personal novel, or that spec screenplay about Elizabeth the First.” Now they have the time, and nobody’s writing it. It just runs the gamut. There are people, like I said, who are writing up a storm. Some of them have to because they’re working in animation, and animation is rolling right along. But for other people, they’re having a hard time focusing.

I’m a therapist, not a writing coach. Whenever someone has an issue with their writing, whether it’s blocks or procrastination or a story point, to me it’s inexorably bound up in whatever their personal issues are. It’s much more important to look at the underlying issues, the meaning you give it.

What about practical advice in terms of creative work right now?

Palumbo: I do think you should have a structure. You should create a fake structure. The other thing is, and it’s really hard, but to stay in the present. Just do what you need to do on a Wednesday. I think if you start saying, “But I wonder, are we going to be able to leave our homes in September, I wonder if my kid’s school is going to open in September, I wonder when production’s going to start, what if it doesn’t start till January?” All that catastrophizing the future does is create anxiety. And I often suggest to my patients that, your feelings don’t predict the future. You can feel like, oh my god this is never going to end, but that doesn’t mean it’s never going to end. You can feel like, oh this is going to just put a nail in the coffin of my career. That’s a feeling. It predicts nothing. And in my 30 years of practice, I’ve had so many people sit on that couch and tell me, “Well, my career is over.” And two years later they have a show on the air.

None of our feelings predict anything. They’re just data on what it feels like to be us in that moment.

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Getting Your Story Straight: 3 Act Structure

Welcome to "Getting Your Story Straight" series on Instagram @storymerchant. 

What is the difference between “Something that happens” and a “scene.”

Many submissions from both novelists and screenwriters are filled with “non-conflicted” writing, passages in which “something happens” that is filled with emotion, description, and symbolism in which no conflict happens to change the character(s) and forward the story, from a dramatic point of view.

In professional storytelling, drama is all that matters—not just in general, but in each and every scene.

The “scene” is the unit of drama. What makes a scene different from an event, or “something that happens,” is that in a scene a conflict is introduced and/or resolved. It’s that simple. A scene has a well-defined beginning, middle, and end; the beginning’s purpose is to “set up” the conflict, the middle works through the conflict’s components or obstacles, and the end “resolves” the conflict and/or, in some cases, introduces the next conflict.

In Memoriam Umberto Eco

I met Umberto Eco just once, but it was enough to impress me with the awe reserved only for the most serious storytellers I’ve come in touch with over the years, like Carlos Fuentes and Eugene Ionesco. By sheer serendipity, our offices were adjacent at the University of Bologna, when I was Fulbright professor there. Still, I was surprised to hear from him after my review of The Name of the Rose in The Los Angeles Times appeared. He called it, “the best review I’ve read,” and republished it in his Essays on the Name of the Rose (Bompiani, 1985). May he rest in honor.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Hardcourt Brace Jovanovich 

here is a kind of novel that changes our mind, replaces our reality with its own. We live in a new world after we've read it. Umberto Eco, the celebrated Bolognese semiotican and Joyce scholar, brings us a new world in the tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Melville, Dostoevsky, Joyce himself, and Garcia-Marquez.

We recognize the author's claim--or disclaimer--in the prologue to his "terrible story of Adso of Melk": that it's a hasty translation of a lost transmittal copy, that he's uncertain about its value and about the need to publish it. He refuses to allow his reader to easily suspend disbelief because his purpose is to explore the relationship between belief and narrative.

Filled with the good-natured polyglot banter of the superfluosly learned, "The Name of the Rose" might be seen only as a effete "Canterbury Tales" except for tell-tale markings on the walls of its medieval monastic library, markings declaring that this records of those walls' destruction is itself a labyrinth in the library's image. We learn the markings, deconstructing the book as we read. We see how the labyrinth operates on more than one level-in our imitative act of finding our way in and out. Eco makes his intellectual riddles accessible by weaving them into an intriguing detective story. A series of grisly murders turns Brother William of Baskerville, and his assistant Adso (our narrator), into prior-day Sherlock Holmes and Watson.

William is friend of Occam, admirer of Bacon, devotee of Aristotle, and consumate practitioner of Thomistic analysis. Like Joyce's Dedalus, he studies the world's signs and cluse with eyes both open and closed; his vision is so exhaustive--literally and metaphorically--that he at one point sees through six eyes.

Through the course of their investigations of the abbey's crimes and its secret heresy, we're given the flavor of the waning Middle Ages in Southern Europe, the ephemeral unity of medieval thought under the Thomistic rule had long since been abandoned as a possibility, and Aquinas himself, suspected of having been a self-important windbag. Now "everything looked the same as everything else," and all morality is arbitrarily and universally metamorphosed.

If you had a romantic notion of the relative simplicity of the late Middle Ages, Eco modernizes your view. He paints a time of multiple popes and multiple anti-Christs, a time when a man would trade sexual favors for a book, when the papal palace in Avignon displaced "crucifixes where Christ is nailed by a single hand while the other touches a purse hanging from his belt, to indicate that he authorizes the use of money for religious ends..."

In a time of diminishing belief, all hands reach desperately from the encroaching shadows of doubt. There were monsters in the imagination in those days: "The cynocephali, who cannot say a word without barking... blemyae, born headless, with mouths in their bellies and eyes in their shoulders... and those whose soles are reversed so that, following them by their footprints, one arrives always at the place whence they came and never where they are going..."


No less marvelous, in the vanished monastery we find their counterparts in a guarded reliquare displaying "the tip of the spear that pierced the side of the Saviour!," "a yellowed shred of the tablecloth from the last supper," "a piece of the manger of Bethlehem," ..."a tibia of Saint Margaret," "a rib of Saint Sophia," "the chin of Saint Eobanus," "a tooth of the Baptist," "Moses' rod," "a tattered scrap of very fine lace from the Virgin Mary's wedding dress"--and much, much more.

Later, in Ados's dream during the "Dies Irae" of Terce, the holiness is comically transformed into "the tail of Saint Ubertina, the uterus of Saint Venantia, the neck of Saint Burgosina engrained like a goblet at the age of 12..." The narrator's dream itseld is one of the richest in 20th-Century literature, a mad comination of Fellini, Fuentes, Borges and Bosch. William's interpretation shows how his assistant's dream was a dream of books, a dream of dreams, of a past and future inextricably mixed in imagination--a triumph of intertextuality. And it provides the key to the mysterious and outrageous crimes they're investigating.

Criminal investigation and exploration of theology and the mentality of the era are interlaced with a comic explosiveness of language reminiscent of Rabelais, as when the semi-demented Salvatore fives Adso a recipe: "Facilis. You take the cheese before it is too antiquum, without too much salis..."

Eco's characters may verge on the dry, but the plot is as neat as Conan Doyle or Christie, with ironic undertow echoing Chesterton's Father Brown series.

The interplay between Adso and William like that of Quixote and Paza, involves us in the paradoxical mind of the times: a delicate but thorough mixture of rationalism and superstition. We prefer, by authorial design, Adso--even when his private opinions nudge against a heresy not yet born: "The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions."

Eco dances on the banks of allegory without drowning in its inane waters. As his characters wrangle over the question of whether Christ possessed property, the narrative offers chilling insight into mores that suggest those of our own time, when the Church of Rome, for all it ecumenicism and globetrotting Popes, still belies its own vow of poverty.

But the book's central dialogue is between men and books, and books and books, and only through the latter, men with men. We harbor the notiron of a preliterary world, where ideas have yet to be born and we commune directly with reality. William disillusions Adso of that concept, and Adso admits the lie: "Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, tha lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books... In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more distrubing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, and imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing... a treasure of secretes emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors."

When the labyrinth is unwoven we're not surprised that "the plan of the library reproduces the map of the world." When the crime itself is solved, the cause is not a contemporary murderer but... I won't spoil the the book for you. Suffice to hint that laughter and comedy move from the diabolic to the humanistic, that the name of the rose is a play of words.

A true investigation succeeds from a false pattern, and the plot to destroy comedy is succesful by accident. But the investigation's success is superficial. William's antagonist, Jorge of Burgos (foreshadow of Luis Borges), succeeds in repressing the book which might have undermined the stucture of all holiness. William accuses Jorge of being Satan: "The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is nevere seized by doubt."

A book like this seeks to replace the world with itself, and eventually does so, showing the reader that reality, except as vision, is already inaccessible; that only vision matter; that even before he began reading it can lead us to recite, with a Kempis, the great imitator: 'In omnibus requiem qaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.' " (In all things I have sought peace, and nowhere have I found it except in a corner with a book.)

Kenneth J. Atchity

Happy 80th Birthday Oscar... you are missed

To celebrate what would have been his 80th birthday, Oscar’s family and friends generously shared some wonderful photos of Oscar and his extended musical family taken over the six decades of his career. 

These photos will be included in Dan Donaghy's upcoming blog on Oscar’s music, VivaOscar.com. 

Listen to Oscar's music on Spotify here

How to Frame Your Story for Hollywood Webinar

With Story Merchant's Ken Atchity and Alinka Rutkowska and Andrew Dupy of Leaders Press. Listen here

Chapter 2 “Dealing with your Type-C Creative Mind” – What’s Going on In There⁠

Whether they ask the question aloud or not, people always want to know what makes a writer's mind work. 

For all storytellers—novelists, screenwriters, journalists, nonfiction writers, and children’s book writers.⁠⁠ 

If you'd like more details or enroll in one on one coaching to perfect your story visit  The Writer's Lifeline 

Ken’s Weekly Book Recommendation⁠

This week "Writing Treatments to Sell" by Ken Atchity and Chi-Li Wong  ⁠

As Hollywood insiders know, the first step in selling your story idea for film or television is preparing a treatment, the brief pitch that sells the concept to a busy producer or agent.  ⁠

This manual is a step by step guide to writing the perfect treatment, and to using it to perfect your dramatic art and market your work to entertainment buyers and gatekeepers.⁠

Available on Amazon

FORBES: Filmmaker Nicole Conn On Promoting Her New Film And Caring For A Child With Special Needs During COVID-19

Acclaimed filmmaker Nicole Conn has dedicated her career to increasing lesbian visibility in film. With her cult classic, Claire of the Moon, and films like Elena Undone and A Perfect Ending, she has racked up dozens of awards and built quite a following.

Right now, Conn is currently navigating the virtual promotion of her newest film while simultaneously prioritizing the safety of her son, Nicholas, who has special needs. Nicholas was born extremely premature, and his severe chronic lung disease makes him enormously susceptible to COVID-19.

“He cannot be exposed to this,” says Conn. As such, Nicholas’ 24/7 nursing rotation has been reduced from the usual seven nurses to only two who see no other patients. “We’re on a tight protocol around him,” Conn says. “He cannot be around anyone but me, my daughter, and these nurses.”

Despite these challenges, Conn also continues to promote her new film honoring Nicholas. More Beautiful For Having Been Broken, released in April, is the story of a woman who escapes from her problems to a small town, where she bonds with Freddie, a boy with special needs, and his mother. Freddie has a rare disease called Fanconi Anemia and is based on Nicholas.

“The representation of kids with special needs, or even adults with special needs, is so grim in the industry,” Conn says. “I really wanted to share who my son is with people. Because I, like many other moms, sit in elevators where people are averting their eyes…Our children are so exceptional and wonderful. I don’t want them to be a secret anymore.”

Conn hopes the film communicates the beauty her son brings to her life.

“Nicholas has always completely blown me away with just who he is in the world,” Conn says. “I know it sounds beyond corny, but he has always been my greatest teacher. He’s got mindfulness down. You cannot be around him and not just sort of absorb his universe.”

More Beautiful For Having Been Broken, she says, should help viewers understand that they needn’t pity parents of kids with special needs. “I don’t want people to feel sorry for us. I want them to realize we have something really special in our lives. That’s what I really want the film to say. That, and don’t make our kids invisible.”

Conn is grateful that the film made its way through the festival circuit before lockdowns began, but now, she is also thankful to have time to connect with fans.

“By having all this extra time, I’ve been able to communicate with people from all over the world,” she says. “It’s been sort of a blessing.”

On May 8, there will even be an interactive livestream event that includes a viewing of the film as well as a live Q+A with the Conn and the cast.

Of course, More Beautiful For Having Been Broken also features a lesbian love story, but Conn is proud that sexuality is not at all a focal point. “Today we’re at a place in our filmography where we can basically not discuss lesbianism, but just show our lives,” Conn says. “I just feel like we’ve done the coming out story. We’ve really, really examined that.”

And yet, Conn says it is still far too difficult to find lesbian films. “It’s just excruciating,” she says. “Unless the movie is studio made, like Carol, it’s almost impossible.”

As such, in addition to working on another film of her own, Conn’s current focus is on Nicole Conn Films Global, an international group that will fund and promote lesbian filmmakers in all genres.

 “We just want our library to be full fledged,” she says. “There is more than enough room for all of us. Women think there is only room for one lesbian writer, one lesbian director, one lesbian show runner, and that’s just not the case.”

Conn is hopeful that she can help lesbian and other LGBTQ+ films become more mainstream. More Beautiful For Having Been Broken, in fact, was picked up for worldwide distribution through a partnership with Vision Films and Wolfe Video.

Conn hopes the film’s success will help bring more awareness to the need for special needs representation in film. So far, she says, its reception has been “pretty unanimously wonderful.”

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website. 

Molly Sprayregen

I am a freelance writer who specializes in LGBTQ issues

Tips For Screenwriters

Getting Your Story Straight: Heroes

Welcome to "Getting Your Story Straight" series on Instagram @storymerchant. 

Professional coaching tips to help you figure out point of view, structure, and master all the elements of story. If you'd like more details or enroll in one on one coaching to perfect your story visit: http://www.thewriterslifeline.com/

Story Merchant Film Closet

Nicole Conn and Lissa Forehan's "More Beautiful For Having Been Broken" will be available for streaming Friday, May 8th.

There will also be a worldwide watch party premiere on cya.live at 11:00am (PST) on May 8th.

A broken FBI agent, suspended from her job and struggling with the loss of her mother, travels to the small mountain town she used to visit as a child. She is befriended by a special needs boy who possesses the extraordinary gift of healing others through his unbroken spirit and unique outlook on life. Though she is hurting, she begins to see through his eyes as the puzzle pieces fall into place.

Streaming available at: https://bit.ly/3eFyUK9

Story Merchant Exec Yasemin Isil Featured in Laura Bryna's New Video "Stars Are Falling"

Directed by ÉLI SOKHN @elication

Tips for Screenwriters

Dealing with your Type-C Creative Mind

For all storytellers—novelists, screenwriters, journalists, nonfiction writers, and children’s book writers.

Sometimes the struggle to publish can drain even the strongest creative dynamo. Here's how to recharge your creativity, to keep your career going...and going...and going...




Learn More about One-on-ONe coaching to help understand a Type-C personality and equip you with practical tools to make yourself more productive and less frustrated with storytelling.