A Hollywood Script Consultant

Tripping the Light Fantastic
By Judy Kellem

Facing the blank page has always been, for me, a struggle of epic proportions. I spent my twenties slack-jawed, starring into the white abyss of my computer screen, the ominous terror that I had absolutely nothing to say looming about my shoulders like some steely eyed patriarch who’s cross armed and at the ready to yawn, “Give it up lady, you’re just a simpleton.”

And yet somehow, the words always, inevitably came, reminding me that no matter how silent my interior may have seemed - no matter how vacuous it may have felt as I sat there floating through it’s dark, seemingly weightless ether - there is always content waiting to be heard.

Nothing will pull you from that deafening, but substantive, silence like having a child. You are so focused on their every breath that you can literally forget that it even exists within you. At least, that is what happened to me after having my daughter fifteen months ago.

A year evaporated wherein I had barely even had a dream to gnaw on as reassurance that some part of me was still “being creative”. Of course I had an ongoing monologue of baby-related “material” streaming through my brain – as well as an unending conversation with my daughter, which had begun well before I even knew she was on her way. But that eerie, infinite, terrifying space that is my own personal cosmos and home base when it comes to writing, had seemingly vanished from my very person.

Or so I thought.

After thirteen months of being purely steeped in motherhood, I recently took a step out from that “head” and was flabbergasted to find myself landing right back into that vast internal universe, as if no baby, no time, nothing had interrupted that old, often painful, weightless journey.

I had been gifted a ninety-minute massage at a luxurious spa in NYC, which I had never had a moment to enjoy. Knowing that it was about to expire, and seeing that my daughter could forget about me for a couple of hours when in the company of her grandparents (I was always right in the next room), I decided to book myself a much needed rub-down. I arrived early to my mother’s uptown apartment, fed my daughter, played with her, got her settled and then with some anxiety, smiled, “Well, this is an experiment!” to my mom, who assured me it would be fine. This was the first time I had ever left my baby completely with another person.

As soon as I walked out of my mother’s apartment, the totally unexpected happened: that internal space began to encroach on all the worry and baby-related prattle in my head. This was the first time in two years that I was hitting the streets of New York, alone, making my way down an old worn path from my mom’s home of twenty-years, to the same subway stop I’d used for decades to get downtown. Moving along at a fresh, brisk pace, jaywalking as I pleased, noting how differently one is treated when not in the company of a baby, my imagination sky-rocketed. An ancient, uncultivated story idea tucked deep in the pocket of my soul came to the fore, and as I stepped onto the subway platform, realizing I hadn’t taken a train in over eighteen months, that idea continued to expand exponentially like a fertilized egg multiplying by the seconds. The packed train barreled southward, a storm of characters, themes, plot beats and dialogue windsailing through my inner eye.

By the time I reached my stop, made my way to the venue and was soon lead into a circular room by an earthy, woman’s woman named Annagrace, I only lamented one detail: I hadn’t brought a notebook and pen! Laying facedown on the massage table, the din of Zen music billowing about my ears, I sighed with relief as Annagrace beat solid knots out of my shoulders. “There is always something to say,” I thought. “No matter when I get that paper and pen, find that hour to myself to sit at the desk and travel the landscape of my own interior…that universe is timeless, waiting, there for the taking when I am ready. I just have to allow myself to enter that ether, and the words will come.”

I share this as a whisper of encouragement, for I gain great solace from such understanding: We are always writers. Settling down to a desk is simply the act of declaring that so.

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