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Writing with Four Hands
Home :: Arts & Entertainment :: Books & Music
By: Logan And Noah Miller Email Article
Word Count: 1072 Digg it | Del.icio.us it | Google it | StumbleUpon it

  

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.

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For more information on 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 please visit http://www.inorintheway.com/

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