Apparently, I’m Writing Screenplays Now
When I wrote Journey of a Salty Soul, I wasn’t thinking about television. I was trying to write a book. That sentence seems to keep getting me into trouble, because apparently I have a hard time leaving well enough alone. Once the book was finished, published, and sitting on an actual shelf with my name on the cover, another question started bouncing around in my head: What would this story look like on a screen?
At first, it was nothing more than a fun thought. Journey of a Salty Soul already felt visual to me. There are boats, rivers, marinas, small towns, islands, mechanical problems, friendships, and thousands of miles of American waterways. I could picture Damian standing at the helm. I could see Salty Soul moving downriver and hear the old captain telling stories over breakfast at the marina restaurant. So I started playing around with the idea, which I have since learned is a dangerous thing for me to do.
Before long, I was learning screenplay formatting, thinking about scenes instead of chapters, figuring out what could be shown instead of explained, and discovering that adapting a novel isn’t simply a matter of taking the words from a book and putting character names above the dialogue. The story had to work differently on a screen. Things that could live comfortably inside Damian’s thoughts on the page suddenly needed an action, an expression, a conversation, or sometimes nothing at all. It was still the same story, but I was learning how to tell it in an entirely different language.
Where Does the Story Begin?
One of the biggest decisions was figuring out what the television pilot was actually about. Journey of a Salty Soul eventually covers a much larger adventure, but trying to cram that journey into the first episode would miss the part that matters most. The pilot isn’t about Damian traveling the Great Loop. It’s about everything that causes him to untie the lines in the first place.
Damian begins with a career, a comfortable suburban home, responsibilities, and a predictable routine. By most measures, he has built exactly the kind of life he was supposed to build. Nothing terrible happens to him. He isn’t recovering from tragedy, running from failure, or trying to rebuild a life that fell apart. He simply begins to realize that the life he built may not be the life that makes him feel most alive.
An ordinary Saturday drive leads him to a small-town marina. The marina leads him to a weathered 1973 trawler. The trawler leads him to its eighty-year-old original captain, and an unexpected conversation eventually leaves Damian holding the keys to a boat he had absolutely no intention of buying that morning. He initially imagines Southern Belle as a weekend escape, a place to get away from the city, work with his hands, and spend some time on the water.
Then he finds the journals.
Hidden aboard are the old captain’s handwritten journals and marked nautical charts documenting decades of travel. As Damian begins piecing them together, the scattered trips become something much larger: a journey of nearly 6,000 miles around America’s waterways known as the Great Loop. That discovery changes the question from what Damian is going to do with an old boat to what he might be willing to do with his own life.
Sixty-Four Pages Later
What started as, “I wonder if this could work as a television series?” eventually became a completed 64-page pilot screenplay. Somewhere during that process, I stopped simply imagining Damian’s story on a screen and started thinking seriously about how the larger world of Journey of a Salty Soul could work as an ongoing series. Every stretch of water can bring a different town, marina, problem, friendship, or unexpected turn, while the old captain’s journals provide a connection between the waterways Damian is traveling today and the adventures that happened there decades before.
Of course, finishing the screenplay only introduced me to another world I knew almost nothing about. Apparently screenplays need friends. So the pilot now has a one-page presentation, character descriptions, a poster, and a full pitch deck explaining the series and where it can go. I’ve also begun putting the screenplay in a few places where people in the industry might actually discover it, and I’ve started looking at legitimate opportunities to get the project in front of people who work in television.
There have been several moments during all of this when I’ve stared at the computer and wondered exactly how I got here. Then I remember that this entire thing started because one day I decided I wanted to write a book. I probably should have recognized the warning signs.
So, Is It Going to Be on Television?
No. Not even close.
There is an enormous distance between finishing a screenplay and seeing something produced for television. I’m learning that part of the process the same way I learned publishing: one question, one mistake, and occasionally one credit-card charge at a time. There are no announcements to make, no secret production deal hiding behind this blog post, and nobody has called asking which actor I want playing Damian.
What I do have is a finished screenplay based on a story I believe in, and now I’m giving it an opportunity to go somewhere. Maybe somebody reads it and sees what I see in it. Maybe it leads to a conversation. Maybe it goes absolutely nowhere. I have no way of knowing, but I would rather find out than spend the next ten years wondering what might have happened if I had tried.
That feels strangely appropriate for Journey of a Salty Soul. Underneath the boats, waterways, journals, and adventure, the story has always been about discovering what can happen when you finally become willing to leave the dock. Damian has to make that decision in the story, and apparently the guy writing him has to make it occasionally too.
I just wanted to write a book.
Somehow, I ended up with a screenplay.
I have absolutely no idea where this particular journey goes from here, but the lines are untied.
Might as well follow the horizon.