The Five Point Plan
On Slackers, Motivation, Ambition, and Fun
Today’s Writing Music: “Dread in My Heart” by Mother Mother
Today’s Reading: Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison
“How do you make God laugh?” asks Eric Stoltz, playing a bartender named Chet, in one of my favorite movies, Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming (not to be confused with the Will Ferrell soccer movie, which has an ampersand instead).
“How do you make God laugh?” Chet asks his pal, Grover, played by Josh Hamilton. Then Chet answers his own question: “Make a plan.”
They both laugh and then, awkwardly sit in silence with that idea.
Neither of them has much of a plan at all.
Chet is in his early 30s but still an undergraduate after ten years, always just a few credits short of graduating (with about six different degrees). He has, at least, made his peace with his role as the town’s philosopher-bartender, and he’s making something resembling an adult life out of it.
Grover, on the other hand, has just graduated (on time) with a degree in Creative Writing (the fool) with dreams of moving to New York City with his writer-girlfriend Jane (Olivia D’Abo). But then Jane instead takes a fellowship for a year in Prague (an “overrated city,” Grover declares, while admitting he’s never been there) and so Grover spends the year wallowing, being melancholy, sleeping with freshman girls, and hanging around with his former college roommates (who’ve also failed to launch) in their former college town, all vaguely trying to work out what to do next.
It’s clear in the film that, even before Jane leaves him for Prague, Grover specializes in writing a fiction of the angsty mundane… a kind of Seinfeld-esque story where a bunch of smart people sit around pontificating about nothing of real importance. There’s only a hint that, perhaps beneath all that paralysis, there’s something lying deep in the iceberg. Grover's classmates LOVE this.
In one flashback workshop scene, they gushingly compare his story to everything from One Hundred Years of Solitude to “that pseudo Russian novel ilk” and the “bastard child of Raymond Carver” and F. Scott Fitzgerald and “Holden Caulfield meets Humbert Humbert.” All of this (especially together) clearly means absolutely nothing—it’s just hot puffery and name-dropping. Workshop mumbo jumbo.
The professor rolls his eyes and sits quietly. (He’s played by the director’s father, Jonathan Baumbach, an actual English professor who wrote one of my favorite essays on The Catcher in the Rye.)
Then Jane steps up to the plate.
“I’d like to say first up that the prose is remarkable. It’s beautifully written. However I’ve noticed that the characters in Grover’s stories spend all their time discussing the least important things. You know, like, what to have for dinner, or who’s the best-looking model in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. I don’t know. To me the story just seemed slight. It had the feeling of being written in one night.”
Grover balks. “It seems I must have done something right if Ms. Hayworth has reacted so strongly.” (Barf emoji) “And this was a particularly hot issue of Victoria’s Secret,” he replies smugly. “They had to make some very tough decisions.”
“You joke,” she smiles, “But I really see nothing wrong with dealing with the important subject matter. All that thought and energy put into Saturday morning cartoons. I think it’s depressing.”
The scene ends in uncomfortable silence.
Eventually, Grover and Jane will make nice over coffee and (what else?) small talk and begin dating. But it won’t work out, we already know—she’s heading off to Prague where, Grover laments, she’ll come back raving about how the beer is so much better there. (And presumably writers there also know the value of important subject matter.)
I especially love that Jane digs at him for writing his story in one night. It’s surely true—and probably the kind of thing that Grover even takes pride in. “Look at me, I’m so talented I can write this awesome Carver/Fitz/Salinger/Marquez/Dostoevsky story about absolutely nothing in six hours the night before its due.”
In a few sentences, she reminds us (and him) that the really depressing thing is we may never know how much more Grover might be capable of—if only he actually put in some effort.
It’s one of my favorite movies, and I re-watch it often with nostalgia for my own college years, when I lived in Baltimore with three guys in a crumbling rowhouse named “The Doug” (long story). I have a soft spot for Grover, of course, and I love watching it slowly dawn on him that he needs to wake up and start trying, or else.
I don’t know that I was ever truly the motivation-less slacker that Grover represents. Sure I had some driftless moments, but usually I was pretty busy overloading on credits, doing theatre, and writing—sure, I slacked off in many of my distribution credit classes, to the point where I almost ended up on Academic Probation, but this was mostly because I was also turning in stories at double the requested page-length in Intro to Fiction and Poetry. And I wasn’t writing them all the night before they were due at least.
On the other hand, I love to write about characters like Grover. Confused and yearning and irreverent and angsty and wounded and hilarious and uncertain. They’ve always appealed to me. They still do. Because there’s always a part of me (I hope!) that still has his head in the clouds, who procrastinates, who wants to stay up late, who likes to sit around and talk with old friends about nothing of particular importance.
That feels like home.
After all, I grew up in Central New Jersey a few towns over from the place Kevin Smith filmed his slacker-odes: Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy.
In some ways, these movies were iconic for me because they were full of more shiftless, cool characters to emulate. I’d brag to anyone who’d listen about being from there. (The fisting scene in Chasing Amy? They filmed that on the swings right by my high school.) But more than posturing coolness, what these movies really meant to me was that someone from where I was from could be an artist.
I didn’t want to be Dante, or Randall, the eponymous clerks, but Kevin Smith—the very hard-working guy who wrote, directed, and acted in a movie made on a prayer and a shoestring and took it all the way to Sundance. Clerks and Mallrats were the first movies I bought on DVD—I also had a book version of the scripts, which I consulted endlessly.
As college went on and I fell more in love with writing, I only became more Type-A. But I clung to my slacker characters, and to a large degree I still do. In fact, it turns out they’re highly useful in storytelling.
In his book How Fiction Works, James Wood describes the appeal of the flaneur in literature, a French word that loosely translates to “slacker.” It’s a point-of-view that depends on privilege, as writers Lauren Elkin and Garnette Cadogan have written really powerfully about. The flaneur is a figure free (thanks to class/race/gender) to roam about the city or the suburb, thinking his angsty thoughts about life and society, with no real urgency. He's thoughtful, poetic, observant, and ever-seeking of truth. What's not to love?
Well, maybe a lack of motivation.
Usually, like with Grover, there’s a heartbreak involved, or some kind of Get Rich Quick scheme to move the plot along. Often these end up just being vehicles for more roaming around and thinking about things.
When I teach my students about character-building, I show them this chart, illustrating a classic psychological theory:
And I’ll talk about how a good character in fiction should want something and actively try to get that something. In other words… they should have a plan, so that we (playing God) can laugh, and throw some antagonist or obstacle comes along to get in their way. A better job, a new girlfriend, a nicer house, reconciliation with an estranged parent, etc. Without a motivation, your story may end up like Grover’s—insubstantial.
Ordinarily, the pyramid shape is said to show how we have to take care of the base needs (food/shelter/money) before we can have space to worry about the higher ones (love/self-esteem/self-knowledge/artistic expression). But I've always been suspicious of this.
The characters in Baumbach’s film are all stuck at the top of the pyramid, without any awareness of how to deal with the needs at the bottom. They’re broke, single, they don’t have groceries, they can't write a resume, etc. They’re privileged, but only really temporarily, within the bubble of the college town, which is why they can’t leave. Until they do, they get to cling to all their self-actualization concerns just a little longer before it all collapses.
Inevitably, it will collapse, and they’ll have to face careers and relationships and all the other adult stuff. They’ll have to grow up and get organized, or end up stuck there forever like Chet the bartender (who, at least, is pretty contented with his situation, and has a job and a meaningful romantic relationship with a professor who has a child he likes.)
And actually, a Chet is a great character. A Chet wants things. Has limitations and agency. Is (mostly) self aware. He’s mature and even a little sophisticated.
So why do I still prefer to write about the Grovers?
I think it comes back to Fun again actually.
The truth is that my life today is pretty darn structured. I could be friends with a Chet, but if I ran into Randall or Dante from Clerks back home, they'd find me pretty square and contemptible. And I think a Grover would do a good deal of eye-rolling at me if he took my class. (I'd probably give him a far kinder version of Jane's same pep-talk.)
Back in college I figured out that I needed to get organized if I was ever going to get anywhere with my ambitions to become a writer. I had to choose between drinking all night and playing Perfect Dark with my roommates, and going up to my room to resort my color-coded index cards, trying to map out scenes for my screenplay. (2:37 AM, which was about, no surprise, a bunch of aimless college students—Clerks it was not, but I did direct it myself, which turned out to be a terrible idea.)
Flash forward twenty years, and I’m juggling the requirements of parenthood, teaching full-time, and trying to complete various long-term writing projects (usually several at once). Most of the time I feel like I'm barely making headway.
I’ve recently started to try and get even more disciplined than ever, cutting weeknight drinking, moderating coffee drinking, exercising three times a week (see previous post), reading for at least 20 minutes a night, completing a lesson in an online course I’m taking each day, and writing at least 500 words a day. My life is all in a bullet journal and a seven-category Google calendar… my days are more structured than ever. (I’ve even noticed that lately I’ve even taken a fresh interest in structured storytelling—more on that next week though, I think.)
Here’s something really ironic: the self-improvement task I’m having the hardest time with? It’s meditating for 15 minutes a day. Turns out that just sitting still and doing nothing is basically impossible for me these days. Yeah—Grover would be so disappointed.
So I miss the days when I could be a little Grover-y sometimes—and I worry that so much structure will lead to the steady ebb of fun from the writing process. The more we treat our writing like our work, the better we may get… but if that means we forget how to play around and have fun then the writing suffers anyway.
Is there a way to make a plan, and still have fun? (Hey God, are you laughing yet?)
I think it is possible to do both, and this leads me to The Five Point Plan.
Another friend from college, Jerry, and I have an annual tradition. (Jerry is, far more than me, a Type-A sort of guy and always has been). Every year, by the end of January (which we have decided is “the start of the fiscal year”) Jerry and I email each other a “Five Point Plan” for the coming year. We also tally up our success or failure to accomplish the five goals on the previous year’s list.
We’ve been doing this, I think, for at least 11 years now—the oldest record I’ve found so far is a GChat about our 2010 goals, but both Jerry and I are pretty sure we’ve been at it longer than this.
The basic setup hasn’t changed much since it started. We agreed that the goals have to be specific and measurable… you can’t just say, “I want to write more” but you can say, “I want to finish a draft of this specific novel” or “I will write, on average, 3000 words per week” or so on.
Often we’ll look for at least one new skill on the list: one year Jerry decided he wanted to learn to tie ten kinds of knots, another year I resolved to memorize the steps to make five cocktails. He’s resolved to do things like practice his Spanish, read the news in Chinese, and learn to drive a car with a stick shift.
I’ve resolved to do things like read the fiction each week in The New Yorker, complete four home improvement projects, or work out three times every week (guess which one I didn’t do…)
In a good year, it seems, we might get three or maybe four of our five goals accomplished. We’ve each had a year or two where we just totally wipe-out. (We decided that 2020 just didn’t count). In 2018 we delayed the start of the new five point plans a few weeks and blamed it on the government shutdown.
We try to have, well, fun with it.
I don’t think either of us has ever nailed all five. Sometimes we give up on a goal and sometimes we re-up it for the coming year. My failure to exercise regularly has, so far, left me high and dry several years running, but hope springs eternal, I guess.
Generally, the best outcome for a completed goal is that it gets to be so routine that it’s now a new habit—something I don’t need to put on the next year’s list because I’m so used to doing it now. This is what happened with my aim to read the New Yorker fiction each week, for instance. And I had so much fun learning to make cocktails that I’ve just kept steadily added to my repertoire without needing it on the goal list.
Now, I’m not going to share my current 2021 list right now—if I’m still doing this at the end of January 2022, maybe then I will. I want to keep the focus on how this little game connects to having fun, and creativity.
Looking back at my Five Point Plans, there’s often some practical stuff like learning to budget my money better, and there are always writing goals too—a certain amount to write each month, or a project to commit to finishing.
But mostly the Plan is actually more about reminding myself to do stuff that isn’t writing. To do stuff that might be fun, like hiking, or learning to play the guitar, or watching a good movie once a week. Is it square that now I have to put it on a list—make it an action item? Maybe. But if that’s what it takes to remind me it’s OK to slack off sometimes… then that’s what it takes.
Trying to lead a creative life can be a hell of a lot to hold onto: it’s full of fits and starts, failures and unexpected discoveries, and it can be sometimes hard to pinpoint where growth has occurred or where it needs to happen. It’s no wonder that someone like Grover has to pause a little first before he can take a running leap at it.
Too often a creative life seems to come at the detriment of all the other lives we need to lead. So, the hell with it. Come up with a practical, actionable plan—turn it into a game. Trust me, it feels pretty good to get to the end of the “fiscal year” and realize you’re navigating by the right stars after all.
Writing Towards the Fun #13:
Take a character you’re working on, and come up with a five point plan for them. What do they want to accomplish in, let’s say, the next year of their lives? Think about Maslow’s Hierarchy, and what things they may need or want from all the various layers.
Once you know what they want, it’s time to start laughing—if you’re God in their story, what’s going to happen to get in their way? Will they prevail or face setbacks? Why?
This is a great way to get to know a character in your story that seems a little flat so far. Give it a try, and remember—have fun!