Pretending to Be a Writer: We need to go deeper than stylistic matters. Back to the underlying reason a story has to be told.

It was the day before yesterday. I had my computer chair facing away from the computer and was putting on my socks when I managed to twirl a little and the back hit the handle of a travel mug of coffee next to my keyboard. The tipped over cup spilled on the keyboard, went under my phone, and the coffee even formed a small, brown lake beneath my DVD player and stack of noir DVDs. "Damn," I said to the empty apartment. This is why an audience want to identify with characters who commandeer someone else's life, like the musician in Detour or the woman in Cornel Woodrich's I Married a Dead Man. Ah, to be someone else.