The Plot Thickens

Endless Summer

A week from today, I will wake up in my new apartment, one I’m renting with my best friend. I won’t have school that day, and in theory, I will be done for the semester. Summer will have started. My plans for this summer are as follows: work at Chipotle, save most of every paycheck, work at an internship, and try to watch a movie once in a while.

Over spring break, while on the way to Boulder with my friends, we listed off everything we wanted to do this summer. There were water parks, museum exhibits, local restaurants, small mountain-side towns, and movies that needed to be checked off. Plus, about 30 other things too. As we drove, we just kept adding to the list every wild idea we could come up with. I made a joke that we were creating the plot of every indie movie ever: have the ultimate summer experience.

And it was true. All of us wanted to have the best summer possible, even though we all knew that summer would end with a total of 10 things crossed off the list and 15 things added, if we were lucky. All four of us are going to be busy with our own lives and jobs and then life happens. Even though we won’t want to, our summer to-do list will have to wait.

I’m still excited for this summer though. It’ll be my first one in Denver, my first one mostly without my parents, and will hopefully allow for some serious writing, reading, and watching.

It feels like each summer I set out to write some novel or feature-length screenplay and then don’t. I try. I try with everything in me. I plan out the characters and the basic plot but then get lost on the details of the story. I’m horrible at plotting. I’ve self-diagnosed this as plots are not as interesting to me as characters. This makes it incredibly hard to be a writer—when you know the characters inside and out but not what you want them to do.

I doubt this summer will change that. Or that I’ll watch tons of new movies and expand my cinema tastes. Or that I’ll be rolling in dough when August arrives.

But I can bet it’ll be fun.