The Tyranny of Had

Screenwriting can be a frustrating pursuit. There’s formatting minutiae, structure paradigms, ether-like qualities of story, and the perception that Hollywood is a solid-wall bastion that we must fling ourselves against until we break through or are broken.

So, every once in a while, I say to myself, “Self, we should write something else. How about when the next script is finished, we write a novel.”

And Self says back, “What about all those hads?”

Now, screenplays are written in present tense. Characters see, drive, talk, make love, fight, and die in the now. They don’t think about doing it tomorrow. They don’t remember when they did it yesterday. As the reader reads, so doth the character perform.

Novels are written in the past tense. Stuff in the novel has already happened and someone is telling the story. Which means going into the past and back to the future. Which means the writer has to know how to make those verbs work. Which requires all those hads.

Had is a helping verb. There are 23 of them.

Why I fixated on had and not one of the others, I do not know.

Had, apparently indicates the past perfect tense.

Know how I know?

Looked it up.

Had to.

Most summers I attend a writing workshop or writer’s conference. At one time or another, I’ve taken fiction classes from Deidre McNamer and Ursula LeGuin.

I’ll be cooking along in whatever fiction class I’m taking, supposedly learning novel techniques from the masters and I’ll have the HAD nightmare.

I’m working at my computer. Writing a novel. I’m also watching myself from the doorway, and I know I’m writing a novel not a script because there is a pile of hads on the floor at my left. As I write along, I’ll take a had or two and sprinkle them in, but the pile of hads doesn’t get any smaller. As a matter of fact, it grows, as if there exists an artesian well of perfect pasts springing a never-ending supply of hads. Quickly, the pile of unused hads towers over me. I begin flinging them with both hands at my computer to no avail and …

I wake up wondering if Mrs. McCutcheon let me out of 5th grade with an important piece of my education bereft.

So I go back to screenwriting where everything is happening now and no hads are required.

Which is why I won’t become a novelist.

I have hadrophobia.