If ever there was a writer who could get by on an astonishing life story, it’s Elgin James. The co-creator and showrunner of the FX hit Mayans MC is a former member of an anti-racist gang whose Hollywood rise coincided with a prison sentence. But James says writers shouldn’t rely on their personal biographies. The key to writing, he says, is hard-earned craft.
James will share his insights next week at the Austin Film Festival’s Ghost Ranch Writer’s Retreat, open to rising writers who want to seek inspiration in the same land that was the longtime home of Georgia O’Keeffe and provided crucial locations for Oppenheimer.
His advice: Don’t try to create what you think people want. Find your own specific way of telling a story, and hone it so well that outsiders will find it irresistible.
“Don’t try to go to the world,” he says on the latest MovieMaker podcast, available on Apple or Spotify. “Everyone’s trying to chase this other thing. Let the world come to you. Figure out your voice. stick to that.
“What is voice? It’s cadence. It’s rhythm. We all have a certain rhythm in our bodies.”
Growing up, James was raised by civil-rights activists on a rural New England farm, but drug and alcohol abuse made for a chaotic home life, and soon he became a fixture in the Boston area’s straight-edge hardcore punk scene and part of a multiracial gang that took on neo-Nazi skinheads.
Writing always provided an escape.
“Even when I was with my friends and we were living on the streets and squats, when I was living as my most violent self with my brothers in my gang, nothing felt real until I came home to write about it at night. And there’s one way I could process the world and feel like I was part of it,” he recalls.
He left the gang life for Los Angeles, where he took part in the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program. His 2011 film debut Little Birds, which he wrote, directed and scored, was up for the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, and he became one of Hollywood’s hottest prospects.
But around the same time Little Birds was released, James was arrested on past charges relating to his gang life and sentenced to prison for a year. James knows his time with gangs and prison informed his work, but they also distracted him from it: He didn’t get his first TV job until his mid-40s.
James says he can’t separate his life from his writing, but that writing has to stand on its own. He notes that if he’d broken in earlier, “I would have made so many great movies at this point.”
“I was 45 years old and that was way past my expiration point. I’d basically been cast into concrete, as we all are. And I had to break out of that.”
Elgin James on Building a Creative Family Through Writing
Still, his time in prison wasn’t completely lost: He spent part of it co-writing the script Lowriders, which was released in 2017. (His work also includes co-creating, with Stephen Merchant, the hit Amazon Studios/BBC One series The Outlaws starring Christopher Walken.)
One of his favorite parts of being a writer — and showrunner — is creating stories that eventually bring together a family of creatives. People who, months after he finishes his scripts, get to go out and shoot them some cold, dark place in the middle of the night.
“I think as artists and as writers, we take what’s inside of us that’s fucked up and broken — and maybe hopefully, there’s some joy, right? — and try to put it on the page,” he says.
“You finally do squeeze out some blood from the stone. And what’s beautiful about it is then you get to bring it to your cinematographer, you get to bring it to your production designer, you bring it to the actors, and then they all put their own love and damage and trauma and all that in it too, and hopefully, you achieve something watchable. And if the movie gods are smiling upon you, maybe you achieve something good.”
At Ghost Ranch, he hopes to share some of his tools for getting past the fear of the blank page.
“I have certain tricks, like, ‘I’m gonna write 10 pages today. Doesn’t matter if it’s terrible. I’m gonna write 10 pages.’ Or because I start to feel claustrophobia sometimes when I start to write, I’ll set a timer, and no matter where I am on this page, in 20 minutes, I have to go on to the next page.
“It becomes like a release: ‘OK, let me just start fresh here.’ And as any writer knows, as soon as you have anything on the page, man, it can be garbage — but when you wake up the next day morning to start again, there’s some words there. It’s not garbage anymore. It’s gold. It’s something to climb, a foothold, a handle.”
You urge you to listen to our full interview with Elgin James on the podcast, where we also talk about when to (occasionally) flex and when to not flex, his love of Allison Anders and Walter Hill, and how to deal with studio notes. He also talks about his love of the Austin Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee.
Main image: Elgin James, courtesy of Shutterstock.