The Writing Week (Vol. 4) part 183 - What is Your Writing Process?

Some writers are incredibly picky when it comes to their process. They have to be in a certain seat at a certain desk, facing a specific direction at a specific time of day. They can only use their typewriter (or computer, or notepad) and can only write in two hour uninterrupted intervals. Music must be playing continuously, and the phone must be off. Others are complete free-for-alls in their approach - they will write when the mood strikes, wherever that may be, and will use whatever writing tool is handy.


For the most part, I land somewhere in between. I put in an hour a day (at least). Anything less, and I feel like it's been a waste or a sham - unless, perhaps, I was overly productive for 40 or 50 minutes. I generally write to music (soundtracks) and have a few go-to staples, along with a mix of some of my all-ime favorite soundtrack bytes. I write from home for the most part, though if I'm going out late after work but don't have time to return to Queens first, I'll bring my laptop to the office and get work done there after business hours. The time of day doesn't matter too much; I'm not really a morning person, so it tends to be in the evening. 


This week, though (when I got writing done), I worked wherever I could. I'm revising my Medieval spec still - just about wrapping up Act Two; however, I left a major sequence at the midpoint blank because I'm still not sure how I want it to unfold. Sometimes, when I'm doing a page-one rewrite, I'll literally start with a blank document. This time, I saved the script as a new document and and gradually working my way from page one back to the end, cutting, adding, and changing as I go along. Even if some of the scenes and characters get cut, I like bits of the description and lines involving them, so those parts are staying. It's also easier - I find - to move forward, even changing directions in the script, if I can continuously work off of what was there to begin with. Perhaps a strange approach, but I'm finding it effective, especially because I am not changing the pacing too much. 


At any rate, writing time was making itself pretty scarce, so I had to be flexible. I wrote on a bus down to DC for the 4th, which was a first. Then, yesterday, I spent two hours writing while on a plane en route to San Francisco (another first). It's amazing how much a set of headphones and the right volume levels can help one zone into the work and zone out everything else. And with little other time to write, those few travel hours were integral to furthering the script.


What's your approach - do you have any nonnegotiable essentials to your writing process?

Good Distractions

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I love my home, but I can’t write there anymore. There are just too many distractions, but that’s almost too negative a word because I’m very fortunate to have everything that’s competing for my attention in that apartment. Let’s start with the beautiful girlfriend, who manages to capture my attention in so many different ways. If I’m lucky she’s batting her eyelashes at me with a grin on her face. How do you write with that going on? I’d close the door to the study, except I don’t have a study. I write in the living room and she’s always about twenty feet away no matter what room she’s in. Anyway, not the worst problem to have, although sometimes those bedroom eyes narrow and get angry, most often for silly things like me not wanting to walk to the food co-op with her, or scheduling a weekend of drinking with buddies over a Saturday engagement that she is “100% positive I told you about you douche bag. Don’t even think about it…you’re fucking going.” Sorry Cake Man and Zombie, I don’t think I can make the DC trip. At least my next favorite distraction never gets angry or talks back. Oh Xbox.

I think Xbox 360 was made by God as a test to see just how determined some people really are in their pursuits. I’ve shot that terrorist through his red beret so many god damn times, but I can’t stop going back to shoot him again. It doesn’t matter if I’ve finished the game. I can still play it through on expert. Funny thing was last weekend my girlfriend was in New Orleans, so I actually managed to get two hours of decent writing done one day. I decided to reward myself, and for some reason the best way I could think to do so was to fire up the Xbox to defend virtual United States for six hours straight. I watched the sun go down, but didn’t want to get up to turn on my living room light. I’m just glad I got the girlfriend before I got the Xbox. I hear girls don’t dig guys sitting in their boxers, wearing headsets, and talking to their buddies across the city with videogame controllers in their hands.

“Are you talking to them or playing with them?”

“Both! What don’t you understand!?”

Have you ever been writing and making progress on a scene, and then suddenly the next moment you’re looking at porn and you don’t even remember how you got there? Cake Man says he disconnects the internet when he writes. I’m just going to assume the scenario that makes me giggle the most. You should do the same.

Anyway, to get back on track I’ll just say there are a lot of things at my apartment that I like, but they aren’t helping my writing much these days. So I’ve decided to return to a practice I abandoned several months ago and start writing at work again after work hours. In most cases once the clock strikes five I’m still in work mode and have a get shit done type of mentality. Some people have told me they don’t have the discipline for an after work routine at the office, but I think it takes more discipline to keep motivated for writing once you arrive back home at your sanctuary. This is the practice that led to some of the best writing I’ve experienced. Since I’ve gone back to working at the office I can say for certain that I’ve moved past my recent slump. It’s a beautiful thing to see that you’ve written four new pages in a day when it took you all of last month to reach that number. If anybody out there has been having trouble with turning out pages and you have a work environment that would allow you to stay on for an hour or two to write, I’d strongly recommend you give it a try. If you hate your job, knowing that your workplace has been a creative temple for your craft could give you a new appreciation for your space. No matter how much I might dislike arriving at my desk early in the morning, I’ll always know that this is the space where I wrote one of my strongest scripts, and that means something to me.

The Collaboration: Why The Ship Sank

About six months ago, Cake Man, Zombie, and I decided that we wanted to collaborate on a script. We were pretty gung-ho about it, and it wasn't long before we were exchanging ideas and nominating three concepts from a list of fourteen ideas that spanned several genres. The plan was to have this featured segment where I would report on our weekly successes and failures with the project. It was going to be informative, and hopefully inspiring. Half a year later and all I have to report on is why I think the project didn't work.

I'd first like to mention why I think collaborating is important, even though I have little experience with it. In my circle of writers we mostly envision a career where the concept is born in our mind, put to page by our hand, and sold with our name alone. The fantasy might be something along the lines of getting a call from an agent and finding out that two studios are in a bidding war for your script. Rarely do we fantasize about being commissioned to write an idea that isn't our own, or better the pages that another scribe already wrote, which is the more common reality of a working screenwriter. Collaboration is only a part of the equation, but I think you have to be trusting, flexible, and more detached than you normally would be with your own project because you don't have sole ownership. It's the flexibility that I'm most interested in, because looking at myself and my friends, I wonder how many of us could succeed if a concept was suddenly dropped on our table and we HAD to write that and not one of the ideas that we'd been toiling with in our heads for years. I don't think we'd manage very well, at least not right now. But the more versatile we are the easier it would be, and I certainly think collaborations could help in that regard.

So what happened with our project? The first thing that comes to mind (no particular order of significance) is the script concept. Not to say that we didn’t have a solid idea. We spent several meetings making sure that the concept was right for a first time collaboration and that we weren’t going to be using fluff for a first go. If we nailed the script we wanted it to be something we could push. The one thing about the script idea was that it was a balanced creature, designed to be manageable for different writers with varying interests and styles. We were all interested in giving it a go, but I think we lacked the sheer excitement that comes with starting a new script of our own. We didn’t absolutely have to write it like Cake Man had to write his Post-Apocalyptic spec, or like how I had to write my Action/Horror Western. The idea felt just right for all three of us, but not absolutely right, which I think it needed to be, especially given our differences as writers.

The question has to be brought up as to just how compatible the three of us were as collaborative writers. I’ll admit that between our trio there are some major differences in terms of style and interests. Sometimes Zombie and I seem a world apart, while Cake Man is more of the bridge. On paper we probably don’t amount to the ideal writing team, but part of me has to believe that as three trained writers we can successfully collaborate on a screenplay despite differences. A script is so skeletal, and though our time at NYU saw screenwriting students hone their creative abilities in different ways, our technical abilities were being developed the same. I anticipated that we’d be able to lay a functional foundation, and scratch and claw over the layers that we put over it. Unfortunately we never got that far. In Cake Man’s latest writing week he discussed the possibility of writing becoming a chore. I think the collaboration was a bit of a chore for all of us and several factors contributed to that, one of the most significant being the blessing of a steady 9 to 5.

Employment, as beautiful as it is in our current time definitely played a role in terminating the collaboration. But whereas the idea and our level of excitement may change, the reality is the factor of our day job will always be there (fingers crossed) through personal projects and collaborations until we find greater success as writers. It's something that just about all writers will have to deal with. In the end it boils down to our discipline and determination outweighing the fatigue of a 9 to 5 and other obligations. Our discipline was there with room for improvement, but the determination to get the job done faded fast.

2009 is still young and I hope that by year’s end I’ll be able to log some collaboration time. I expect that Cake Man and Zombie have their eyes set on round two as well. Even if it’s just pulling hairs over a first act, or simply banging out a few sub-par pages, it’s still a start, and writing tends to have that snowball effect where all you need is a start. I'm determined to give this process a go again, and I'll admit that it got the better of me as I'm sure it has many writers. What are your collaboration experiences like? Do you think it’s necessary, or even worthwhile?

Writing Resolutions for 2009

Because it's better late than never - I've decided to share my writing resolutions for 2009.

I can't make any resolutions along the lines of "I will write this many scripts this year..." or "Sell a script for this much money" because those can vary so much. So, I've decided to focus on improvements to my writing practices. I've got nasty habits that can be improved, so I'll start there.

- No more internet after 10 PM. This means e-mail, Google reader, checking our facebook fan page, or, ahem, blogging here. New /Film posts will still be there in the morning when I have my coffee. If Ken Levine had something funny to blog about, it'll still be funny tomorrow. "Checking my e-mail" usually turns into hours of useless Wikipedia/AllMusic scouring. From now on, I'll be reading or watching movies in bed and hopefully sleeping earlier.

My writing is least productive during the evening hours, which leads me to...

- Wake up earlier to write. Typically, I do my best writing in the 6:00 AM - 8:00 AM hours before I head to my day job. I'll usually write for a while in the evenings, but my word counts are never remotely close. I've always been a morning guy. This year I'll make sure to take better advantage of my mornings: wake up, have my coffee, and then it's writing time. Every morning.

With those morning hours used more productively, it should free up a bit of time in the evenings to...

- See more movies. I watch a good number of films already, but it's still probably not enough for an aspiring screenwriter. I double-majored in cinema studies in college while working as a projectionist in the department... during those three years I was watching seven to ten movies a week. It helped that my job and classes were centered around that, but the number I see now has tragically dwindled to two, maybe three, movies a week, on average. Now that Cake Man and I both have Netflix subscriptions, and I have access to hundreds of movies through their Instawatch program, there's really no excuse not to be seeing more.

Along those lines, I should also...

- Read more books. And no, musicians' biographies don't count. (Resolution: First mention of Gram Parsons, put the book down!) I would guess I read about 30 books last year (King Suckerman is ashamed of me now, I can tell) but the number of fiction books in there was less than five. I like fiction. Why haven't I been reading more of it?

Speaking of fiction...

- Try branching out into a new writing format. Because why not? I haven't really written prose in a few years. Maybe it won't show my strengths? But I don't know that yet. It's worth trying, for sure.

And there we go; I'm interested in seeing how these stick through the year. Bring it, 2009!

On a related note, FilmInFocus asked 22 filmmakers about their resolutions for 2009. Fun read, especially if you recognize a few of the interviewees.

What are your writing resolutions for 2009?

Kyle's Mom's a #$%*&: Writing South Park

New episodes of South Park FINALLY start back up tonight, and at least this Leaguer is excited. How many non-talk shows manage to stay as topical as this one? I'm always amazed at how it even remains half as edgy as it does after 12 seasons. (12 seasons?! Do you feel as old as I do?) In honor of the occasion, here's a great old AV Club interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone with a few interesting bits about the writing process for the long-running animated series:

AVC: What would you say are the hardest episodes to write?

MS: Sometimes they're the ones where we start with a point and then we try to shoehorn a story around a point, and it doesn't come out of the story organically. Those just kill us. Or when we try to put two ideas into one episode. You'd be surprised—"Oh, it's about this." "Oh, wait, what's it really about?" "It's about that and that." "Okay, it needs to be about one thing." We've learned that the hard way over the years. I don't know about the easiest, but the best episodes come from "This is a great story with actual emotion in it." And then all of the sudden, when you have a real good story with a real emotional center to it, it actually makes its point. And the point may be what you started out wanting to make, or different, but it will make sense, and it'll be cool. Whereas the ones where we go, "Oh, we want to do a show that rips on this." "How do we do that?" "Okay, how about Kyle gets a letter—" And you just start talking—they always suck that way. They're so hard. We don't make that mistake as much any more, but we do every once in a while.

AVC: What's the time ratio between sitting around and talking it out vs. somebody actually sitting down and banging out the words on paper?

MS: Oh, minutes! Trey really writes most of the dialogue on the first pass, just because we need it so fast. We'll be in the writer's meeting and be like "Oh great, we want to put this in it, we want to do this and this—but what is the scene?" We kind of come up with what the scene will be, "Here's the main joke," and literally Trey runs off and writes it and I go deal with other shit. Sometimes he comes back in and says "Well, that didn't work." But it's minutes. We start an episode on Thursday, and it's on the air in six days, so the writing is done concurrently with the animation.

You can read the whole interview here.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off to Work We Go....

Some time back in March or April I was suddenly inspired to write a fantasy romance action movie. My main goal was to write something that'll appeal to the pre-teen/ teen girls. I wanted to create the same feeling girls get after seeing Kate & Leopold, except instead of "sigh...I want a 19th century Duke as a boyfriend", change that to "sigh...I want a thief from a distant land as a boyfriend."

Both the rough draft and first draft got very positive response from my female readers, but they also pointed out that it's a total mess. The structure was in shambles, lots of things didn't make sense. I got some bones but didn't have the flesh. But, through the murky disorderly script, they saw something they liked. Some scenes created the reaction I wanted. That was really all that mattered, since I don't mind fixing up a script as long as it has appeals. The worst that can happen is to write a perfect script, and no one wants to read it. Or just no one wants to your script, period.

The next draft I clarified a lot more of the world. Like writing any fantasy, I pulled out my hair trying to figure out how to get the logic in my head to make sense on page. Or figure out which of the logic in my head doesn't actually make logic sense. I wanted to create a Greek pantheon universe, where the people don't view the gods and rituals as a "religion" but as a way of life. Even after setting up clearer rules and putting in the god's story, my fellow leagues still pointed out a lot of things that didn't make sense, but more than that, I had to fix up my structure. The inciting incident was happening on page 50. Disaster.

I am now on the third draft of the script, and it seems to be the only thing that's going well currently in my life. The inciting incident is happening on pg 15. The end of first act at pg 37. Much closer to the mark. I've really strengthened my antagonists, and I have a clear view of where is this going scene by scene (for the next 30 pages anyway...). On the other hand, I look back and realize that, much of the rough draft is gone. The scenes that I originally wrote for the squeal factor are almost all tossed out to make way for plot-focused scenes. That, or maybe there're still there, I just no longer see it objectively. (I have a bad habit of hating all my jokes after reading it 3 times.) Sometimes I'm afraid that while making it a clearer, better, more professional script, I'm also butchering it. And maybe, the 4th or 5th draft what I have to do is to go back to the very beginning, the original goal, and have my focus for that draft be to make it young and fun again. Not that, er, it's not young and fun now.

4 Quadrants of Growth

Working at a small movie distribution company in the less-than-usual nonsense New York, I don't really get much big company pep talk. I do, however, have them relayed to me through my sister. One snippet that really caught my attention was the Quadrants of Growth (or something like that). Here's how it goes: you start out Unconsciously Incompetent (1), and move to Consciously Incompetent (2), then (hopefully eventually) move to to Consciously Competent (3), and finally one day you (will hopefully) be Unconsciously Competent (4).

The example given is driving. You start out as a kid sitting on your dad's lap turning the steering wheel and thinking you can totally do this. That's Unconsciously Incompetent (1). Then come 16 and first few days at driving school, you realize, wow, I totally suck, and become Consciously aware of your Incompetency (2). Because of this, you start practicing, and with hard work you become Consciously Competent (3) where you can actually drive well. But only when you pay attention and not be stupid and cocky. This is why there are so many teen driving accidents. Then over the years, driving well (should technically) become a second nature and you are Unconsciously Competent (4). Congratulations.

If you don't factor in the talent limitation and go for the be-all-you-can-be view, this quadrants can easily be applied to writing. Everyone who writes continually are moving their way through the 4 quadrants. The question is, where are you? The thought deeply bothers me. There are time which I feel I'm at Consciously Incompetent (2) moving toward Consciously Competent (3). During my more cocky moments I feel I'm already at Consciously Competent (3), and soon I'll become Unconsciously Competent (4). This is usually when I finish a draft (usually the first draft) and feel, hell yeah, this rocks! Give it 2 drafts and I'll be done ...Then the first round of critique comes around and I go home thinking, wow, I'm probably still Unconsciously Incompetent (1), moving to being consciously aware that I REALLY GOT TO STEP UP MY GAME. After sleeping on the comments, I then usually look back on the script and think, it wasn't bad, it just wasn't good enough. Yet. Hopefully. Maybe. Please?

The other question is, how long before I become Unconsciously Competent (4). There are days and nights which I wave my fist at the sky and think (due to poor sound proofing) I WILL BE GOOD DAMN IT! But when? 30? 40? 50? The number keep growing. I don't mind hard work, but traveling two-steps-forward-one-step-back is a honest but slow journey. A friend recently told me that she does believe that my writing has improved. But how much? An inch? A pound? If 1 is for monkies at typewriters and 100 is for the Bible/Shakespeare/What-Will-You, where am I? Meanwhile, I guess there's nothing to do but to keep trucking along. At the very least, I got my inciting incident happening at page 15 this time. I can still hear Zombie cheering at the news.

Wonderful Life

I've realized recently that since graduation, my days can be divided into three types:

A) In which I write nothing. I don't even pretend I'm thinking about my script. These days I cook, I clean, I go running, I hang out with friends, I watch TV, I go to the library or read in the park, I remember to eat fruits and vegetables, I consider getting a pot of lavender or a cat. I am a normal, functioning human who is generally happy.

B) In which I write. Or at least I say I'm going to write. In reality I usually only accomplish one or two pages, five if it's a super good day. Most of the time is actually spent in self hatred, pretending to write, getting distracted by TV or the internet, and punishing myself by doing dishes.

C) In which I WRITE. These are the days I really. Fucking. Write. I don't eat, I don't drink, I hardly go to the bathroom, I don't pick up my phone, cups of half-drank tea or water surround me. Usually with consecutive days like these, I can pound out a script from anywhere between a month to a week. During this time I don't sleep: I pass out, and dream unsettling dreams.

The past few days have been C), and I finally finished my rewrite, as according to my angry vow that I will complete it within a month. I mainly sustain off of left overs during this time. On Tuesday, it wasn't until I got up to get another cup of water, did the warning signs finally reach my brain, and I realize that the food has gone sour. By then I finished half the bowl without noticing. Scenes after scenes are bulldozed through. Chunks of script are ripped out and new characters/scenes put in place. And around 11:30, I finished the script (which, might be total crap filled with spelling mistakes, but I refuse to think about it right now). By then my brain has been rendered into a lump of tofu. Electrically charged, but with no higher function than bean curd. My apartment is a mess. The dishes are piling out of the sink. I haven't ran for a while and adrenaline is at an all time low (although in the past I've been able to get adrenaline rushes from writing). I needed to vacuum. I REALLY needed to do my laundry. I can smell my trash rotting in the kitchen. I realized that I didn't pick up my grandmother's calls three times in a row.

It's funny, but I never thought I had to choose between living healthily like a normal person, or writing and feeling like there's meaning to my life. During days which I don't write, it never ceases to amaze me how much time I have to do so many things. Is that what normal people feel like? To have HOURS after work doing whatever they please? At times I feel that somehow I can REALLY WRITE and carve out an hour or two to make sure my living standards have not gone subhuman, but so far no luck. It seems that I either go all the way or not at all.

Perhaps, in a few years time, I'd be able to achieve a balance.

Screenplay hard drive clutter

Last week I talked about the document I keep of cut passages from each of my screenplays and the nega-writing process. While I'm on the topic of peripheral files for a screenplay, I may as well touch on the other things that I accumulate during the writing of a first draft.

I keep a folder on my desktop that share their names with different writing projects I'm working on. In each of these folders I collect various pieces of media that are either inspired parts of the screenplay, are referenced by the characters, or are in some other way related. My current alpha project (a thriller that the fellow Leaguers are all familiar with) is no different, and its folder contains the following:

1) Locale photographs. Several are taken by myself, of locations I have in mind to use as reference when describing a character's surroundings. (For example, several scenes take place in a diner that I've modeled after one I used to eat at often in Ohio.)

2) Miscellaneous images. I have various jpegs that I stumbled over during the formative early months of my screenplay's life; a poster that hangs on a character's bedroom wall, and photos of strangers found on the internet who resemble the appearance I visualize for certain characters in my head. (Is that creepy? Maybe.)

3) MP3 files. Two songs are referenced in the screenplay, and there were a couple songs that helped me get into the right frame of mind for certain scenes. I keep these nearby in case I ever need to fall back into that mood.

Part of me is tempted to include this folder on the CD along with the PDF file when I hand the draft to a friend to get their take on it, but I'm afraid that offering that type of guidance would distract them from giving me an unbiased reading and an unhindered feedback session.

Nega-writing

Over the weekend, I believe I may have actually nega-written.

After two solid, drawn-out sessions in front of Final Draft, I came out with a lower page count than I went in with. The fruits of the weekend's labors amounted me taking out two already-written scenes and replacing them with entirely new ones.

In the course of writing any first draft, I fall into a pattern of compulsive self-editing. I wouldn't be surprised if every page I write is composed of the chopped-up remains of three others.

I keep a separate document for every script where I keep copies of all of the scenes that I cut for one reason or another. In many cases there may be something I liked in them that just wasn't right for the overall story, or it was an early idea that was later pushed out of the way for something I thought of later and just liked more. I keep copies of these scenes in case I can use them elsewhere, either in another place in the same screenplay or for a different project altogether.

I noted today that the "deleted scenes" document has just passed 30 pages for my current project, and I've yet to finish my first draft. Should I be alarmed?

Voices in My Head Put Me to Sleep

Like Onyx Enforcer, I don’t have a set writing process. While most times I like to write out an extensive beat sheet before I begin, the script I’m currently working on went through little to no planning, and is so far the smoothest writing I’ve done in years. I also find inspiration from very different places for each scripts, and while music is always playing when I write (I can’t stand writing to silence), it doesn’t really influence what I write.

I think the only consistent writing process for all of my scripts is character building. While the scripts always start with an one-line idea, it’s when I figure out what kind of person the main characters are do the story come together. Psychology fascinates me, and I like giving characters different conscious, subconscious, and unconscious goals, or conflicting/ hypocritical desires. Most of the time if they stay in my head for too long they become pretty broken and twisted, but to my delight the people in my two recent scripts are staying very healthy.

While the script is under construction, I like to let my characters run around in my head and do whatever they want: Meet another character, go to a new town, admire a knife, stalk a kill, eat some breakfast, go camping, get upset, be happy. It’s basically day dreaming, but without me. I also play the scenes I know I want to write over and over and over until the moment I write it (that’s actually how I put myself to sleep every night).

I suppose it is because I revolve around character rather than plot, if I don’t know the ending to a script I simply can’t begin to write, not even the rough draft. This is because without knowing exactly how it will go down, my characters would (like normal humans) simply drag the conflict out as long as humanly possible until it simply die anti-climatically, or suddenly ends with an abrupt burst of violence.

Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

Jumping off Cake Man’s Don’t Never Change, I really don’t know if I have a regular enough process to the extent that I’d call it my “writing process”. I would say that I have writing habits that fluctuate greatly. I’m a young writer, and perhaps when I’m older things will be more concrete, but right now they’re all over the place. If anything they center around music lately.

I’ve usually been off and on with writing with music. I find that sometimes it helps a great deal to listen to an instrumental tune that captures the mood of a script or scene. For the most part I found that songs with lyrics were very distracting, but lately I do a lot of writing to songs with lyrics. Most recently I’ve been obsessively listening to Phobia by Breaking Benjamin, an alternative metal group. Zombie, the music guru in the group, is probably cringing at my music selection right now, cringing or cutting himself. Odd it may be (especially if you knew me) but I like it damn it, and I write tons of pages through 46 minute loops of that album. Thing is, I don’t know if those pages are any good yet seeing that nobody has read them. This habit of listening to songs with lyrics has a present, certainly a past, and possibly a future with me. Speaking about that past.

My current writing habit was born out of desperate times, back when I was crashing at my brother’s place for nine months. I was doing some writing when my work was interrupted by my brother’s roommate having what must have been acrobatic sex with his girlfriend. I can say for certain that writing to people having sex is a very bad writing habit. I didn’t have my own music to escape to, so I just put on some headphones and listened to some of my brother’s stuff. The songs had lyrics and the evening turned out to be one of my most productive in terms of putting out pages. And so the habit was born. I’m going to try and get some eyes on my new pages soon. My last script was written mostly to a combination of Red Hot Chilipeppers and Sia, and those pages were received well somehow. If these new ones are ok then maybe I’m a step closer to my writing process.

Don't Never Change

We talk a lot on this blog about writing, our projects, our experiences. It's weird, then, that we haven't really written about our actual writing processes.

As you can tell from my Writing Weeks, I'm abut 19 weeks into the year and have completed two first drafts of new scripts from scratch. Two new specs in about 10 weeks apiece. Factor in the fact that I tend to experience a two week lull after completing a project, and that brings it down to about 8 weeks I spend on a script. From start of the outline to finishing the draft. Yeah, I'm fast (... in my writing).

Don't get me wrong, though, I don't consider those two months on each script to be all that I need to complete a project. I'm usually pleased with my first drafts, though aware of the work they need. I just can't get myself to look at them objectively for a very long time, though - hence the two week lull, followed by the second, new project. It takes me a good deal of time before I can look at a script I've written and get past that initial feeling of pride and accomplishment to the point where I can see the (sometimes large) flaws in it.

Once I do finally decide to embark upon a rewrite, it's often a messy experience. I usually still find myself too wedded to my pages to just flat out cut them completely and start from scratch, so I tend to wind up re-writing from the first page on, correcting scenes and dialogue as I go, but leaving everything ahead untouched for the time being. Anyone who reads a draft of one of my specs in this state would wonder why the hell I spent so much time and money studying screenwriting - pages 1-30 would seem like a completely different script from 31 onward, whole scenes would be missing, characters would be completely different with the turn of a page.

It might not be the most effective (and is probably evidence of me still being too unwilling to change what I've written - though I have done cold page 1 rewrites before). In time, I'll probably find a better way. But for now that's just how I seem to work. What about you, what's your process?

Honey and Whip

While the Writing Block is a true and real, sometimes the enemy is just your own laziness, aka, the Slump.

I’ve never had too much problem with the Writing Block. When I do, I contribute it to the work of the Devil, and tell myself “My Lord and Savior will help me overcome Goddamn it!!” And usually within a few hours I do. The Slump on the other hand, not so much. It’s hard to pray to God for help in defeating your own self. Mainly because it sounds like it’ll hurt, a lot (I’ve yet to decide which of the Old Testament deaths is the worst way to go). And, honestly, being lazy feels So. Damn. Good. So in these cases, I usually turn to the only logical help to get me to write again: rewards and punishments.

Over lunch last week, Zombie told me that he would place Twin Peaks on his desk, forcing himself to write for two hours before he can watch one hour. It reminded me of my one-time diet back in high school, where I’d slap a candy bar and giant jug of water on my desk every night. However, those interested in psychology would notice that Zombie works with rewards (as most parenting books suggest), while I’m a sucker for punishments. Hey, whatever works for you right? Zombie’s almost done with his script, and I lost 15 pounds.

My punishments for writing tend to be very primal: you can’t have dinner until you hit page 45. No sleeping until you finishes this scene. No bathroom break until the end of the page. While they work, I tend to have very bad health when I write.

I’ve tried more humane punishments with myself: No watching Law and Order until you’ve written this scene. If you can’t write go do the dishes. They don’t work. While guilt can keep me from actually eating, these humane punishments just piss me off and I end up saying fuck this to my script and watch SVU while the dishes pile up.

If you have any good ways to get out of the Slump, please share. My body can only take so much and I’ve got a script to write.

Thinking Vs. Typing

I deal every day with a particularly unhealthy but alternately helpful affliction. A curse, possibly, passed to me through genetics, or perhaps stemming from some strain of OCD. In short, if I go a day without putting some time into my writing I'm struck with such an extreme feeling of guilt that I just can't enjoy anything else I may be doing.

On one hand, this makes it hard for me to take the occasional day off, but on the other it helps keep me productive as a writer. It's a necessary evil, I guess. I wish I could take a day every now and then just to relax without falling into a miniature and short-lived bout of self-loathing, but I'm afraid if I wasn't like this I would become much more lax in regards to my writing.

The last week has been a very productive one for me. From Friday the 25th through Thursday the 1st I was able to write 27 new pages on my current project, putting me just into the final act of my screenplay. Twenty seven pages in a week is A LOT for me. I'm a slow writer - I wish I could write at fellow Leaguers Cake Man or DOA's pace (we all wish we could write as quickly as DOA, I'm sure) but everyone's different. I'll take what I can.

I hit a wall this weekend, though. Friday, half a page; Saturday, half a page. This morning I'm awake at 6:30 and staring at Final Draft, just unable to move my fingers to the keys. I've hit a point in my screenplay where I need to hunker down and figure out how I'm going to tie off my remaining loose ends. Where it stands now, there are three hanging threads I need to explain, and I'm not 100% sure. Not to say I don't have ways to solve them - it's just deciding which I like best and which will make the most sense to people who haven't had these characters in their heads for six months already.

I ended up taking my coffee out to our balcony and sitting out there for a few quiet morning hours, making notes and putting a lot of deep thought into my script. I feel like I got a lot done and solved a few problems I'd been struggling with, but I never actually typed a word.

Part of me feels like I had a productive writing session, but another part (the more neurotic part) just sees that my page count hasn't gone up since yesterday.

I guess my question to you guys is: do you still feel like you're writing if you're not actually writing anything? Is a writing session that doesn't produce pages still time well-spent?

Search for Inspiration

Last Thursday I caught myself adding Instruments of Torture to my library request list, and realized it was time to take another dose of romantic comedies to get back on track.

Friday I watched The Big Lebowski. No romance, but I was stuck at a (hot) math student’s apartment, and it was either that or Lord of the Rings. I left around 3am uninspired. Funny stuff, but it had nothing to do with my script.

Saturday was Chasing Amy, Definitely, Maybe, and somehow Dance for Camera 2 and clips from 21 Grams were thrown in the mix. I was surprisingly disappointed by Chasing Amy. I had expected it to be mind-blowingly good....and it was good 2/3 of the way through. But the during last third I was outraged and flabbergasted instead. Definitely, Maybe on the other hand, turned out to be unexpectedly good. However, even with a happy ending, it was an extremely depressing movie about life. I was briefly cheered up by the perfectly cooked fish for dinner. After all, there was still tomorrow.

Sunday after church, I pulled out the last romantic comedy I had prepped: Someone Like You. It seemed like a winner: a) it was suggested to me by a normal, happy, non-writer girl, b) like my script, one of the love interest was a player, c) Hugh Jackman was in it. How could this possibly not spark some idea or motivation me to write? Well it didn’t.

At that point, I gave up. All that love and happiness were annoying the hell out of me. Screw my script. If I was going to waste a whole weekend, I'm going to enjoy wasting it. I rolled onto the carpet with a bag of white cheddar corn puffs and began binging on House M.D.

After four episodes back to back, somehow there were fifteen new pages attached to my script.

Moral of this story: Hugh Laurie is MAGIC.

Hopes and Fears

In order to avoid writing last night, I started scrubbing the bathroom. It’s always a bad sign when I prefer to get on my hands and knees and pull weeks of hair out of the drain rather than write, but hell, I was even ready to do the dishes, vacuum the floor, balance my book, AND call my mother to stall the enviable need to open Final Draft. Yet denial can only last for so long. Bathroom cleaning only takes 20 mins tops. While washing out the remains of Scrubbing Bubbles, the sense of dread I blocked returned.

The forced I used in pouring out the bucket of water must have been filled with displaced anger, because it promptly knocked three tiles surrounding the tub off. Along with the tiles, grout showered down into my newly-cleaned tub. Where the tiles have once been is a section of soft, black, moldy wall. I stared at it for a moment, then went and wrote, trying to block out everything else.

I wrote more than usual. It was a very productive night.