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.

Need A Lifeline

Today was... today I capsized. Throw me a lifeline.

Like most screenwriters, or people aspiring to be screenwriters, I have a day job, which I can tolerate most of the time. As far as day jobs go, it's really not that bad. But today, I felt like I was drowning. Today was one of those days where I realize just how much time I spend in a place that I don't want to be. For the most part, I manage to allow myself to care about work only when I'm actually in the office. And I care to the point where I know what I have to do and I do it, but I can just as easily take a breath, step out of the office, and be in my own place again. But today, after various office crap happened, I was hit in the face by the notion that I need something more. Soon.

I don't mind working, but I want to work for me, to my own ends. I need a change. I need to feel a big break coming on, and I need to know that I'm working toward that. Query letters are a good place to start, but with a script out to two competitions, I don't want to send anything out prematurely. Then again, it's over three months until I'll start hearing word from these competitions, so what do I do in the mean time?

You see our blog, and it's certainly come a long way in the past few weeks, which is great. We're hoping to have readings this summer of our work and maybe even make a short film together. But I'm still looking for the next big step. I don't want the League and my computer to be the only things that get to know my work in the next three months, or the next three years. Like the rest of the Leaguers, I'm young. But (and not to make a horrible joke), I'm also restless.

Throw me a lifeline. I'm swimming to shore, but on days like today, I just get tired. I've got a lot of time to work my way up, I know, but that's a lot of time I could be out of the water, too.

The Writing Week part 18

This week was mostly about re-writes, and gearing up for the next project I’m jumping into (what that is, I still don’t know for sure). Like a giddy schoolboy bringing home a new Batman comic book (pretty much what I am), I sat down with my pages and read through them last Wednesday, which I took off from work, in part so I could have time to read the pages in one sitting.

Gotta say, I was surprised. The “problem” scenes really weren’t. They read alright to me, and actually wound up being less of a concern than something else. Coming in at 90 pages with a fair bit of quick dialogue, this script is a breeze to read. (Actually, for some reason, I had a target length of 88 pages, which is exactly where I ended the first draft—random, huh?) My biggest concern wound up being the pacing and the time I allotted for detective work within the script. There is, as you might imagine, a bit of police procedural in the project, and I was worried that I hadn’t afforded it enough time to come together cohesively. As a whole, though, I was really pleased with the draft, especially considering I hadn’t outlined it.

Zombie and I are roommates, so I cheated a bit and picked his brain about my script after he read it, despite the fact that the League is not meeting until Wednesday. He assured me that the pacing and police work was on, and illuminated something for me about the problem scenes I was initially concerned with. Basically, they are about interactions between two characters, but I never thought to show the evolving relationship by only using one character on screen at a time. That new idea will solve a lot of the problems, condense the scenes of interaction, and allow me more building room when the two are on scene together.

Writing, no matter how many hours spent at a computer or with a notepad alone, is never a solitary thing.

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?

With Reservations

My first internship with a major player in the film industry was at the now defunct New Line Cinema. I spent a great two semesters there, learning a lot (and watching a ton of films during the Tribeca Film Festival). Recently, I opened an issue of Creative Screenwriting and saw, under the Sundance coverage, that one of the very first scripts I wrote coverage on, FROZEN RIVER, premiered at the festival this year. I had passed on the script, “with reservations.” I liked it, but just didn’t see the potential for huge earnings and did not recognize it as different enough from other independents to stand out on the marquee, shelf, or online queues.

Seeing the (brief) mention and praise that the film got started me thinking. This was something I had hesitatingly passed on, yet it got made. Obviously, the filmmaker was dedicated to her idea, which is commendable. But was I right to pass on it, or, in lieu of the fact that it was produced, should I have been one of the first to say, “someone make this”? I like to think I have a good eye for potential, so now I ask myself, what does this film being made mean?

I should tell you that New Line didn’t wind up producing the film (Sony Picture Classics wound up being the distributor, I think). Of course, that decision not to go with it had very little to do with the coverage I wrote as an intern. Still, here’s a project that, if I was in charge of, I would have said no to. Someone else saw merit in it, and will be distributing it. Granted, a lot of movies get picked up and distributed that don’t deserve it or that have been passed by other companies, and I guess the “rightness” or “wrongness” of my decision will really only be apparent after the release, based on the numbers. But this whole situation just got me thinking about how hard it can be to sell your film, no matter how committed you might be to it, no matter how good it might be. Someone will pass it, someone will scoop it up, and someone might roll in money because of it. You just never know.

Fare thee well, LoKor

As you can tell from both what we've said and the aesthetic and content-based changes we've made to the site recently, The League is undergoing a period of great change. Most of that change is good, for the best. However, some of it was also unwanted and sad, albeit predictable.

LoKor, after being there in the beginning and helping to create The League, has left the group. While I won't go into much detail on why here, as I'm sure if he wants to, he will do so, I will say that he has gone on to pursue something else, career-wise, which he is much more invested in at the moment. Though those of us still in the League do not want to give up trying to write professionally, we understand that one's heart must be in it 100% to do that. LoKor's just wasn't anymore, and we, as his friends and fellow Leaguers, understood that.

LoKor, we'll avenge you if it's the last thing we do. Writers Block will pay for this!

What the Hell?!?

A little back story: not only do I write screenplays, but I also dabble in stage plays every now and then. My leaning is, on the whole, toward the screen. But every now and then I have an idea for the theater, and write that. A while ago, I submitted to a play development festival, which would have brought me cross country to spend a week in a cabin working on a play I wrote. My kind of thing.

Today, I found out I didn't get in. That's not a huge disappointment. We in the League all know that rejection and thick skins are essential to this business. What got me, though, was the reason for the rejection. Essentially, I received a mass email indicating that the company, which shall remain nameless, received more submissions than expected (OK, that happen). However, the staff was unable to read all of the material (...OK). As a result, the facilitators of the festival calculated the number of plays they could read in two months, which wound up being half of the submissions.

They had a lottery for which plays were going to be read, and cast the other half aside without a second glance.

OK, so, I like to think I'm level headed. And, like I said, it's not the rejection that bugs me, but the reason for it. I work with over 300 non-profit theatre companies in NYC, many of which are a two or three person staff. Yet, these companies hold festivals and read through everything that is submitted. To me, there is no justification for an arts organization, be it for the stage or the screen, to claim to promote new writers and develop new work, and not even read the work submitted! As unknown writers, we rely upon opportunities such as this festival to help us further our careers, and when the companies sponsoring them are overwhelmed and therefore neglect to read 50% of the material submitted to them, no kind words ease the burn felt by those left in the dark.

I fully understand the feeling of being overwhelmed by a project like this festival I submitted to, but I believe that a company's ability to simply back out of their commitment to artists is a frightful thing. Most of us in the League have work out to other competitions. Granted, those are national, well publicized, well managed screenplay competitions. Still, if all of a sudden we received an email telling us that such and such festival received too many screenplays and will only read titles that start with letters A-M, we would feel incredibly gypped (if we fell after N).

My anger comes from this feeling that it's hard enough to make it as a writer. We don't need companies that work for writers making it more difficult. In future years, I hope that this festival I was inappropriately dropped from will figure out how it can manage, and make its new policies very clear to all those submitting work. I hope that this is a one time thing, and not something indicative of a larger issue.

It's great that so many people are writing that writing competitions feel burdened. It's terrible, though, that a writer cannot even be guaranteed that someone will read his or her work when submitting to a competition.

Is this a common occurrence?