There are so many wonderful writers I know and we are all so vastly different but there are a few things we share aside from the need/love of writing. Specifically, we all share the presence of people in our lives that assume writing is very easy. I mean you just make stuff up, right? Or there are those that say, so what it’s hard? Push through. Or there are those who have the romantic relationship with writing which only sets you up for failure (if romanticizing the fully unknown doesn’t work for love, why would it work for anything else?). Here’s how it goes for me:
- Great idea pops itself into my head at usually not a convenient time causing me to either zone out, grab a napkin, try to remember, forget, remember again at another time, magic dust sifted off and idea is a little less than the initial great formation.
-open blank document. stare. be scared. first word struggles. first word deleted. decide to be zen and just write it out. usually like that. come back and realize you must do this sweaty palm typing all over again.
-panic when story structure does not go smoothly despite outline or no outline or clear steps in head.
-write it out.
-decide you are really not killing any of your children if yo cut that monologue that doesn’t work. i for one never use the cut stuff again. it sounds great but it sounded great THERE and it doesn’t fit there so it doesn’t matter.
-share. with people. preferably other writers. if you share with actors, they either smile blankly or digest the thing whole and want it to be part of their fabric and ask you tons of questions you haven’t really thought of. sometimes this is great. sometimes you get an actor or actors who have decided they know this thing better than you and there is no way to talk them away from this concept. nobody got anywhere being a stage mother.
-hear comments. related to above. the magic of getting notes is pretty easy. if you let it, it will make you a patient in the bin but if you become liquid, it will become another exercise in getting to know others (sort of like eavesdropping). first, realize that people’s comments are coming from them - not from some magical unbiased think tank. this is not bad. sometimes people’s experiences are wonderful tools to use. other times, not so much. but they don’t know this so don’t be defensive towards them. they know what they know. how you get through this process is simple. write down what’s useful, pretend to write down everything else.
-remember your own thoughts after hearing play out loud. a few times. the first time you might want to peel your skin off, pee, run and crave oxygen at the same time. that happens to me. i’m no good the first time around. my heart wants to say the lines and that’s not possible so my mouth is forced shut. the second time, you can hear the gaps, run into the bumps, realize when a line is said not how you intended (decide if that’s your fault or if the actor just missed the lead in), figure out how to fix it.
The thread here is that you have to stay fluid in the process. If you have decided already how things should go, you might miss out on the best way they can go. What if? is never a bad thing to keep asking. Tune out the people who think you just sit down and start typing fast. Confidence works in life and more so in art. If you have a day job, realize that art is not the same structure. There is no boss when writing. No one can boss creative process. Well, that’s wrong. Madonna can boss creative process. But you’re not Madonna. So there’s that.
Just remember to cheerlead yourself until you get a posse who does it. You shouldn’t stop when you get a posse but you also don’t have to be sad you don’t have one when you don’t because you are more than enough.
TweetNo Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.