Tag Archives: writing

If you’re going to shoot, shoot.

I recently read a post from Mike Cane’s xBlog that re-posted an essay from 1922 titled “Why I Quit Being So Accomodating.” The essay included the following section:

“Surely, if life means anything at all, it means that each of us is entrusted with a certain irreplaceable fund of hours and weeks and years. To let anybody and everybody fritter that fund away is as if the trustee of an estate were to deposit the estate’s funds in a bank and issue check books to whoever applied.”

The tl;dr version of the article: Your time is precious and you should be selective to whom you offer it to, as you will never get this time back. Those who freely give away their time at the expense of their work do not respect their time and thus do not have their time respected by others.

There’s some generally solid, applicable advice in this column from almost a century ago, but there’s a specific aspect of this that is worth looking at for anybody who wants to call themself a writer, and what it means to make that distinction.

At the basic level, a writer is not about the external validation of their work (sold screenplays, published novels, paycheck, awards, etc.), but about the consistent effort to produce work. Do you sit down and put words together regularly? Are you working toward improving the quality of what you write? Great! That’s being a writer.

Cultivating the practice of writing requires effort and intention. Like the line from The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, “If you want to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” Writers make the time to write, they don’t just talk about it. They do the work.

And sometimes it’s frustrating. A factor that keeps people who work hard at their writing from willingly identifying as a writer is thinking that all they write is crap. There’s a quote from Brian Eno I keep up in my workspace: “The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.”

Take your time seriously. Put the words on the page, even if they suck. Keep doing it, and they’ll suck less. They might even become good. But you can’t make it better until you’ve made it, and you can’t make it until you make the time.

A matter of perspective

This is a corollary to the previous post on the dangers of the writing what you know mentality. If you do choose to write a story based on something from your own personal experience, the closer you are to that moment, the less sense of perspective you have on it.

Think about perspective as being the range of magnification that you can see an event with. When dealing with something that happened five minutes ago, you can only see the situation in close up. You’re able to see the details of that moment, but not the larger context. Compare that experience to something memorable that happened seven years ago. You can still see the close up details of the event, but you can also pull further back to see the chain of cause and effect that lead to and from that moment for you. You can pull further back to see how that moment relates to other, similar moments you may have experienced. You can even see how others involved in that moment have been affected by it, and you may even be able to make assumptions about their motivations and actions while in the moment you’re remembering.

There’s also a process of natural selection that happens to choosing ideas to work with. Every idea seems fantastic when you first have it. Ideas that still seem great months or even years later are ones with staying power. Writing something based on an event that hasn’t had that time to fight it out with competing ideas does a disservice not only to your writing, but the idea. Without giving the idea time to prove its strength and fully ripen, you’re cutting the thought off at the root and freezing it in a state of immature development.

This isn’t to say that an idea based on something that has happened to you recently can’t become a great story, but by giving the inspiring event time to move into the past tense, you allow yourself to detach the idea from the facts of the moment so that you can focus more on its truth. “That’s how it actually happened!” is a weak justification for plotting, but weaving something that did happen into a fictionalized version of events can be a way to make the fictionalized aspects of a story feel more honest and real.

Your duty is to your story, not to your past.

Off to the side

I keep a mini legal notepad next to my keyboard when I’m writing scenes. It’s there for when I need a push on figuring out what to type next. For example, sometimes I’ll look at the wording of a line of dialogue and it feels wrong. I dash off 10 or so different versions of the line on the notepad, then keep moving.

You could spend hours on a single line of dialogue, character introduction, or action line. Type. Delete. Type. Delete. The computer lets you get stuck in this cycle as long as you let it.

That’s why I have the notepad. It has a physical limit, so I can see when I hit a point where I’m just spinning my wheels. It’s outside of the main document I’m working in, so I don’t feel pressured to hit the target all at once. Sometimes combining parts of different attempts into a Frankenline does the trick.

There’s a pressure that can come from looking at things in context, especially when the document’s page count gets larger. The notepad is a pressure release valve. Over there, away from the screen, it’s a place to play and discover.

Because writing should be fun.

If you can read this, you are not writing

You are reading this sentence instead of writing one of your own.

You are continuing to read despite the suggestion that your time would be better served writing.

This is not a blog post meant to offer a piece of advice or a strategy. This is an alarm clock. Every time you move on to the next sentence instead of closing your browser to work on your writing, you’re hitting the snooze button.

Wake up.

Actionable Steps

I don’t try to disguise my appreciation for things relating to Getting Things Done. The idea of breaking a large task down into smaller steps that you can tackle in a single period of work is a helpful motivational tool.

But what should a writer consider an actionable step to be? What units should you use to measure your work?

Word Based

Cases Where This Method May Be Beneficial: First Drafts

I don’t feel that how many words you get on the page is a good way to gauge screenwriting. There’s an emphasis on using as few words as possible to get the story across, and you’ll find yourself cutting back a lot as you edit. Measuring in this way may lead to prose-styled passages that will only be deleted during revision.

However, it can be a good way to get words onto the page. You may pad some sections with additional verbage, but you’re also giving yourself a clear, measurable way of saying that you did what you deem to be an appropriate amount of writing.

If you’re not planning to show this draft without first editing, this might be the way to structure your work.

Page Based

Cases Where This Method May Be Beneficial: Workshop Settings, Early Drafts

This goes along with my thoughts on measuring by word count, as you can get into other bad habits when measuring this way.

It’s very easy to pad your page count.

Incredibly easy.

Get the picture?

However, it can be helpful to measure your work by page count when thinking about pacing. Going off the generally applied measurement that one page equals one minute of screentime, keeping an eye to how many pages you’re using will make you mindful of how long scenes are pacing out, and the general timing of the finished script.

Additionally, when you have smaller, regular deadlines, such as in a workshop group, it can be helpful to measure your efforts by pages written. Depending on the structure of the group, only so much time can be spent on each person’s work. Keeping yourself on task, as well as within the limits of your class or group, can be a good way to measure your work.

Time Based

Cases Where This Method May Be Beneficial: Working Under Self-Imposed Deadline, Building The Writing Habit

You say to yourself, “I will write for X amount of time every day, regardless of how many finished pages this creates.”There will be times when an hour leads to half a page. Other times, five or more pages. It depends on how you outline, or how mentally prepared you are for your writing session. If nobody is impatiently waiting to read your pages, this method may work for you.

Additionally, choosing to block off a set amount of time for writing is a strong way to encourage the development of the writing habit. The mental muscles involved in writing will get a regular workout, making it easier to focus should you have a strict deadline in the future.

Scene Based

Cases Where This Method May Be Beneficial: Polished Drafts

Measuring your work in dramatic beats may be helpful for later revisions. You’ve been over the story before. You’ve outlined and re-outlined. You know the road map, and now you need to take the time with each scene to improve it. Not every scene is of equal page length, but every beat should be given its due consideration with a rewrite.

This is also a good way of splitting up the work into smaller sections when you have a hard deadline. You know how long you have to complete the script, you have your outline, and you can easily do the math to subdivide the work.

Above All, Don’t Go Nuts

Do you think you can write 20 pages a day, every day?

Don’t be surprised if you find out you can’t.

Be a patient and honest observer of your own habits, as well as the committments in your life that aren’t related to writing. Adjust your scheduling accordingly. A plan that doesn’t reflect reality isn’t a good plan.