writing – Page 13 – This Builds Character

Don’t Be A Bad Boss (When You’re Your Own Boss)

Unless you’re getting a check for turning in what you’re writing, you’re your own boss. But, in this situation, don’t forget that you’re also your own employee.

It can be easier to manage others than to manage yourself. When dealing with another person, you have feedback in their responses to your management. When you delegate work to them, you measure their performance, then focus your attention on other tasks while they do their share of the work. When you set a deadline or goal, they need to work according to your standards. It’s on them.

This isn’t how it works when you’re the whole chain of command. You delegate work to yourself. You need to keep clear on both the big picture and the day to day details. If something is going to get done, it needs to be done by you.

So, how do you avoid becoming your own nightmare boss? It goes beyond being gentle with yourself.¹

Think About Your Previous Bosses

No matter what the business, there are general qualities that separate an effective boss from an ineffective one. Look back on the previous employers, teachers, mentors, etc. you’ve had in your life.

What were some of the most succesful ways they motivated you? How did they communicate goals and expectations? Did they work with you to set realistic deadlines and measure your performance accordingly? How did they keep things organized?

Find An Assistant Manager

Think about this person as the XO on a naval ship. Part of their duties involve making sure the captain doesn’t make decisions that will jeopardize the crew or their mission.² There’s a similar need for that when managing yourself.

Find someone who has an interest in your goals and is willing to keep tabs on you. A significant other, a parent, another writer. Anybody that you have regular contact with and who you trust.

Let this person in on your goals, plans for accomplishing them, and the deadlines you’re planning to work with. The better they know you, the better they’ll be at helping you evaluate if you’re creating unrealistic expectations for yourself (or if you could do more).

At the end of the day, you need to call the shots, but having an outside voice will help you to put things in perspective.

Hard Deadlines vs. Soft Deadlines

A hard deadline is when somebody else needs to see something by a set date. Any deadline you set for yourself with no external force involved is a soft deadline. Period.

A soft deadline can be moved, as needed. Yes, it’s important to set a goal and make the mad dash for it, but if it looks like you won’t make it without multiple sleepless nights, ask yourself if it might be worth it to push things back a bit. This is one of those situations where it’s good to check in with your Assistant Manager, both to remind you when a delay is a good idea, and to help keep you honest if you move the goalposts too often.

Keep Everything Outside Of Your Head

Use a calendar. Find a task list method that works for you. Make countdown signs on a whiteboard when a big deadline is coming up.

The more you try to just remember, the harder it is to remember it all. Save your brain power for the things that really matter and keep hard (and/or digital) copies of all your planning and administrative information.

Give Yourself A Day Off If You Need It

You can’t fake calling in sick when you’re your own boss. You are completely aware of any reasons you decide not to work on a given day. You aren’t just Ferris Bueller. You’re also Mr. Rooney.³

But you can’t let yourself take the attitude of a Mr. Rooney. If you feel you have a completely valid reason to have a Me Party,⁴ or take care of something else that’s come up, do it. Unless it becomes a nine-day bender of Netflix Watch Instantly and cookie dough straight from the tube, it’s not the worst thing in the world.

See previous post on being gentle with yourself. ↩
For examples of this, see every naval movie, ever. Also, most space movies where there are more than five crew members on a ship. ↩
If you’ve checked this footnote, it may mean you haven’t seen this movie. If that’s the case, please fix that as quickly as possible. It is so choice. ↩
A party for one. ↩

They Didn’t Read It Wrong

No matter if you’re a beginning writer or have several years and numerous scripts under your belt, you have the potential in you to be That Guy.

Say somebody makes a critical comment about your script that you don’t agree with. It could be a teacher, someone in a workshopping group, or (if the fates favor you) a creative executive.

If you have the urge to say any of the following, don’t.

You read it wrong.
That’s not what I meant.
But I’m not trying to do (X)
That’s not how I see it.

There are plenty of reasons to not respond to criticism with antagonistic and defensive posturing, but it all boils down to one thing: If you don’t respond well to criticism, people will believe you are difficult to work with.

But what happens if you can’t help yourself? If you’re absolutely certain, in that moment, that what they’ve said is completely off base and they have no idea how good your script actually is? That this person claiming to want to help you is actually trying to do damage to your masterpiece?

1. Appreciate that somebody read your writing

Seriously.

It is more likely that someone who is willing to take the time to read what you’ve written and provide you with constructive feedback is genuinely interested in helping you make it the best it can be than that they are trying to sabotage or dishearten you. They could be doing other things, but they believe that it’s worth their time to work with you.

They’ve given time to consider your work, and you should be willing to respond in kind by taking time to genuinely consider their comments.

2. Believe that you are not your script

Even in situations where you think that criticism is personal, you can not respond to it as such. An imperfect script does not mean you are a bad writer. It simply means that you have yet to find the best way to get across the story you’re trying to tell. Any critical comment that is made is being made about a single, changeable document that exists outside of yourself.

Also, much like how you are not your script, your idea is not your script. If you believe something is in the pages that other people aren’t seeing, you must be willing to accept that something may have not made the transition from your mind to the page. Things can get lost in transit, and the only way to ensure that everything reaches its destination properly is to pay attention when people say something is missing.

3. Remember that you aren’t going to have all the good ideas.

This isn’t to try and dismantle your confidence or to suggest that you don’t have a dozen brilliant notions before breakfast every day, but you need to accept that someone other than you might have a perfectly logical suggestion for something you’re working on.

Unless you are directly plagiarizing, there is nothing wrong with finding a way to incorporate ideas that didn’t originate inside your brain into your work. Consider, in fact, that none of the ideas you have are completely original to your mind, because they all come as a response to the stimuli you process from the world around you. Every idea has an origin outside yourself, so it’s not too much of a stretch to then accept that another person might be able to have an applicable and helpful idea to contribute to your script.

4. Look for the note behind the note

Sometimes it’s not easy to articulate what’s not working. Sometimes smaller symptoms get the attention when a larger problem is lurking beneath the surface. That’s when you need to see what’s underlying the criticism.

It’s a two-way street: If you make a knee-jerk defensive response to a comment that doesn’t quite get to the root of the problem, neither you nor the person who read your script are getting any closer to finding a way to make it better. Absorb the comments. Digest them. Ask questions. Come back later and look over what’s been said and try to determine what the underlying points actually are.

In summary: Be grateful. Be humble. Be open to ideas. If you already think your script is perfect, you will miss countless ways you can make it better.

Counterpoint: In Defense Of Writing Without A Net

If you think staring at the blank page is intimidating, imagine staring at 100 blank pages. All at once.

Sometimes, that’s what outlining feels like. You look at the outline, and you see the spaces where all the moving parts are supposed to go, but you’re not sure what goes where. Or you have all these different elements cobbled into a Rube Goldberg device, and you’re not sure if the end result will be anything like what you intended.

Every so often, it’s a good idea to set the outline aside and dig in. Write a scene. Write three. Don’t think any further ahead than five pages.

What you’ll find is that you can get a grasp on something concrete. The voices of your characters. One or two specific actions. An aspect of the location you hadn’t thought of before.

It’s a form of reverse-engineering your outline. By taking a moment to live and breathe in the world of the story, you see how some of the smaller parts function. When you see that, you can extrapolate where they can go from here.

Is this a good way to write an entire screenplay? Not generally, as tunnel vision can set in and cause you to miss the opportunities that planning helps to create. But this technique can be used as part of a middle path between the control and planning of outlining and the unbridled creativity of just ripping through pages.

Point: Outlining is Awesome

Seriously.

A good, thorough outline makes actual writing feel effortless. All the hard work has been done! You know who’s in the scene, where it takes place, and what should happen. Maybe some of the dialogue is even set.

Making a solid outline before you begin writing creates a sense of direction. You know where you’ll be going and how close you are to reaching your destination. It’s a set of specific goal markers that allow you to stay motivated as you move forward. At any given point, you will know you are X number of scenes from a completed draft.

Additionally, there’s an additional distance that you get with the outline. It’s separate from your script, though it’s based around the same ideas. This means you can add things to the outline and develop them without the pressure of seeing them in script form. The outline will never be a perfect document, because that’s not its intent. It’s meant to lead the way.

Think about it like a cartographer going into unknown territory. The map that they create can be extremely detailed, taking a long time to produce. While that detailed map may help future travelers as they venture through this land, there comes a point where additional detail becomes more decorative than useful. The shape of the coastline is important. The exact number of trees along a path towards a valley is not.

In this analogy, you are both the cartographer and the adventurer to come. First, you populate the landscape and give it a general shape. Then, as you write, you move through that place in its full detail, looking to the map as reference if you should lose your bearings.

These analogies aren’t just chosen at random. Writing is an adventure, as grand an adventure as you make it for yourself. You may not be discovering things as they are, but you are creating a world for others to explore. And much like actual explorers, this adventure should not be undertaken with reckless, aimless abandon.

Protagonists Should Make Mistakes

For our purposes, a mistake should be taken to mean any action or decision that leads to further negative consequences for the character. Even something that could be seen as an objectively good action (ex: A child feeds a hungry, stray dog) can have additional consequences (The dog follows the child home, and her/his parents do not want a dog in the house.)

Mistakes deepen our understanding of a character. An individual’s choices are informed by their backstory, their priorities, their temperament, and so on. What is important to your character? What blind spots does your character have? When faced with a difficult decision, what’s the mental flow chart they go through to make the call, and how does this differ from the “ideal” path to a solution? When they misstep, what does it show us about their inner workings?

Mistakes create room for further conflict. The only time that a character should be able to potentially come up with the perfect solution to their problems should be close to the end of a story. If they solve everything before then, there’s nowhere else for the story to go. An imperfect/mistaken solution creates the potential for additional conflict/problems/story.

None of this is to say that a writer should force a character to make mistakes. That way leads to the scenario where characters behave like idiots for the convenience of the writer and the plot.