I haven’t forgotten about my writing updates, four more to go! Also we’ve finalized a cover design for the book, one that I am VERY fond of. Excited to show you all down the line. Here’s my favorite writing tip to celebrate, hopefully the tough love will inspire you to go start a project yourself.
SCREENWRITING TIP #4: WRITING HABITS
A note about writing habits – don’t have any. Well, one – write every day. Now writing can be research, outlining, thinking about what you have to write, re-writing, but immersing yourself in the process is what really counts. Still, I try to crank out at least a page a day.
Now I’ve heard it a few thousand times – “I don’t have the time to write.” Bull. There were times I was working 50, 60 hours a day. But I still wrote. Every damn day. Too tired at the end of the day? I can empathize. I was beat. So, I wrote on my lunch hour. Or, at one company, lunch half-hour.
A page a day. If I was able to put down one page each day I was working toward my ultimate goal – to be a full time writer. If you write a page a day at the end of three months you have a feature script. If you re-write it at the same pace at the end of six months you have a better script.
If you can’t write a page a day then you just don’t want it bad enough. I used to pick the worst restaurant near my work place, where e-coli and hepatitis were selections on the menu. I picked it because I knew nobody from work would show up and lure me into a conversation. Don’t bother me, was my motto, I’m trying to work my way out of this soul sucking job.
I wrote every day at lunch, occasional evenings, weekends and holidays. For six years. Then one year I made more money writing than as an accountant and I quit.
Here is a little trick I used to make that lunch hour as fruitful as possible – I would check my outline every morning before going to work. Then I thought about the scene I was going to write all morning. On the drive to work, during boring meetings, adding columns on a calculator, paging through computer print outs. By lunch I had written and re-written the scene a half dozen times. After lunch I would study the next section and let my brain work in preparation for the evening pages - if I had the energy.
I still do this. Every night, right after turning off the lights, as I lay in bed before I go to sleep I run through what I intend to write the next day, concentrating on any particular problem I anticipate. And surprisingly upon awakening the problem is often solved. It may be my subconscious helping me out. Or I’m delusional. I don’t care.
As for habits. Besides writing every day, I repeat – have none. I know some writers make a ritual of their work. “ I must have quiet.” “A window facing the rising sun (or a wall).” “A cup of Honduran coffee, Mozart on the stereo, twelve sharpened number two Ticonderoga pencils and a thin lined tablet (white with green lines) and the smell of rotting apples.”
These are all just setting up excuses for you not to write. It is hard enough to do this, you don’t need any more reasons not to do it. I write anywhere, anytime. I have produced pages in a hurry, under duress from directors, executives, actors, in a tent, in the rain, in the cold, at four in the morning with a full crew standing by. You don’t here a cobbler saying he’s not in the mood to heel your shoes. A car mechanic never stops because it is too noisy. Teachers don’t take a day off because they are not inspired.
No excuses. You write. Say the writing isn’t going very well and all you can think of is crap. Write a bad scene. You can’t re-write a blank page. But a bad scene often can tell you what’s wrong with it and where you’ve gone awry.
Write.
