A reader writes: To get your reluctant self to do something – I get some leverage by playing off the downside (pain at not doing it) against the upside (pleasure to be gained by doing it). Interesting question you can pose yourself. How can I make this( seemingly unattractive task) fun? List the answers. Works for me.
Another reader writes "Please keep sending me these but could you include your Scottish accent please?" Reader, everything I write is in a Scottish accent. You just have to read it the right way.
I'll say this quickly. Feel free to read fast. Approx 650 words.
Newsletter No. 3: Jan 21 2008
Thompson settled into the canvas stool and gulped the old whiskey. His left hand fingered the white bull that is a blank page and fed it into the Underwood.
Ernest Hemingway
Not everyone agrees with Hemingway. Some people say they love an empty piece of paper and the freedom it gives them to create.
In fact I used to be one of them, in the days when I was writing legal documents and government reports, and welcoming every chance to sneakily bring something new into the world.
But in doing that work we always had a template, really. It just lived in our heads. A report to the Oban and Lorn Area Committee has to observe a certain structure or no-one will take the content seriously. You can't write it in Klingon: you can't submit a picture of your next car. Your freedom is tempered by your own sense of purpose. It's the same in press releases and in academic books and it's very much the same in screenplays. As soon as you decide to work on some particular project, your creativity is necessarily constrained.
So how do you master the white bull?
You don't. You transform it.
I've been writing a lot of academic papers recently, and I find it's very helpful to start each of them by copying the essential parts of an old one. It's mainly my way of getting the format right, but it also helps me to write. If the essential linking phrases are already on screen ("This paper will...", "The research question was...", "In conclusion...") it gives me those helpful constraints within which I express myself.
It's the same here. It took me months to write the first of these newsletters, and to get it perfect (which it wasn't, but we'll talk about perfection another time). Since then it's been easy, because I have the structure. Rewrite the introductory housekeeping stuff – rewrite the introduction – rewrite the closing admin remarks, and already the job feels half done. I just need one spark of inspiration, and I have a safe place to spew the resulting words. Safety makes it easy. This letter was written six days ago.
It's slightly different, for me, with screenplays. There's nothing you can type before you start creating. FADE IN means nothing: it's redundant and it's not expected by Hollywood readers these days, so typing it would my work feel less like a screenplay. A screenplay starts with the writer stating the location of the first scene, and that's is a very important, a key, part of the creative work. It can be intimidating (or you can choose to be excited). So there is no text to copy from one script to the next.
Even so, you have the format in your head. You know the shape of what you're going to type. You only have to choose the words. You start by knowing you will use normal screenplay format and, when you know that, the job is begun. Fire up Final Draft if you are rich enough, fire up the beta version of Sophocles if you want the same functionality without any expense, or just fire up your word processor and set your margins and tabs correctly, and suddenly you have created a safe white cave within which you can tell your unique story.
By the way, if the white bull still bothers you, change the "paper" color on your computer - done correctly it won't affect how your work looks to anyone else (but do not let computer tweaking take up a lot of your writing time).
You don't master the white bull. You transform it.
Something you can try today:
When starting a project, copy as much as possible from the last one. Even if all you copy is the page layout, that will still give you a safe familiar place to work. A place where you have worked successfully before. A place where you know you can do it.
David
David
David Jung McGarva
+1 (818) 707 1871
Write me: david at todayiwrite dot com
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