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CUT THE CRAP, WRITE THE PAGES
My Fellow Writers,
It's about time I beat up on you - and also myself - about writing every day, on the highest-priority project.
There must be a project that you absolutely love. That drove you to writing screenplays in the first place. Is it finished? Is it as good as it can be? Wait, is it as GREAT as it can be?
If not, you need to get on it.
Don't talk to me about priorities, jobs, families, friends, television, the internet, video games, vacations, or anything else. If you love that project, you'll make the time. I see it every day - writers with children, a job or two, and obligations all over the place. And yet they do what they can, every day.
You do the same. Save the excuses as reasons you're not going to the gym. I'd rather have you have flabby abs and a great screenplay in hand.
You need an hour to eat lunch? Bring a sandwich, eat in ten minutes, and write for the rest of the time.
On the way home, turn off the car radio and talk out the story.
Don't ever watch television again unless it's a videotaped (or TiVO) program. You'll save yourself all of those commercials, and you won't lazily watch spontaneous television. Stop watching sports on television.
Weed out convenient friendships - the ones that you just have because they've been there for a while, and because the people are largely unobjectionable. Don't spend time with these acquaintances, not now. You've got more important things to do.
I've said it before, I'll say it again - write at least an hour a day on the highest priority project. That's EVERY day. NEVER miss. Through sickness, health, big presentations at work, vacations, your wedding day, the day your child is born. Every day. This is your creative expression - the thing that makes you unique from the nearly six billion other people. Give writing its proper due. It's the only way you'll ever finish, and the only way you'll ever make a living at this.
Write more than an hour if you can, but never less. If you must, make the writing a brainstorm about why you can't write today. Chop it up into two half-hours, six ten-minute blocks, I don't care. But make it happen.
I had one streak that went over a thousand days before I stopped it on purpose - because it had served its purpose. But even after stopping it, I'm of course writing every day.
But I'm not writing this column to act superior or dance in celebration. I'm just writing to hopefully inspire one person to drop whatever bullshit story is getting in the way of their writing. And just write that project, one day at a time.
That's the key. It's quite overwhelming to think of writing a screenplay. But if you think of it on a daily basis - an honest hour (or whatever time over an hour you can budget) per day, on that project. One hour. Today. That doesn't sound as tough, does it?
What are you waiting for? Log off, slacker.
Logging off myself,
Grady
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