It's The End of The World As We Know It

This is a whole nine days late and it’s only the fourth edition, so I hope you’re all taking that under stern consideration for my quarterly review. The truth is, I’ve had trouble thinking of a topic, because I haven’t been working much, because of a bad flare of illness but also because…well, all of it. YOU know the all of it; I was in the grocery story the day after Trump’s first election and I remember a clerk saying “How are you today, with… all of it?” That’s how we’ve been, for the last eight years, living with…all of it. Sometimes the all of it was different, sometimes it wasn’t about Trump, but about body bags in ice trucks outside of morgues, and sometimes it was about burned bodies in the Gaza Strip, or Russian Warships Fucking Themselves, and for a brief time it was about a stuck boat, which was, I’d say, the best it ever got since 2016. But it leaves every creator I know with the same question I have, and maybe you have, which is how in God’s name do you write while your brain tries to handle all of it?

For as many scripts as I do read per month, there are also ten times as many sitting on someone’s laptop not being written. Sometimes it’s not even because of politics, but because you had to have knee surgery, or your dad died, or the time changed. Finding time and motivation to write is a problem nearly as old as writers; don’t you think there was a cave person who got halfway through a mammoth drawing and said, “oh shit, Ugg forgot dentist appointment,” and then didn’t get back to it ever? Millions of years later, an archaeologist might be teaching a class on the famous Half Mammoth of Lascaux and its relationship to Neolithic Concepts of Being, when truthfully, Ugg was just very overwhelmed and a little tired and he didn’t have any good snacks and he wanted to play a video game and maybe he wasn’t good enough to be a Mammoth Artist, anyway.

So this month I don’t have a note to address with you guys, but rather a little squished up feathered offering, if you’re facing problems in your creative brain. Because truthfully, while I’m having a very hard time working, I’m actually not having trouble writing. I’m diving into writing like a pool, and I think this may be because of a distinct mindset I’ve had to develop over the last eight awful years, one I didn’t have in 2016, where my writing partner and I put down a script we’d killed ourselves on and didn’t pick it up again for two years, or in 2020, where we didn’t write a word of anything for an entire year. This may not work for everyone, or anyone else, but if you want to test the formula out, here’s what I’ve got:

Write in Secret

Nobody wants you to write. Your spouse or partner actually would prefer if you’d take out the trash, PLEASE, and your kids might like to see you, and your agent is also overwhelmed, and doesn’t want to read any more pages from anyone including William Shakespeare, and you aren’t him, and most people think writing is frivolous, and your fans think they could do it better, and, let’s not forget, the entire Republican establishment thinks writing can go to hell, along with soy lattes, queer people, and having a conscience. Also, did you know you aren’t any good at it? Well, your brain thinks you aren’t, and it tends to be smarter than you, the dumb operator of your hands and your keyboard.

And while all of this is very demoralizing, it is also maybe a key, because it means that if you do write, you have to do it SECRETLY. You have to shut the door on the Internet and the news, and your doubts, and your mother, and the companies that crave your attention and wallet, and you have to do something sneaky. Sneaky is a great motivator, it lights up all the little sensors in our brain that love to be a little bit taboo. Write like you’re eating a whole Twix bar - both sticks - on your own in a dark closet. Write like you found a Playboy hidden in a library book about Stalin. Tell yourself you don’t have to write, but you have to get away with writing, and suddenly you’ve changed the game. It’s not a chore, it’s a sneaky little pleasure. No longer are you dragging yourself up the slope to do something you owe to someone else, but instead you’re running like a bat out of hell to get up to your writing tree house before anyone realizes you’re home, just to dash out a page or two. You’re playing hide-and-seek with the real world, and you are Not It.

Because after all, writing has been (and may become!) a taboo act! It was outlawed for women in various parts of the world for centuries, manuscripts by every minority group under the sun were and still are ignored, and Revolutionaries of one kind or another have always gone around with seditious pamphlets hidden in their crevices. The state has never quite come around to trusting writers, and we’re entering an era where they may become actively hostile about the whole thing. There are worse reasons to write than to say Fuck You to Donald Trump, even if what you’re writing is about a baby weasel finding friends. That baby weasel needs you to tell the censorious world to get fucked, and you are allowed to find that just a little bit badass.

Refuse The Call

Have you ever wanted to walk up to Joseph Campbell, spit in his face, and say “Alright you mischievous little imp, HERO THIS!” Well, if you find yourself unable to write, here’s your chance. Call your best friend or that one other writer you sometimes despair with, and say it aloud. “I think I’m done writing. I can’t focus, and I’m out of ideas. The world is terrible, and I should probably be chaining myself to the Capitol fence right now, but instead I’m going to eat handfuls of Cheerios out of the box and not do any writing.”

Then go even further. Glare into the calendar app, and tell it “I am not going to write at all this month. I’m giving it up. I have no ideas, and I’m not going to get any ideas, and if I do I’m not good enough to write them. I am setting a goal: I will not even open a writing program for a month. Absolutely NO WRITING.”

The power of reverse psychology is that it actually lets you off the hook, in some strange subconscious way. There’s no way that I can explain this without going into Wonderland syntax, but if what you’re avoiding is not actually writing, but meeting any kind of goal, then setting a different goal will make your brain want to avoid that instead. If you make it your goal to have no ideas and not write anything, then that absurd seven year-old that lives in your melon may just go “oh YEAH?? Well I don’t WANNA do what you say! Here’s seventeen ideas!”

Steal Another Brain

Misery loves company, which is why writers throw such great parties. This also applies to the writing process, where sometimes, the best thing you can do for your broken brain is to add a second person with an equally broken brain. Writing with a writing partner does a couple of wonderful things for you, as long as you actually like each other and work well together. First of all, it means that one of you can be hopeless and useless at any given time. This is an unexpected benefit that can give your brain a lot of little rests. You can be as mad as a hatter today, and miss all your goals, and because you got that break, then tomorrow you might actually be sewn back up and productive, just in time for them to collapse. People talk a lot about accountability, which can be a helpful part of having a partner, but it’s equally correct to think of it as trading off short mental breakdowns. This is more restorative than it sounds.

Writing partnerships aren’t for everyone, but I do think they’re worth trying at least once. If nothing else, it stirs up your process, because you will never approach a script quite the same way you do alone. There is no greater way to learn what aspects of a script you’re truly passionate about. Your writing partner will say something like “I think the dog should be named Gus,” and you will suddenly find yourself on a fifteen minute diatribe about how the abuse that the character’s grandfather suffered in the Boer War means that the dog would never be named Gus, in fact, the character would never even speak to anyone named Gus, and how could they NOT KNOW THAT? As introspective people by nature, writers know all the argumentative voices in our own heads very well, and are used to muttering at them dispassionately, like people in a dead marriage. When you throw the perspective of an entirely different writer with equal rights to the idea into the mix, it can pull you out of the grave. As long as you can avoid throwing things at one another, this is a healthy and productive kind of conflict.

And at the very least, having a writing partner means that someone will say to you “How are you today with…all of it?” and you can say “Oh, very bad,” and they can say “oh, me too.” And sometimes, that can help, also.

Better luck writing next month, friends.