Ruts and Grooves

Ruts & Grooves is Moving

2012-01-20T14:47:00.002-04:00

New posts will be up on tumblr.

Little Doubts Getting In The Way of Bigger Ambitions?

2011-11-14T13:31:00.000-04:00

Today, Cary Tennis responds to a letter-writer who seems to have every opportunity to pursue her dream of being a jazz singer but asks:

What is this about, this holding myself back from the one thing I ever dreamed of being and loved the most? Why do I forget the great reviews and let the smallest impediment stop me from proceeding?

I can relate, and if I read "writer" in Cary's response rather than "singer" and "musician," it all holds as true.

CBC -- Part 4 -- F*&% the Ratings

2011-11-09T12:50:00.002-04:00

Headline from The Canadian Press in October: "CBC Struggles in Fall Ratings War Against Private Networks."

It's a familiar story, only exacerbated this year by more competing channels and the switch from analog to digital.

Surely by now Canadians have headline fatigue over news of CBC's failures; the perception of CBC as a competitive loser has cemented into conventional wisdom. Of course, conventional wisdom is sometimes long on convention and short on wisdom.¹

I don't give a sweet goddamn about how CBC's ratings compare to other networks.

It's apples and oranges. It's like fielding an NHL team on the soccer pitch against Manchester United and then acting all surprised.

"Oh my god! Manchester is creaming them!"

CBC is being judged by a false equivalency ratings standard when it should be judged based on how it goes about fulfilling its own mandate. The other guys are on a pitch. CBC is on a sheet of ice.

And no shit Sherlock the private nets are winning the ratings war. They air mainly American shows, which are supported by the massive American-hype machine long before they air. Then, when they do air, one American show leads into another in schedules that are painstakingly crafted to keep masses of eyeballs on the same channel for hours, days, and weeks at a time.

While private networks hone their brands to a fine point, audiences are trained: if you like The Mentalist, you'll like lots of other stuff on CBS. If you like Desperate Housewives, you'll like lots of other stuff on ABC. And the US has the audience numbers to go around.

To create that effect and get ratings in Canada, CBC would have to please all of the people all of the time. It can't be done. They don't have the money or the time on the schedule to do it. If you like Republic of Doyle...thanks for tuning in. Don't forget it's on again next week. Please. DON'T FORGET.

Not to mention Americans make really good television. They also make a lot of dud shows, but their private networks can afford to throw much more crap at the screen and see what sticks. Canadian private networks could afford to throw more Canadian crap at the screen, too, but they tend to stick to the bare minimums required by law -- or less.

So we don't send our teams out to practice as often as the other guys, and then we berate them for losing. How Canadian.

CBC's schedule is a different beast entirely from the private nets. It's not begrudgingly squishing its Canadian programming -- in some cases fake Canadian programming: ET Canada, anyone? -- in between schedules full of American shows. Shows viewers don't need CTV or Global to air at all now that households with TV in Canada get NBC, ABC, and CBS with their cable anyway, by the way.

In contrast, CBC is all Canadian or co-pro programming except for Coronation Street and that controversial and soon-to-be-killed hour of Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.

In a country in which conventional wisdom states that Canadian television is bad and CBC is a loser, how do you like the chances of a network with CBC's mandate building a schedule that draws eyeballs and keeps them from one hour to the next and one day to the next?

Despite it being an unwinnable battle, the pressure to compete on this playing field no doubt affects CBC's ability to play its own game well.

Canadian TV and therefore CBC TV is always going to be different from American. We have a different culture, sure. But more fundamentally, we have a different population: US 307 million people. Canada 34 million people. That fact alone changes the economics -- fewer eyeballs, fewer advertising dollars. The American entertainment system has been funded much better for much longer.

And it's been sold to Canadians much more forcefully for a very long time.

The goal in Canadian television is often to do what the Americans do as well as they do it. I like that goal. It's on my list of things to do. But we need to be committed to other goals as well, ones that don't revolve around looking South and comparing ourselves to them.

CBC needs to change to win more audiences. But audiences need to change, too. Conventional wisdom needs to change, and so do average Canadian viewers who assume they don't like CBC and therefore never try it. They need to stop looking for good dribbling when they're offered good stickhandling.

¹This isn't a knock against Bill Brioux, the author of the CP article. He covers the Canadian TV landscape passionately and well. His article on this topic contains plenty of context. It's the inherent assumption in the headline, which Brioux may not have written himself, that I take issue with.

CBC - Part 3 - Culture

2011-11-02T14:51:00.001-03:00

I set myself the task of writing about the value of culture in my next CBC post and then was very quickly swamped by the pages -- too many pages for a blog post -- of facts and arguments that came out. My husband glanced at a printout. "I've seen many people try to explain the value of culture before," he said. "It never works."

"People either get it or they don't."

But here I am, ever the optimist.

Or, as my therapist has been known to call it: stubborn.

At one point, I thought I would just try to speak from the heart:

To some of us, threatening to take away our culture is like threatening to take away your church.

But, I can hear the right-wing privatize-CBC argument going, privatizing CBC isn't taking culture away. It's just letting business interests who know what they're doing take it over.

Sputter! Sputter!

Besides, I don't ask for your taxpayer money for my church.

I was speaking from the heart. It's not a perfect analogy. Now shut it. This is my blog. Get your own blog. It's easy. Any asshole can do it.

Good, he's gone. I hate the right-wing privatize-CBC guy in my imagination. He is a REAL jackass.

Okay, so I started out writing about culture, and found I was writing just as much about the money, happiness, and power that's related to it.

1. Money

In 2007, the Canadian culture sector was worth $84.4 billion, 7.4 per cent of the national GDP, and meant 1.1 million jobs. Culture is a significant part of our economy. Entertainment culture in particular is a money-making industry and its value is quantifiable to anyone with a financial stake in getting our attention. Outside of the CBC, whose budget is 2/3 public and 1/3 advertising, entertainment is funded mainly by advertisers making bids for our hearts, minds and wallets.

The thing is, while we pay for CBC with our taxes, we also all pay for that advertising.

How? Let's look at a prime example all over the news this week with Kim Kardashian's divorce. Kardashian's family has a reality show or three on E! Their qualification for being celebrities who get paid to have their lives filmed and broadcast? Other than being good-looking and gaining notoriety as a Hollywood socialite with a sex tape, I can't tell you. I don't watch it and know nothing about them except what shows up on magazine covers in the supermarket checkout and on headlines and my Facebook feed. But I'm going to hazard a guess Kim has no special education or talents in arts, science, or technology.

No matter, because she's doing very well for herself as a celebrity. In 2010, the family earned $65 million dollars. This year, E! paid her $17.9 million for the rights to air the wedding. The wedding itself cost $6 million after "deep discounts" from vendors in exchange for the publicity. This week, Kim filed from divorce.

E! had planned a marathon of reruns of the wedding special for this week. Would they cancel it in light of the divorce? No! They added additional reruns to the schedule. This is the network banking on the idea that this week's news would draw additional eyeballs to "Kim's ~~Fairytale~~ Wedding," earning them ratings that would translate into advertising dollars.

E! pays the Kardashians, but that money has to come from somewhere.

So it comes from us. The cost of advertising (including freebies for celebrities) is built into the price we pay in checkouts, restaurants, and car dealerships. Any product we buy from a company with an advertising budget costs us extra -- a little fee to convince us in the first place that's a product or a brand we need or want. Even people who don't watch commercials but buy that product pay the fee.

The public paid for Kim Kardashian's wedding.

It's gotten to be fashionable to talk about taxes as if they are a nuisance expense. But why do people want their taxes lowered? So they can keep that money and buy stuff and pay for advertising on "free" networks? If CBC goes private, its new owners will still have their hand out for that $34 bucks -- guaranteed.

Granted, the Kardashian phenomenon is particularly American. But up here, the private nets in Canada have the entertainment-for-eyeballs trade well covered, too -- mainly by airing American shows. Conventional wisdom says that American entertainment is just better than Canadian. The kind of American entertainment we're talking about when we say that is the kind that's well funded by advertising and box office -- compared to the Canadian entertainment industry, the US one has had the resources over the long term to get very good at what they do.

The question, when it comes to CBC, is whether culture that doesn't turn a profit has value.

2. Happiness

That right-wing privatize-CBC guy is fond of saying that CBC is just for "cultural elitists," and therefore not worthy of taxpayer dollars. Your average Canadian is happy with a bit of simple entertainment at the end of a hard day's work, and CBC gives them none of that -- so what's it worth?

I don't consider myself a cultural elitist. I've loved (truly, madly, deeply) watching thousands of hours of popular television in my life. It's the kind of TV I'm most interested in writing myself. Of last year's top 20 shows by ratings, I watched some or all episodes of 11 of them. Personally, I'll take me some Grey's Anatomy over a broadcast of the opera any day. But I'll line up with the cultural elitists if only to say this: so what?

Why shouldn't cultural elitists get some of the public-spending pie? They're out there doing their jobs and paying their taxes, too. And you want them to sit down after a hard day's work and watch Two And A Half Men? Well, they won't do it!

I don't doubt the CBC audience is made up of more intellectuals than those of Global, CTV or SunTV. After all, any good network has its brand. And we need our intellectuals. They run the universities we all want to send our kids to so they can get jobs and move the heck out of the house. We need them so we can have someone to call when we have questions about the science-y stuff. Even SunTV needs cultural elitists, so they can have someone to mock.

When the right threatens to take the culture of CBC away from Canada's elitists, intellectuals, and left-wing nutbars -- the people like me to whom the very existence of a public broadcaster is important -- they threaten our happiness.

Happiness psychologists say that happiness is made up of three things. First, there's pleasure. That's the kind of feeling we get from a really good meal or an episode of Glee. Second, there's engagement. People who are communicating with others and participating in the world around them tend to feel more satisfied. Finally, whether or not you feel your life has meaning contributes to how happy you are.

While the private nets bring us lots of Glee, CBC provides the cultural engagement and meaning. Here, in fact, the private nets and the public one diverge hugely. Think Fifth Estate and Doc Zone, RMR and 22 Minutes. Radio One is a near-constant stream of Canadians talking to Canadians about things that matter to them. Even Being Erica, which I'd argue is the closest CBC comes right now to popular entertainment, walks the line into meaningful territory more than most mainstream dramedies.

Besides contributing to meaning for their audience through their news and entertainment, CBC contributes to the quality of life for thousands of Canadians as a place of meaningful work. Governments love to tout their "job creation," but strangely calls for cuts at CBC seem divorced from the notion that they are also cutting jobs. There is a right-wing implication that jobs in the culture industry aren't "real," but of course they are as real as the mortgage bill to the people who have them. Not only that, on a quality-of-life level, there's "jobs," and then there are good jobs. For many Canadians, the opportunity of working for or with CBC makes a significant contribution to the satisfaction and meaning we gain from our careers.

While profit-driven media has more and more turned towards giving the people what they want -- that bowl of ice cream -- the public broadcaster can be empowered to give them what they need -- the meat and potatoes. CBC is our shot at a balanced diet -- at staying healthy and happy as a culture. And what is the cost of a society that's not engaged and provided with meaningful information?

For one thing, we stand to weaken our identity as a nation. Already, the saturation of our market with US media means that often when Canadians look in the mirror, they see Americans looking back at them. Most of us can recite the Miranda warning, but have no idea what our rights are in Canada when placed under arrest. Many of us know more about Obama than we do about Harper. If we don't know our own system, how can we properly participate in it?

Granted, a unified, national source of engagement and meaning can be inconvenient for some. It can mean that we're not buying what they're selling. It can mean we're questioning our government -- and we're coming armed with information.

3. Truth

The single most valuable thing to Canadians about the CBC is its journalism. And yes, we should be paying for it.

Despite journalism's credibility, news can be quite different from truth. The truth according to corporate interests is sometimes quite different from the truth as the rest of us see it: their perspective and priorities are very different. And news divisions aren't exempt from fighting for eyeballs. This means that the news is not just about the truth, but about the truth that sells. To see the contrast between the two, compare CNN and BBC for a while.

If this part of our culture is entirely privatized, corporate media will be solely in charge of who has a voice and what information the public gets -- and it will be the voices and information that raises ratings, sells advertising, and more or less follows the "correct" worldview.

Well, the rest of us will still have the Internet, right? I've seen an anti-CBC argument that the Internet makes CBC obsolete. But if you believe the Internet allows truth to be free and widespread regardless of business interests, first take a look at the current state of WikiLeaks. Second, reconsider the importance of professional journalists and editors.

Journalists are trained and experienced in news-gathering and writing. (For a good, pithy definition of what a journalist is, check out the point-form definition at the end of this post.) Citizen journalists, bloggers and tweeters contribute to the flow of news and information, but they can't and won't do the whole job. For one thing, journalists make a living at it -- if society stops paying for journalists, it simply won't get as much of the good stuff. For another, journalists have a responsibility to at least attempt to achieve objectivity; in contrast, it's strong opinion that's valued on social networks. Both are great, but what are we going to have strong opinions about as the flow of information dries up?

Editors, meanwhile, are the curators of the information. Faced with the onslaught of material online, from sources of varying degrees of credibility or integrity, editors do us all the valuable service of narrowing down the news to that which is trustworthy in an amount we can manage. They also serve to guide the ongoing coverage of any given issue, making choices about what stories need more background, in-depth reporting, or expert opinions.

CBC has a stable of real journalists and editors. Ideally, our public money entrusts them with the responsibility to do balanced journalism rather than political propaganda like SunTV. Ideally, CBC has the resources and is at liberty to report any and all relevant news, rather than only the kind that will sell more ads framed in a context that will be comfortable for the biggest swath of audience. Ideally, money from all taxpayers in Canada enables CBC to report news relevant to all taxpayers in Canada, not just the news one political party or one corporate owner wants to see. Ideally, the standard of journalism at the CBC serves to lift standards at other news organisations.

With its massive journalism machine, the CBC as a whole serves as one of the major foundations of information in Canada. An important story that goes up on joeschmo.blogspot.com might be read by 30 people. An important story that goes up on CBC.ca is going to also be broadcast on TV and radio, be read, shared, and talked about by thousands and picked up by other stations and papers, thereby getting more in-depth coverage and reaching even more people. Even if you never sit down to watch The National, the reach and value of CBC news extends far beyond CBC itself.

This is the strength of the foundation CBC represents. And whether or not CBC always lives up to those ideals and standards, it is vital that it always exist because no broadcaster in the private sector will ever be striving towards these particular ideals and standards and therefore will never have the opportunity of coming as close to achieving them as CBC does.

The Harper Government has already cut CBC funding, circulated surveys that promote the option of privatizing CBC, and supported SunTV over CBC and the courts in the access to information case. Harper is also notoriously secretive and tends to control access to the truth. Some would argue he lies fairly regularly, and some would say this is an ordinary day in Ottawa for any party.

Either way, on issues that matter to them, no matter who is in government, the public needs good journalists tasked with gathering as much truthful information as possible. Otherwise, we give away our power to participate. How often do you take action on an issue or change your vote because of an issue you don't believe you understand? How often do you care about an issue that doesn't directly effect you and doesn't make headlines?

4. Power

Culture, money, happiness and truth all create power. The CBC costs us $1.1 billion dollars a year, and what we're buying isn't just culture -- it's the power of communicating with each other, the power of enjoying a good quality of life, and the power of information that's crucial to a healthy democracy.

We need to stop thinking about attacks on CBC as attacks on some wishy-washy, ill-defined notion of culture, and start recognising them as attacks on our power -- as attempts to weaken our roles as citizens, and undermine our status as smart people who want to contribute to or make art, entertainment, and good journalism. Citizenship and knowledge and culture aren't frills in a democracy; they're vital to it.

We need to think instead about CBC in terms of what it can be empowered to do, and what the best results of its work can be for Canada and the world. And we need to fund it in terms of the real value it provides, in a way that enables it to live up to its mandate and excel at its important work -- not to the tune of $1.1 billion, but more.

CBC - Part 2 - $1,000,000,000!

2011-10-19T11:44:00.008-03:00

Canadian taxpayers will pay 1.07 billion dollars next year to support the CBC. Last year it was $1.09 billion. Big numbers. The amount "one billion" is frequently cited in calls for the privatization of the Corp -- the implication being that there are plenty of better ways for Canadians to spend a billion-plus dollars each year.

I look at that money a couple of different ways.

First, according to the Fall 2011 budget, the government's total expenditures next year will be 250.8 billion dollars. So the $1.09-billion CBC allocation represents less than half of one per cent of the country's overall expenses.

Still, to individual taxpayers and families, a billion dollars sounds like a whack of cash. So let's look at it on that individual scale. To borrow an analogy from my accountant, suppose I go to the grocery store with $250.80 in my pocket and spend $249.71 on groceries for my hungry family. I don't need a loonie to pay a Halifax bridge toll on the way home from the grocery store, so I could give the change -- or, relatively speaking, CBC's public allocation -- to my kids to put in the CNIB seeing eye dog on the way out (they love doing that). I probably wouldn't give that loonie, nickel, and 4 pennies a second thought.

Another way to look at a billion dollars in Canada is that, assuming a population of 33.74 million, the CBC costs each individual Canadian $34 per year. By contrast, I could spend $30/month for basic cable -- as many Canadians do. That low-end cable bill adds up to $360 per year.

For that $34 dollars a head, everyone has access to three national public radio stations; two television networks; national and international news reporting; local programming; original news, entertainment, children's programming, and documentary content; iTunes programs; and a website with print, audio, video, and additional multi-media content.

Personally, I feel like our local Mainstreet program alone is a bargain at $34 and I'm glad to pay it.

Finally, I've noticed a few other things Canadians spend in the neighborhood of a billion dollars on every year. In other public arenas, $1 billion buys us:

-- last year's budget for Environment Canada, at $1.09 billion -- though that's dropping to $872 million this year (because we all know how little Canadians care about the environment);
-- over six months worth of a continued war in Afghanistan, which costs Canada an estimated $1.85 billion per year;
-- almost a year's worth of tax subsidies for oil and gas companies, at about $1.4 billion per year.

If it were up to me, Environment Canada would be a spending priority. I'd have to take a good long look at the efficacy of our efforts in Afghanistan. And I seriously question the public good of subsidizing oil -- one of the richest corporate industries in the world, and one that already gets our cash at the gas pump, on my home heating bill, and indirectly through higher food prices, among other things.

Obviously, it's overly simplistic to yell, "it costs us one billion dollars!" as if that tells taxpayers all they need to know about CBC. But when the public broadcaster's detractors feel they need to elaborate, they go on to cry that it's one billion dollars just for cultural elitists. So in my next CBC post, I'll talk about the value of culture.

CBC - Part 1 - I Would Marry It If I Could

2011-10-14T04:23:00.003-03:00

I once had a sex dream about Peter Mansbridge. I suppose his soothing, authoritative delivery of the news suggested to my subconscious that he'd make a good lover. Or maybe I was actually in the midst of idolising his then-wife, Wendy Mesley, and the dream was expression of a wish to be like her. Or maybe the dream -- the details of which, thankfully, I can't remember anymore -- was just the natural next step in my life-long love affair with the CBC.

CBC Radio was always on in our house. As a child, I learned about international affairs, the famine in Africa, war, and Pierre Trudeau from the radio. I remember laughing until I cried at the Air Farce and The Frantics. When I became a prime-time drama junkie, Street Legal on CBC TV was one of my first favourite shows. CODCO and The Kids In The Hall brought more laughter, and the certain knowledge that Canadians were specially and uniquely hilarious.

That's not just a matter of national pride, although it is that -- it's also a source of encouragement. In the same way that the fact of Sidney Crosby has lifted hockey in Nova Scotia, it helps when you're young and living here to see people on the road ahead, proving that the thing you dream of doing can be done.

From the age of 10 to 25, I loved listening to Peter Gzowski on Morningside -- his incredible range of topics and interview subjects seemed to bring Canada together and into focus like nothing else. His style was to be unfailingly interested in the conversation and willing to challenge his guests, while always treating both them and his audience with great respect. Gzowski was a great leveller -- bringing everyone from mothers of handicapped children to world leaders into the same seat, treating them with the same importance.

This was how I came to understand my country and the people in it as a collection of humans -- not only as right and left, powerful and weak, smart or stupid or any of the binaries that much of mainstream media feeds us -- but as real people with experiences, goals, aspirations, problems.

Gzowski's death left a palpable hole in the weekday mornings on CBC radio, and to my taste it's been filled to a degree now by the combination of Anna Maria Tremonte on The Current and Jian Ghomeshi on Q. When people claim there's been a decrease in quality at CBC Radio, I wonder how more new Gzowskis can be bred when all new hires at CBC are on contract, perhaps unable to make a living or given the time to practice on the way to becoming a master interviewer.

In Halifax, we're fortunate to have Stephanie Domet hosting Mainstreet in the afternoons, and I think she could be as good as Gzowski in her own way: she has a wonderful voice, enthusiasm for a wide range of stories, and is fully capable of asking tough questions in a smart, straightforward way. (Disclosure: Domet and I have friends in common and when we've met in the past I've found her personally very intelligent, engaged and witty.) Mainstreet is host to an ongoing conversation about the music, events, issues and people of Halifax in a way that doesn't happen on other local radio stations.

There's a seemingly endless list of other things, too -- like the songs by independent artists I've bought on iTunes after hearing them for the first time on CBC; the fact that my 13 year-old sister learned to cast a critical eye on marketing and commercials from listening to The Age Of Persuasion; that my father listens to Ideas at night before bed, and gifts me with snippets of it when we talk; the warm feeling I get when I'm in the car and hear the theme music for As It Happens, knowing that I'm about to hear funny, interesting stories from around the world. That, as I've said on this blog before, Being Erica became one of my very favourite shows.

Finally, over the past few years, I've had a script in development with CBC and so indirectly made my living for a year or two from the network. Before that, my father-in-law was one of the Executive Producers of the Canadian Antiques Roadshow -- before that, he worked for many years at CBC News in New Brunswick. So my family has seen financial benefit directly and indirectly from CBC.

This personal financial interest in CBC probably makes me biased in a discussion of CBC. The continued existence of a public broadcaster makes it slightly more likely that I can achieve my own dream of writing Canadian television drama. Some of my passion for CBC does come from self-interest. And why not? Shouldn't anyone with a job they love have an interest in the survival of their industry, their way of life, and defend it with passion?

So when I hear the attacks on CBC -- from anonymous posters on message boards or from right-wing newspapers or SunTV or the Harper Government -- my reaction is borne partly of self-interest. But it's also borne at least equally by this love affair, this secure knowledge that CBC has fed my view of my country and my world all my life, in a way no commercial network has or seems the least inclined to do.

Though perhaps I shouldn't, I feel these attacks personally -- as if by attacking the value of CBC, people are attacking the very things I value and strive toward in my life -- being educated; caring about the arts and social issues and local, national, and international events; listening to people who are different, who do different things and come from different places; contributing to Canada and Canadianness as distinct from America, as valuable in its own right, for its own reasons. That my work itself, in all its CBCishness, is worth less than another kind of work. That to take satisfaction and meaning from all those things is a kind of a fool's errand. That as much as CBC has meant to me my whole life and continues to mean to me, others would take it away without a care.

Yes, I take it personally.

So I sat down to write a rant about the attacks on CBC...but that rant will have to wait 'til tomorrow, because it seems what I had to say first was: I love the CBC.

De-Dazzling

2011-10-13T10:13:00.001-03:00

I'm having a problem with my character description for a new series pitch. The pitch is almost ready to go out the door, but I'm hung up on this page-and-a-half.

I like this lead character: she's interesting, has a tough problem and a clear ambition. I was happy with my first draft of her bio. It was some pretty lively prose, packed with information, a surprise or two, some snappy bits...still, she just didn't feel compelling.

Tinkering only seems to make things worse. The profile is developing an unfriendly density as I cram more details into it, hoping they would make the character clearer. What was at one time my favourite part of the pitch is turning into the worst. That's what happens during rewrites sometimes.

I was unsnarling another set of notes on the hard copy and, honestly, whining to myself about it, when a friend posted 25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer on Facebook. (My 1 Insight on Reading 25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer? Just choose one. You can't make much use of 25 hard-earned words of wisdom all at once. Get the one you need and hightail it out of there.)

The one I need is this:

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Oh, not my games with language, you say, Kurt?

Now, pitches are a bit about games with language -- I'm trying to squeeze an entire show's brilliance into a few pages, so style is important. I want it to be engaging, and to convey the mood and imply a whole whack more information than I have room to provide. So I've been focused on keeping it lively.

But if even I'm reading this character description and not feeling it, there's a fundamental problem that no amount of style is going to fix. No matter what else, it needs to be clear what I genuinely care about with this character.

So I took a couple of hours of escape from style. I set the bio aside and, on a (virtual) fresh sheet of paper, I listed the important things about the character in short, declarative sentences, with no embellishment.

Stripped of its style, the problem with the profile became clear -- there were gaps that I'd been using style to hand-wave over. Using the new information from my list, I was able to reconstruct the bio with less hand-waving and clearer language. I had to kill a few babies -- sentences that seemed elegant or lively but weren't carrying their weight. Now I'm much happier with the new draft.

I remember worrying years ago, as a newer-newbie writer, about style: did I have any and -- since I suspected I did not -- how would I go about getting it? At that time, I thought style was something you add at the end of the process, like with a hot glue gun.

It's still something of a mystery to me, but like so many things, looking back I wish I had worried less and written more. I suspect it sorts itself out in quantity, to a certain degree, and the rest as your taste develops and you identify your point of view on the material.

Now I believe style is built in at every stage. In the end, its effect is like a smile: when it's genuine, coming from the heart, you can hardly stop it. And it just works.

Read This

2011-09-21T15:26:00.002-03:00

Don't Write What You Know

Dear Sugar

2011-09-13T11:00:00.001-03:00

I like to read advice columns. They give me the same thrill I got when I went into group therapy at age 27 and realised for the first time in my life that everyone out there has some kind of problem. Before that, I would look at people on the street and assume that because they were pretty, they were also happy. Or that because they had a job and a credit card, they also had it all figured out.

In group, I saw the faces of people who on the outside were composed and together, and then I heard their stories -- of a husband in a marriage who felt like the tedious day-to-day of his marriage, and his wife's clutter, were like bricks stacking up on a wall between them; of a beautiful woman whose father used to drink, and now her husband, and her, too, with their little baby asleep upstairs; of other people like me who didn't know how to love themselves and felt fated to be miserable until they became that person they could really love.

It let me adjust my measure of what was normal, and begin to recognise that my problems were actually ordinary, and to give up at least a little of the pain I had over being uniquely, especially messed up.

The letters in advice columns provide similar insights -- into other people's central problems. The answers, in the case of a few really talented columnists, are very often touching and kind and wise. Even when the problem in the letter isn't directly related to my experience, there's usually a universal lesson in the answer. My two favourite columnists right now are Cary Tennis in Salon and Dear Sugar in The Rumpus. Both are creative writers in addition to their columns. In one column, responding to a young writer worried about the ways she wouldn't be good enough, Sugar coined a warcry for writers in one of her columns that rightly caught on among her readers:

You can read the original Write Like A Motherfucker column here. And here's another to a writer wondering whether they'll ever fit into the writing world.

I hope one day I can write as beautifully Cary and Sugar. To get there, I'd better write like a motherfucker today :)

I'm Not Afraid of Heights. Much.

2011-09-07T10:45:00.004-03:00

I'm still anxious about writing. I've been waiting for some magical day when I wake up relaxed and enthusiastic about getting to work writing my next super-compelling script in an orderly fashion. But I'm starting to think that is probably not going to happen. Because while I can see the appeal and logic of being relaxed, enthusiastic and orderly about work, emotionally there's a good chance that every day feels like jumping off a cliff anyway.

C25K or Do One Thing That's Impossible

2011-09-06T16:43:00.003-03:00

A few months back, with the advice of a doctor, I did a cleanse. Before she suggested it, I would cringe whenever I heard people even say the word, "cleanse," kind of the same way I'd cringe when I heard tell of counting calories, or Wiccan Midsummer rituals. Fine for other people, I suppose, but I'd sure as hell never go there. But after years of doing battle, I was desperate: my muffin top was still winning. So, I took the plunge.

How deep was the water? Get ready...

No dairy, no wheat, no alcohol, no coffee, and (the worst) no sugar. For 30 days.

You take away wheat and sugar and that's like, half the major food groups for any self-respecting cupcake junkie like me. Alcohol's no biggie. Not my particular vice. A few days of headaches weaning off my latte habit and that was taken care of. But food? That's my addiction, my comfort and distraction.

That battle with my muffin top I mentioned? It was waged in my head, not at my midsection: 10 sit-ups in the space of 5 years can hardly be called a forceful assault on the front.

In fact, for most of my life, I took my body for granted. My feeling was that it's here to carry me around. I've always been healthy (knock wood), so I was able to get by with that attitude, albeit a bit mystified and resentful about weight gain, poor posture, and declining energy as I approach coughmiddleagecoughcough. Combined with the writer's lifestyle of sitting for long periods at the computer, fortified with chocolate and coffee, motivated on occasion by big bags of jelly beans, and after two pregnancies, I had to face facts that my body wasn't going to suddenly get fit without some conscious effort.

So I did the cleanse. All 30 days. And it was actually...not fun, exactly, although there were moments of satisfaction and physical energy that did feel fun. But mostly it was satisfying, and kind of a revelation. Physically, I felt great, and the mental effects were terrific, too. I did something I thought was not in my character, and something I thought was pretty much impossible. To step even that little bit outside of what I believed myself capable of was liberating. If I can do that...

And that brings me to the Couch to 5K running program. I am not a runner (see above). I filed running, along with most forms of exercise except yoga, under the heading "Not Me." I would see runners on the street with their fucking perky ponytails and feel deeply jealous. Why them and not me? Wouldn't it be nice to just go out and run and feel that accomplishment and fitness? But it wasn't my destiny.

Well, the cleanse made me rethink that: I can do what I want to do, even if it seems difficult or impossible. So a few weeks ago, a friend and I went out and bought running shoes (the sports store sales people succeeded in selling us the most ridiculous-looking ones they had) and I cued up the C25K app on my iPod and off we went.

My friend has also been, all her life, most definitely Not A Runner. She was visibly nervous the first night, certain she would die before we finished the first half-hour run/walk program. They talk about a runner's high, and I didn't expect we'd get it so soon, but add the physical exercise to the triumph of following through and finishing something you suspected might kill you -- and that is a good feeling. One that I wouldn't quite get if what I tried wasn't challenging to begin with, and a little outside my comfort zone.

Three weeks in and now running every second night, as the program suggests, almost isn't enough. My friend and I are classic back-out-of-planners. We know how to make excuses, how to find a good reason to stay home at the last minute. We were surprised to find that we weren't doing that with running. It was hard, but we kept our expectations reasonable (run slow if we need to, repeat last week's program if we feel like it) and we kept on getting out there and discovering that we could do it. Soon, we even found ourselves looking forward to our runs. Last night when she had to cancel to work late, I discovered I'm a running slut: I went without her. I couldn't help myself! It feels so good!

Just as I'd taken my health and fitness for granted for most of my life, I took it for granted that I would be a good writer. I became mystified and resentful when my writing came out bad, and from there it was easy to develop anxiety around the work. Finally I was forced to recognise that good writing isn't a thing I can assume the universe owes me because I'm a good person: it was going to take conscious choice and it was going to be hard work.

Not a pleasant truth, but one that at least puts me -- instead of the cupcakes -- in control. In control, with a more realistic sense of what has to be done.

What is the thing you think you wish you could do but have always assumed you can't? Consider trying one thing that's impossible. Success at a little cupcake-deprivation or lung-burning, thigh-punishing running can give you a terrific sense of your capacity to change your self-image, face challenges, and overcome self-doubt.

If you want to be a writer, you're gonna need it!

Magic Morning Pages

2011-09-01T10:31:00.003-03:00

The trepidation I have around writing is most intense when I'm not writing at all. The simple, inconvenient truth is that the best cure for writer's block is to write. My producer on the hockey pilot, himself a writer, said this to me one day: "Just write through it." That's very irritating to hear when I'm reveling in the worst of my anxiety. Just write through it? That's the thing I can't do! Isn't there a pill for this instead?

I did try anxiety pills when worst turned to worstest, and they were helpful in the short term, but later I found a natural cure: Morning Pages. Write three pages of anything, first thing in the morning - or, as I modified it, first thing in my writing session, whatever the time of day. Whatever's top of mind, scribble it out. I think that Natalie Goldberg prescribes something similar in Writing Down the Bones, but I'd lost the habit along the way somewhere.

I got a cheap Hilroy ring notebook that reminded me of high school and a good pen. (I suspect all writers get a writing boner from a good pen. Black Staples OptiFlows have been giving me my thrills for months now.) As Julia Cameron advises in The Artist's Way, I set the bar low: it wouldn't matter if I wrote "the quick brown fox" over and over until I'd filled three pages. But as it happened, I never needed to do that. I just wrote about whatever was on my mind.

The other day, I read about a psychologist who says the best way to offload anxiety is to write about it, and I've found this to be true with my Morning Pages. Usually before the end of three pages, I've aired my fearful thoughts -- which always look more innocuous on the page than they seem when they're niggling around in my head -- and also decided how I want to attack them in practical terms.

Yesterday, for example, after half an hour of Morning Pages, I'd prioritized my projects and set my writing goals for the day. By the time I started writing, the anxiety that had built up over the past weeks of not writing was mostly gone, leaving me to get on with the work, cured for another day!

I'm Back

2011-08-31T09:44:00.000-03:00

Hello! It's been a while, but I'm happy to be back. I finished my crew job yesterday, and what a fun job it was: Script Coordinator on the YTV sketch comedy series, That's So Weird.

I love film work: no two days are the same, the people are fantastic, and film production has evolved really efficient systems where everyone knows their job and works fast and hard as a team. It can be intense but it's also really satisfying work. In this case, there was also the added pleasure of seeing the very funny and charming cast do almost as much comedy backstage as they did in front of the cameras.

So I'm sorry to finish up that job, and frankly more than a little trepidacious about getting back to my writing. Coming off the high of delivering my pilot, I thought maybe I'd kicked my writing anxiety for good. Actually, I was more worried about what might become of my little blog. But fear not! I can feel some material coming on...

On the other hand, I just spelled trepidacious right on the first try! So what's to worry about? Writing is just spelling a bunch of different words reasonably accurately 50,000 times in a row, right? Hah.

The Occasion of Defeat

2011-06-04T13:43:00.003-03:00

Heather Havrilesky is probably my favourite television critic: her writing is sharp, funny, and intelligent, and she's clearly a TV fan but she takes no guff from it, either. So I was delighted to see her article comparing two of my favourite shows, Glee and Friday Night Lights, in the NYTimes Magazine this week.

Both set in competitive high school clubs, Glee has been a hit while FNL never found numbers. Havrilesky's explanation for this pivots on how each show treats their themes of teamwork versus individualism, narcissism versus selflessness, and winning versus losing:

Despite Coach Taylor's inspiring talk of victory for those who fight together, "Friday Night Lights" is essentially a show about losing. In fact, aside from "The Wire," no show has painted such a vivid picture of the agony of defeat. ... For the denizens of Dillon, trading in big dreams for lives of quiet compromise amounts to just another local rite of passage, as common as breaking out or getting braces. "Glee," by contrast, pays lip service to teamwork, but the unintended moral of its story is the opposite -- that you're not really much of a star until you're the Star.

Although the fifth and final season of FNL has been available on DVD for a while, I've waited for the NBC run, and even then let five or six episodes build up on the TiVo before I started watching it. For the same reason, I still haven't read the final Harry Potter book: I don't want it to end.

But this week I did start watching, and the sadness of knowing this is the last season was quickly eclipsed by the joy of it. Havrilesky nails one of the show's unique achievements:

It's not hard to see why "Glee" would be more popular right now, but its moment, like the moment of glory it celebrates, feels likely to come and go. Recognizing the impermanence of such moments, "Friday Night Lights" embraces the rough edges, the fumbling, the understated beauty and uncertainty of the everyday.

The distinction between fleeting moments of glory and the everyday is particularly resonant to me lately because, among other things that are happening in my life, CBC passed on my pilot. So: a loss where I was hoping for a win.

But a loss that isn't quite what I expected.

When this project went into development -- how many years ago was it? I've lost count -- I thought that not going forward would be a failure. My own failure. It would mean I didn't write a perfect script. That seemed to me at the time like a fate worse than death, because in my simple understanding of winning and losing, winners are winners and losers are losers.

No wonder I got writer's block.

Yet now that the worst outcome has come, it turns out I've learned so much, I don't feel like a loser. (Three years ago I would have called that "the battle cry of the loser." If it was uttered by a contestant on a reality show, I would have laughed at them, too.)

What I didn't fully understand with my simple winners-and-losers rule of thumb was that going through the work itself changes the game. The work, the experience, the process -- these things matter, and in mattering they make the win or lose at the end a little less important.

By the time I delivered the final polish of the script in early February, I knew that I'd done -- with the help of Story Editor and Producers and Network Execs -- the best job I could do. Once it was delivered, it was out of my hands, and I more or less stopped worrying about it. I was happy to move onto other scripts -- with more confidence and experience translating into much less writer's block this time around. (Not none, as I half expected, but less and much more manageable.)

And then it took some time to get a decision, which was good because even though waiting was hard, it gave me time to get my head out of the project and back into real life, time to get philosophical about winning and losing, and time to brace for unwanted news.

During that time, I also had to start thinking about what I would do next. A recurring theme in my writer's block is that I should quit writing and find a new career. It's a natural thought when you're in the depths of despair and telling yourself you're a crappy writer: just give up this pointless misery and find something else to do, preferably something that comes with a reliable paycheque. Even when I'm not in the depths of despair, the idea of a reliable paycheque has all of the unsubtle appeal of a Beyoncé video.

The lure of quitting also goes back to when I thought of it as win or lose: if I turned out to be a good writer, as evidenced by getting my pilot picked up, for example, I would win the chance to have it as my career. If I lost, on the other hand, I would have to find something else to do. The prospect of quitting writing was always as imminent as the end of the development cheques.

But when the script was finished and I was actually faced with the last cheque, I realised I'd been thinking about it the wrong way. Because writing is not simply win-lose. Rather, if I put in the work, it's inevitable that I'll get better at it. In this I suspect it's much the same as any career: effort results in progress. By that reasoning, why would I now give up something I've already invested years of effort in and that I love doing to start over at square one with something else?

So I came up with an If-The-Show-Doesn't-Go Plan B that involves staying on the same path I've been on all along. With the kids a little older now, I realised I could go back to production work (with its 12- or 14-hour days, it wasn't something I wanted to do when they were really little). Then I could continue writing between crew jobs.

I decided I will not quit writing. And the decision felt right.

I wrote to my film contacts and told them I was looking for work again and soon I had a job lined up. It's temporary, as film jobs are, but one should lead to the next. And I love working production just as much as I love writing, so it doesn't feel like a compromise or a step back.

Not that I don't still fantasize about the reliable paycheque. But it's progress, to know that my writing career doesn't live or die on one script -- that it goes on after a loss. Like Coach Taylor's teams and players, I live to win another day. And the network says they'll consider the hockey script again, in the next round of pilot decisions. So hope remains, and the excitement and vexation of new scripts, and the children, and the coming summer, and returning to my blog after months of silence, and the "uncertainty of the everyday."

Quick Tip: Straight To The Problem

2011-03-07T19:51:00.010-04:00

The quickest way past a particular block -- a scene in a script you're not sure of, a character who's not working for you, a big giant hole in your plot or whatever's holding you up -- is to go straight to it. Identify the problem and tackle it right away.

If the problem is big enough to be causing you a block, you might not even be conscious of exactly what you're afraid of. Figure it out. Try freewriting, starting with "I try to write this scene and I'm afraid..." Write for a while, until you feel that click that says you've hit the heart of the issue. Then go directly to that part of the writing and start picking away at it.

Otherwise, you can spend a lot of time procrastinating around the entire project, or -- what's almost worse because you can trick yourself into thinking you're being productive when you're actually not progressing -- finicking with the color of the drapes when the problem is that your window has a big old hole smashed through it.

Find the real bit that scares you and shine the lights all over it.

Bright Side

2011-03-02T10:38:00.002-04:00

Have you noticed the second-class status art is given in our society?

The accepted wisdom is that arts are unnecessary. A luxury. Drawing pictures, writing poems, taking acting classes -- these are self-indulgent hobbies that, let's face it, will probably never amount to anything.

Do you have this voice in your head? In your family? Your government or media?

I do, and it has always been there to tell me that until I become successful, during these years of working to be a good writer, I'm a freeloading dilettante pursuing an airy-fairy, selfish, impractical "career" just to feed my ego when I should be out getting a real job and contributing to society.

In Canada, Stephen Harper would have everyone believe it's okay to shut down creative industries -- as if these don't represent Jobs in the Economy just like any other industry.

But it's more than business, too. I know in my bones art -- music, visual arts, the stories of film and television, photography, dance -- these are as necessary as roads and phone lines and farms, although their benefits can't be measured by the same criteria.

I know I'm doing something worthwhile and valuable, although I don't often see that point of view articulated or championed. And I'm not always sure how to articulate it myself, without sounding all defensive or airy-fairy.

Happily, Mary Beth Maziarz is not afraid to sound airy-fairy in her book Kick-Ass Creativity: An Energy Makeover for Artists, Explorers, and Creative Professionals, and I'm grateful she's not because it means that she wrote this:

Every day you have the potential to make contributions to the universe that no one else can possibly provide. You've got something special to offer. You're gifted, even. Creators like you share a gift of trust--in themselves and a higher source. You're one of the brave ones, the bold ones, the ones fearless enough to make huge changes and impacts on the world. You find the time that seems to elude everyone else, you believe in your visions, and you courageously stand beside your works and take the heat or applause, respectively. Let's just say how it is: you've got it goin' on.

There are other wonderful things about you. You're no stranger to creative energy--how it flows, how it slows, how it occasionally is served by large quantities of caffeine or a new relationship. You generally feel like you get it, even if you haven't always mastered it. You've probably learned to work with (well, tolerate) your inner critic, the occasional fear of failure (or success), and funky productivity rhythms. You may have even done some energy-enhancing work, like positively affirming yourself, jotting into idea journals, and learning the value of daily clearing rituals, all with good results. It's special and rare what you do. You risk! You sacrifice! You take chances, make choices, and give the time, thought, and effort necessary to carve a place for creation in your daily life, whether as a passion, hobby, or full-time career. Day by day, step by step, you discover and embody the life of an artist. You are one who creates.

Isn't that kind of affirming and energising?

These two paragraphs gave me such relief, I realised that I've been thirsty for a positive way of thinking about my creative profession. It's not just selfish to be a writer -- it's kinda great. It doesn't have to be all loserdom and self-doubt and being broke and pushing a rock uphill. It's something to be celebrated -- now, even if the royalty cheques haven't started rolling in yet.

I want more of this language, even if just to counter that voice in my own head that chimes in at the worst possible moment to tell me I don't deserve respect for my work until it pays the bills and even then...

And I want this language to become more a part of the conversation about our work, our arts and culture. Let's focus on the benefits -- to ourselves, our families, and our community. Let's move toward a world where pursuing a career in the arts is valued appropriately.

Second class? Let's call bullshit.

Character Prep: Emotional Arc

2011-02-05T13:33:00.004-04:00

My next spec pilot is a drama with a female lead, a strong procedural element, and a strong personal element. The procedural part takes place in a world I'm not familiar with, so it'll require research. Writing the story outline, I could get hung up on the part of the story I don't know -- the procedural, or "business," as I think of it -- but instead I'm starting with something else: the emotional arc of the main character.

This is a more efficient approach for a couple of reasons. First, until I know the emotional arc of the character, I don't know what kind of story I'd be looking for in my research. Secondly, it's something I can develop on my own, so I don't risk getting sidetracked by the research and losing momentum.

When I know my main character's emotional arc, I can begin to build the plot. I'll know what I need the business to accomplish, even if I don't yet know the nuts and bolts of it.

And again for the character, I don't want to get sidetracked pondering an extensive backstory. Instead, I start with this basic model:

The opening events of the show subvert her expectations by ____. This raises her biggest fear of ____. She could deal with her fear in a self-defeating way by ____, butinstead she will ultimately draw on her greatest quality of ____ totake the path of fulfilling her own best destiny of ____.

This is the emotional arc I want to fill in. It provides me with the questions:

What's the problem she has to deal with?
What's her biggest fear and how does it relate to this problem?
What's her flaw and how will it lead her to take a self-defeating approach to the problem?
What's her greatest strength?
If she chooses the path of her strength instead of her flaw, what's the best destiny she can fulfill?

(If you want to write a tragedy or down-ending, you'd ask the 5th question in reverse: if she chooses the path of her flaw instead of her strength, what's the worst destiny she will encounter?)

My first set of answers to this question are kind of sweeping -- they might apply for an entire series. So I keep those and then modify them to make a simpler version that will fit in the pilot.

Then I have the foundation of my character's emotional story: she has a problem that triggers her greatest fear, and she first deals with it out of fear, exposing her biggest flaw. When the results of that attempt come to light, she takes a different tack, draws on her greatest strength, and fulfills her destiny.

There's an essential truth to this model that I find inspiring: every person has in them the potential to give into their worst impulses and fail, or live up to their best selves and achieve something great.

Consider an addict. Perhaps you have a friend or family member whose addiction is dragging them down, undermining them personally and in their careers. Because you love them, you can see that if they find the strength to quit, they have it in them to be so much greater than their addiction will let them be now. But to them, none of it is very clear, and powerful forces are holding them to a self-destructive path -- but you, outside of it and loving them, can see that they have a choice and a great destiny that will either be fulfilled or not.

That's the way I think of character arc. It was first illustrated for me by a wonderful novel by a friend, Andrew Kaufman, called All My Friends Are Superheroes. It's not an addiction story, though -- it's a love story in which the protagonist is clearly challenged to realise and overcome his own flaw or lose his love forever.

All of us have this choice between our best and worst impulses every day, but generally the stakes don't seem so high as overcoming addiction, or losing your greatest love. But as storytellers, we can show the choice very clearly by putting a character in high-stakes circumstances and following their emotional arc through to the end.

Naming Names

2011-02-04T11:23:00.014-04:00

Working on a new spec pilot with a brand-spanking-new set of characters to play with, I remembered I wanted to write here about the tricks of character naming.

Naming can be challenging: you want names that are familiar but not overused; interesting but not impossible to pronounce and not trying too hard; age- and place-appropriate; suit the tone of your script -- not every script can pull off an Inigo Montoya -- and that fit alongside the names of the rest of your cast.

I had to rename a few characters partway through hockey because I'd inadvertently given two of them names that appear in the regular cast on Grey's Anatomy. During the search for replacement names, Story Editor gave me the following tips, and he's kindly agreed to let me pass them on to you:

None of the regulars can have a name starting with the same letter, for ease of writing in script documents and mnemonic ease. People associate with the first letter. So if you had a Trevor and a Tony, people would get them confused.
Not more than two regular cast names ending with the same sound. For example, a Jamie and a Lacy maxes out your "eee" names.
They can't all be two-syllable names.
Pay attention to vowels. Avoid a preponderence of internal A's, for example. Martha, Barry, and Pam will start to sound too same-y.
The name needs to work as a shorthand for the character-vibe. You'll know it when you see it.

Story Editor's last tip is important: you want to feel that click, because finding the right name can really help you get in the groove with your character -- and later for your audience to do the same.

Working on a new script with my co-writer, we started out naming our characters after the real people they were based on. This helped in the beginning because it gave us a clear sense of the type of person we were dealing with.

But a word of warning about naming your characters after friends and enemies: at some point, you'll need your character to diverge from the real-life person -- you want them working for the script, not being faithful to someone your audience doesn't know or care about. You may want to rename them at that point to give yourself mental freedom from the person who gave you the original inspiration.

Say the name out loud a few times, and don't forget to combine it with any titles your character might have to make sure it works in the ways it'll be spoken by other characters in the script.

Look at your cast names as a set and check them against the rules above. For extensive casts, I've started keeping an A-Z list on file for quick reference. I also keep a file to save names I haven't used yet but that I think might be useful in future.

Here are a few of my go-to online naming resources:

Facebook.com - Go to the page of the biggest social butterfly you know and cruise through their extensive friend list as a quick way to find first and last names.

YeahBaby .com - This babynamer allows you to search by beginning and end letter as well as number of syllables and ethnic origin.

Popular Baby Names - The American Social Security site provides lists of most popular names going back for a hundred years. I find my character's birth year by adding a couple of years to today's date to adjust (optimistically) for development and production time and then subtract their age. Search the SSA site by year to find naming trends appropriate to your character's age.

Behind the Name - Surnames by ethnic origin and/or first letter. And for some of these, you may want to refer to this handy dictionary of surname pronunciation. Googling your setting name and "surnames" will also provide you with genealogy sites listing common names from where your characters live.

Imdb - Use the drop-down menu search at the top of the page to select "Characters" and enter the names you're thinking of using to see where they've already shown up in film and TV. If the name you want has been used for an iconic character already, or is in circulation on a popular current show, you might want to avoid the association.

Your Myelin and You

2011-01-26T09:02:00.003-04:00

I bet you've been thinking there's not enough neurology discussion around here. Well, today's the day we change all that.

Further to my talent tirade a while back, I picked up a book called The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How. by Daniel Coyle. Mainly I liked the look of it because the subtitle suggested Coyle would confirm everything I'd said about talent -- and don't we all enjoy books that confirm our rightness?

It does, but for a reason I didn't anticipate: science!

Coyle talks to neurologists and studies pockets of genius in arts, music, and sports, such as the futsal origins of Brazilian soccer stars, and concludes in his book that nature and nurture, the usual suspects when we talk about the formation of talent, have nothing much to do with it.

Instead, Coyle confirms the role of practice, arguing that there's nothing innate about talent -- like those soccer players, whose skill developed in the intense conditions of futsal courts. Expertise is formed through a cellular process in the brain in which the cells that carry information about a particular task are wrapped with myelin, making them stronger and making you better at the task. Neurologists believe that how good you are at any one thing depends on how much myelin has formed around the brain cells responsible for that task.

And myelin develops, Coyle learned, through a process he calls "deep practice." Deep practice, "struggling in certain targeted ways -- operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes -- makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them...end up making you swift and graceful without you realising it."

This mistake-focused practice is particularly interesting when I think of myself as a newbie writer, more interested in gaining approval for my writing than taking criticism for it. Approval, for all its perks, won't help build myelin:

Deep practice is a strange concept for two reasons. The first reason is that it cuts against our intuition about talent. Our intuition tells us that practice relates to talent in the same way that a whetstone relates to a knife: it's vital but useless without a solid blade of so-called natural ability. Deep practice raises an intriguing possibility: that practice might be the way to forge the blade itself.

The second reason deep practice is a strange concept is that it takes events that we normally strive to avoid--namely, mistakes--and turns them into skills. To understand how deep practice works, then, it's first useful to consider the unexpected but crucial importance of errors to the learning process.

So as writers, what we need to do in order to build that myelin is focus on our mistakes. This might take some ego-adjustment, an improved tolerance for telling ourselves, "that doesn't work." But it'll build a better writer's brain.

The firing of the circuit is paramount: Myelin is not built to respond to fond wishes or vague ideas or information that washes over us like a warm bath. The mechanism is built to respond to actions: the little electrical impulses traveling down nerve fibers. It responds to urgent repetition....Deep practice is assisted by the attainment of a primal state, one where we are attentive, hungry, and focused, even desperate.

In this way, Coyle says, one intense, mistake-focused session of practice can be as productive as a month's worth of passive practice. Practice reading our own material seeking out what doesn't work and correcting it (after we've pushed through that first draft, of course). Send it out to readers who will be critical. The mistakes don't hurt us in the long run -- they help us, as long as we're working toward fixing them.

* * *

Futsal photo above used with permission. Check out andybatt.com for more amazing sports photos.

Get On The Train

2011-01-25T12:36:00.002-04:00

Here's a cool term for series television from Salon's Matt Zoller Seitz:

As soon as possible, every ambitious TV series must produce what I call a "Get on the Train" episode -- an episode that demonstrates mastery not just of the medium itself, but the show's dramatic raw material: its characters, story and themes. An installment that confirms beyond a doubt that the people who make the show are all on the same page -- that they know what they're doing and what they're trying to say, and can put it all across with discipline and panache. When you've seen an episode like this, you decide to get on the train and see where it takes you.

From this review of FX's "Lights Out."

Cracking Meaningful Endings

2011-01-21T09:39:00.015-04:00

For a long time, my script was top-heavy. I revised the setup acts over and over, but always seemed to run out of time and energy on the second half. Of course that wasn't a coincidence: I was scared of the ending.

The ending -- and in this case by "end" I mean from the midpoint to The End -- is where all you've built up pays off and the cosmic point of your story becomes clear. It contains the biggest emotional moments and the results of the transformation your characters' journey has caused. It will have a huge effect on whether your audience feels satisfied when the credits roll.

No pressure!

Two things in particular helped me work through my fear of properly tackling my endings: Robert McKee and a screenwriting blog I'd never seen before that I discovered during a desperate Google search for "screenplay midpoint."

But before I start quoting McKee, I'm going to digress a little bit to give you my disclaimer about screenwriting books: the biggest lie about screenwriting books (and courses), implied or stated outright, is that they will unlock the secrets and provide you with The Formula that will practically write your screenplay for you. I've found that they do not. Shocking.

However, there's no point throwing the baby out with the marketing pitch. Screenwriting books do provide a variety of ways of looking at screenplays that can cumulatively, along with your own practice, teach the craft. And when you know the books, you sometimes know where to look for answers when you find yourself stuck, as I was with my ending. I turned first to McKee, and he said this:

Story climax is the fourth of thefive-part structure. This crowningMajor Reversal is not necessarily full of noise and violence. Rather,it must be full of meaning. If I could send a telegram to the filmproducers of the world, it would be these three words: “MeaningProduces Emotion.” Not money; not sex; not special effects; notmovie stars; not lush photography.

MEANING: A revolution in values from positive to negative ornegative to positive with or without irony—a value swing at maximumcharge that's absolute and irreversible. The meaning of that changemoves the heart of the audience.

"The meaning of that change moves the heart of the audience." This was the really important part for me. Anyone who's watched enough movies or TV knows that there's a great climactic scene during the end stretch, in which your hero makes his last important decision -- a good decision if you want a happy ending, a bad decision if it's a tragedy -- and indeed I'd had that great climactic scene in place for some time. It was in the right spot, the right people were there and the right action was happening.
It just produced no emotion.

The meaning of the change had to be clear and moving. So I went back and identified what I wanted the meaning to be, what setup I had to do before the scene to achieve it, and rewrote. McKee talks about this as if there's a formula, but as well as understanding the mechanics, you have to pay close attention to your own feelings, look at how your emotions are moved, and use that understanding to create the experience you want for the audience. You know how sometimes you'll see movies or TV where you know the right scenes are in the right places, and the actors are going through the right motions, but you still don't feel anything? The formulas are only helpful up to a point -- you have to provide the emotional content yourself.

Then I found Australian screenwriter and teacher Allan Palmer's description of the meaningful shift that takes place in the midpoint:

The first thing that should happen at the midpoint or the Ordeal is that someone (generally the antagonist) should hold up a mirror to the hero and make them aware of their flaw – typically in none too subtle terms. In doing this, it should be clear that the hero CANNOT continue towards their goal without addressing this flaw.

Palmer argues that this emotional experience for the protagonist is more crucial than raising the stakes at the midpoint. In fact it is raising the stakes, but it's the internal stakes for the protagonist -- the emotional stakes. When done well, it affects how we care about the character and what we want for them. Palmer gives several examples, including this one from Dead Poet's Society:

In Dead Poets, this is the “sweaty toothed madman” scene. Mr Keating (Robin Williams) asks Todd (Ethan Hawke) to recite a poem he’s written, knowing it scares the hell out of him, and Todd says he hasn’t written one. Keating won’t be beaten that easily and says that “Mr Anderson thinks that everything inside him is worthless, isn’t that your greatest fear, Todd?”. He holds a mirror up and says, there, pal, that’s your flaw. But he doesn’t stop there.

Then, in Todd’s worst nightmare scenario, he’s forced to extemporise a poem in front of the whole class. He’s resistant, he’s humiliated and embarrassed and the less sensitive members of the class laugh at his predicament, but under this extreme pressure he conceives images and metaphors that silence the room and reveal the lyrical romanticist that’s been lurking in his high-achieving brother’s shadow. Todd emerges from his trance reborn. Neil looks at him in awe and Keating says, “Don’t you ever forget this”. And he doesn’t. It’s this moment that allows him to rise up, literally, in Act 3 and stand in defence of both his dead friend and beloved mentor.

Read the whole post here at Palmer's blog, Cracking Yarns. I've gone back to it again and again to help me understand and develop my endings. When I put it together with McKee, I saw how the midpoint connects directly to the ending, and rewrote the two of them together to bring them closer to depicting the internal transformation of my characters, the meaning of that transformation, and the emotional journey I hoped my audience would experience.

UPDATE: Checking out what sites are linking to this one, I found a new story blog I haven't seen before. Jim Hull's Story Fanatic site is a collection of articles about the elements of story, including a series on "Meaningful Endings:"

The purpose of every great story should be to present an audience with something meaningful, some greater reason for the events that unfold. With that in mind, the key to solid story structure is making sure that every moment leads to an ending that supports this greater purpose. The articles in this series outline the different ways a screenwriter can successfully fulfill this responsibility.

Hull's series includes articles on ending a movie, and writing a tragedy, personal triumph, personal triumph, and tragedies and triumphs.

Freedom

2011-01-19T08:26:00.008-04:00

In the New Yorker article on procrastination I mentioned a while back, they talked about a program called Freedom, which blocks the Internet from your computer for as long as you tell it to. I tried out the trial version and then bought the full version for a mere $10, and it's great for those times I need a little extra help focusing on my work.

Freedom is a very simple program that disconnects your Internet. To reconnect before your scheduled session is over, you basically have to restart your computer with a few more "End Now" clicks than usual -- a suitably annoying process.

If Facebook and Twitter are your particular bugaboo, there's a special version of Freedom that blocks only social networking sites.

Get your distractions under control before you have to go to Jonathan Franzen lengths. From Time:

Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can't write serious fiction on a computer that's connected to the Internet, he not only removed the Dell's wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port. "What you have to do," he explains, "is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it."

Freedom is available for Mac and PC. Based on my experience, the most important tip I can give you to get the most out of Freedom is that after you download and install it, you have to actually turn it on.

Next Up

2011-01-17T13:25:00.009-04:00

While waiting for CBC's notes on the second draft of the pilot, I'm working on new ideas, including a couple of series pilots. The process feels very different this time around: faster and less painful. Here are a few things I've learned from the experience:

1) Write what you need: When first breaking the hockey story, I did a lot of laborious work around characters' backstories and psychology. Why were they behaving the way they were? What would this person do? I also did a lot of research, much of which is packed away in a file box. Now I know I don't need to put off doing what needs to be done. What matters is the series concept, the pilot story, and the characters. I can go straight for those things and fill in the answers as questions arise because:

2) Nothing is permanent: I used to not write in the actual bible, script, or outline until I had the best possible choice for everything. I'd write lots of notes trying to arrive at something worthy of going into the official document. Now I start with a notes file for early thoughts and as soon as they start coalescing, I start a bible document and a story outline document. That means putting in things I know are placeholders, or approximations of what I want, or the best idea I have today. Tomorrow, it may change. Anything you don't like can be rewritten. Things will improve. There is a real fluidity to writing. It's a living, changing thing. Really understanding that impermanence is a great cure for my writer's block, and a great help to writing faster. Don't put off the real work -- if what you want to write is a pilot story, write the pilot story. Keep your hands moving and have faith that the material will grow as it should.

3) Be entertaining: The first time I worried over themes and characters and what would people really do and what is the moral of the story and what am I trying to say? Snooze! All those things are important but they're completely irrelevant if they're in story no one cares about or will have fun watching. Now I recognise that story is not the same as real life and I don't want it to be: I want it to be better than real life! Now I ask, "What's fun and interesting about this scene and these characters?" much more often -- in every scene, if I'm paying attention. (On a similar topic, check out "The Tyranny of Why" from Denis McGrath's archives.) This is TV. It's fun, goddammit!

And Then There Are The Good Days

2011-01-13T15:35:00.003-04:00

Well I've had an interesting month.

We got network notes on the first draft in December and estimated it would take a couple of weeks to turn them around, delivering the second draft in time for pilot consideration at the end of January. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Then, while I was working through the notes, I found a story change I wanted to make. On one hand, it was a change that simplified the story in a good way. It made a more natural flow for the plot and characters, basically. And the more I looked at it, the more I felt it made great sense and would kind of strengthen every character's throughline and pull the whole thing together. Wonderful!

But.

Once the network has approved the story -- and at this point they've approved it in the outline and the first draft -- I need to go back to them for approval to change it. And after getting overall positive notes on the first draft, why would I want to make a change that didn't directly address the notes at all? It would be opening up a new can of worms.

Now, a big challenges as a beginner writing a pilot is learning when to take everyone else's advice and when to do you want despite their good advice. One of the guiding principles I've had in my relationship with Story Editor and Producers is that their experience is important and valuable and I'd be a freaking idiot to disregard it.

At the same time, part of the job of writing a pilot is to make it your own. For example, the reviews today of Off The Map have some crying foul over its pale imitation of Grey's Anatomy. I hope Off The Map becomes its own and succeeds because 1) Matt Saracen! Squee! and 2) it's not that easy to make a new show and most deserve more than one episode to find their feet. But if it doesn't, it will land on the scrap-heap of dozens of cookie-cutter shows that die of soullessness.

The audience can spot a cookie-cutter show and even if they like it, it seems to me like a cheat and a waste of time and creative power to just recycle the formula. Much as any of us would like to bottle the Grey's lightning (and I would), making it your own means taking what you love about the other show, adding your own genuine passions, improving on the model in some way, and providing something new for the audience.

I mean, I guess that's what it means. This is my first time at the rodeo, after all.

But when I think of Network Executive urging me to "keep it yours" as I got ready to choose a Producer, this is how I understand his concern: There is an element of lightning in a bottle to any good show -- something that gives it heart and makes it special -- that won't come by committee. It has to belong to someone. And sometimes that means not listening to the good advice of more experienced mentors because you have to trust your gut instead. The trick is to figure out when.

So here I am with this change I want to make -- and I keep thinking that now I've seen the rightness of making this change, I can't unsee it. Consequently, the old plot is like a flashing neon light of wrongness to me now: I could abandon the idea, do the network notes in a few days and be done with it. I just don't want to.

On the other hand, the change starts at the top of the third act and snowballs on through the rest of the script. What with the holidays, our window for getting the script in for pilot consideration this season is rapidly closing. And no one is too sure I can tear apart the script and rebuild it in less than two weeks, since I've never never accomplished such a thing before in the history of this project. History tells us this could as easily take me three months to do, by which time the project will be well and truly dead.

So, on New Year's Eve, Story Editor, Producers and I had a conference call to discuss the dilemma. At this point, we're waiting for network approval on the story change. We've all, at this point, gone above and beyond what we thought we were signing up for at the beginning of this project, and no one is too excited about the prospect of letting me miss another deadline, miss the network's deadline for pilot consideration and effectively kill the project. I tell them I think that I've learned a lot over the past three years and won't mess this up -- but I have to admit I've pretty much never met the deadlines on the project before so, honestly, I don't know for sure whether I can pull it off. Everyone else on the call seems to lean toward scrapping the change and doing the network notes on the old version of the story simply and quickly.

But before we did that, I made my last pitch in favor of the change, to which Producer said: "We like to support the writer, they know the project best. I want to support you but we also need to know that this can be delivered on time. That means having a draft to your story editor a week from today. Do you believe you can do that? I just need to hear you tell me you believe. Do you believe?"

(Producer seems to have a previously-undiscovered flair for the dramatic moment.)

My mind raced over the question for a moment. I'd outlined the plot change but hadn't started scripting it yet. A week to rewrite the script?

"Yes. I believe I can do it."

To everyone's credit, they responded with very supportive noises and jokes about how my New Year's Eve plans had changed and I'd better get to work. But I kind of expect we all hung up wondering what kind of risk I'd just taken. I thought perhaps I'd gotten caught up in the drama of the moment and made a ridiculous promise -- but you know what? Mostly it felt strangely powerful and reassuring to say, "Yes, I believe."

The first four days of the rewrite were buoyed by my new personal motto. I didn't get blocked, the revisions came out almost magically, and even faster than I expected. I rewrote the script in four days, leaving three left to revise. I felt like the 1980 Men's Olympic Hockey Team.

The next three days were a bit tougher -- the story wasn't quite as tight as I'd hoped, I struggled with my list of improvements I still wanted to do, and I started to question the wisdom of not taking my mentors' advice. I lay awake nights worrying that I would have been better off polishing the old story to a high shine and that instead this draft would be the nail in the coffin of my writing career...blah blah blah those thoughts are so boring!

But I kept writing, and in the end I sent the script to my editor three hours before the deadline. Woo hoo!!! I believe!

Ten hours later, Story Editor turned around his notes with a note I've printed out and pasted in my diary so I can show it to anyone, anytime. He said: "Very strong, you should be happy....You are indeed on the other side of a great learning curve, and I have great admiration for all you've done here."

That was a good day.

The second draft of the script has gone to the network now. There will be more polishing to do, and then it will be out of my control. I'm trying to figure out how I'll feel if the pilot doesn't get ordered -- or if it does, for that matter. I've never experienced either, so I don't know what to expect. But either way, I feel good. I feel -- more than ever before in my life -- equipped.

TV Writers Really Know They've Made It When...

2011-01-04T14:19:00.015-04:00

High ratings? Yeah, I guess that's pretty nice.

Renewal year after year? It's a living.

Emmy's? Popularity contest.

But how will I really know I've done good TV?

When my hero is immortalized in cross-stitch!

Via the comedy geniuses over there at Regretsy and Steotch.

Am I Good?

2011-01-02T08:27:00.008-04:00

Scott Myers recently asked readers to tell him their writing wish for 2011. Of the wishes people wrote in with, the one that struck me was, "For someone to tell me my writing is good....it would mean everything to hear." I remember this feeling so well. From yesterday. Just kidding, haha. Not really. Anyway... I admire this writer so much for letting this particular wish, which I'm sure is quite common but often unspoken, hang out there. So here is my personal response, for him and for anyone who wants the same thing:

I haven't read your writing but I can tell you that you are good. Your writing may not be good enough yet to sell or even for others to enjoy reading, but you are good enough to get it there as long as you have patience. You will get it there faster when you master the skill of fretting less about how good you are and writing more.

Oh, I remember feeling this way, yearning for reassurance and instead hearing pro writers say, "Just write," and being so frustrated by it. I thought, they make it sound so easy but it's not that easy! It's not that easy to write well, not at all. But the solution remains: keep writing. It may seem like an ugly, inconvenient solution but, like the cockroach after nuclear war, it's the one that will win out in the end.

Right now, no one can satisfy you when you ask them whether you're a good writer, because you're probably not -- yet -- and you know it, no matter what they say. You can't really write well yet but you can look to yourself for the patience to persevere even when what you're writing is crap, and disappoints you. Look to yourself for the clear eyes to know when it's bad, the forgiveness to let it be bad, and the burning desire to keep making it better. Then one day you won't need to ask others to tell you you're good, because you will know.

(That's not true. You'll keep wanting people to tell you you're good. But you won't feel quite so desperate about. Most days. I think. Did you like this post? Leave a comment? Please!)

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T09:59:00.005-04:00

I'm not really here -- I have to work like mad this week. But in the meantime, let me say this Oliver Burkeman article, "Abandon Your Resolutions," is a nice way to start the new year. First he says don't make resolutions...and then he offers a few options in case you just can't help yourself. One involves wrangling your Facebook addiction into submission:

"It's a one-on-one fistfight between you and Mark Zuckerberg for control of your brain. Make sure you win."

But the essential point -- not to make resolutions at all -- is the best. Just relax. In the immortal words of Mark Darcy to Bridget Jones: I like you very much. Just as you are.

Have a great 2011!

The Magic Is Inside You

2010-12-30T10:40:00.006-04:00

Soon after I began dating my now-husband, I asked him one of those tiresome "romantic" questions. Something like, "Will we stay together?" Happy, and wanting reassurance it would last.

"I don't know," he said simply. "I don't have a crystal ball."

That may have been the moment I fell in love.

When we embark on something, we want to know the outcome. One of the great successes of the advertising industry is that it is willing to promise good outcomes: In this car, you will be happy. With this face cream you will look young again. Ads have none of the pesky uncertainty that plagues, well, reality. But ads are self-interested propaganda. In fact, none of us has a crystal ball.

For many years, I've been preoccupied with the outcomes of my writing. Will my script be good? (Brilliant, actually, is what I hope for.) Will I sell it? Will I get work? Will I make money? Will I be popular? Will I win awards? Will I be successful? As if it's a race and all that matters is the finish line.

I want you'll-look-young-forever guarantees when I set out on a big journey, especially one that can make me as vulnerable as writing will. But no one knows what's going to happen. Pretty fucking inconvenient, eh?

As a stand-in for the crystal ball, I have always liked the idea of faith. At first, my faith was sort of groundless optimism: everything will be all right. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people will like me when I'm a mad-famous tv writer! Kind of a rickety foundation, but it kept me going.

I've made some great progress, personally and professionally, while writing this pilot, and one of the most valuable things I've learned is that the outcome isn't where or what I thought it was. It wasn't something I could imagine.

One of the things I've developed is a different kind of faith. It has to do with knowing that if I put in the work, I will get better. That's all. I will get better, and I'll enjoy getting better. The day-to-day work, the process -- these are good enough. These are actually a lot.

I started out thinking that I would be successful only if my show was produced (and the series picked up, and beloved by the nation...). But I encountered all kinds of problems, and I was afraid I'd never be successful. Then I handled the problems, still with no guarantee of the outcome. And the more I handled them, the more I felt it: I'm successful already. I'm doing my job the best I can and I'm enjoying it and getting better at it. That's success.

When I told Georgina this -- that I'm at peace with whatever happens next because the process has been entirely worthwhile and I know I've done the best that I could do -- she said I've had a breakthrough. And I think it's true.

I don't know what happens next. And I'm okay with that.

"The magic is inside you. There ain't no crystal ball." -- Dolly Parton

Be Imperfect

2010-12-23T22:09:00.003-04:00

It's so funny, isn't it, that we spend much of our lives trying to be perfect and then it turns out the secret to it all is to be imperfect. The same can probably be said of your screenplay. Watch this.

F&*# Talent!

2010-12-15T16:04:00.004-04:00

Let's retire the word "talent."

The idea of talent comes up frequently when we talk about creative work, sometimes even as a prerequisite for the job of writing, acting, or painting. And maybe it plays a part in whether a person can be successful at those things, but is it a part that deserves the traction it gets?

We think of talent as something innate, a gift, a special ability you're either born with or not. So by definition it's passive -- we didn't do anything to get it -- and it's unchangeable. It's also unmeasurable, so you can't know for sure whether you have it or not. Most often when we say people have talent, it's after they've spent hundreds or thousands of hours practicing the skill they're "innately" good at. When it comes to gauging an aptitude for creative work, the word is pretty much worse than completely useless.

In it's place, I offer my list of qualities more important than talent:

1) Enthusiasm: An interest in the kind of art you want to pursue so passionate that it makes you spend lots and lots of time seeking out, enjoying, analysing, thinking and talking about what other people have already done. If you're only interested in your own art, that's fine -- just don't expect to make a living at it.

2) Hunger: A recurring compulsion to contribute to this particular field. That is, don't assume that because you have something to say and you want your point of view to be heard that you must be a writer. People can be influential communicators in lots of different fields -- look for a marriage between the things you want to say and the way you want to say it. TV drama might be the right fit for you, but so might stand-up comedy, photography, farming, finance, journalism, or politics.

3) Curiosity: However much you already know, you want to know more. It helps if you're curious about things in the real world, big or small, so that you have material to write about that comes from your own observation. Yes, someone else has already written about that real-life material, but better you should start with the real thing and practice writing about it as if it's the first time anyone ever has than regurgitate someone else's art. Care enough to find out what it feels like to have fresh discoveries for yourself.

4) Ego: You want attention so badly that you're willing to spend years refining your ability to get it. You believe in the importance of your own thoughts, experiences, observations and opinions.

5) Humility: You are willing to write 200 pages then throw 190 of them into the recycling bin. You're prepared to rewrite. And rewrite and rewrite. You want to hear other people's advice about your work and put your own feelings aside to take their criticism and ask for more. You know that the time and response of the audience is something you work to earn, not something they owe you.

6) Patience and determination: To the best of your ability, imagine that before you succeed in a creative field, you will spend 7-10 years toiling in unpaid obscurity, frequently frustrated by the gap between the quality of work you want to produce and the quality of work you are able to produce. Imagine a frustrated spouse. Multiple rejection letters and unreturned phone calls. Financial limbo and never feeling like you have a "real" job. And lonely, abject humiliation when you go back and re-read what you wrote last year (or last week or last night). Set aside for a moment the fantasy that your first screenplay will win you an Oscar, and pretend instead that the above scenario is guaranteed -- do you still want to do it?

These are not qualities you have to be born with -- they're things you can develop if you have the interest and willingness to do the hard work. And I think they're far better predictors of success than the t-word.

Ensemble Family Drama

2010-12-14T22:28:00.005-04:00

If you're working with an ensemble cast or a big cast, you're going to want to have scenes where you bring everyone together. And then you're going to have to justify bringing everyone together.

From a production standpoint, for example, group scenes mean all the cast is at work that day and the crew is doing endless coverage. There's also a pretty good screenwriting rule about not having cast in a scene if they're not doing anything -- this is not only potentially dissatisfying for actor who might be standing around without lines, it's also distracting for viewers, who may at least subconsciously expect everyone present to make themselves useful. Kind of the human equivalent of hanging a bunch of guns on the wall -- once you see them, you start anticipating gunplay.

My pilot is an ensemble family drama, and there are many scenes with multiple main characters. So my story editor has had repeated opportunities to remind me: exploit these scenes. "Have the stories converge here," he would tell me. And I'd kind of tear my hair out every time he did.

I found converging stories challenging because I was so focused on individual characters. I struggled repeatedly to try to bring all the strings together into something more orderly than a tangle, but it seemed like a plotting demand that was way beyond my expertise. I began wandering around mumbling, "ensemble family drama" in a self-recriminating kind of way. Who came up with this bright idea, anyway? (On days when I was working on group scenes set at the hockey rink, my lament would be, "ensemble family sports drama.")

Then one day it occurred to me to look at group scenes not as a collection of individuals to be corralled into plotty order, but as a single unit. The family unit. So instead of focusing on where individual character arcs were landing in during group scenes, I worked out an arc for the family as a whole. I asked myself, what's the story of this family? It gave me the emotional journey that they were going on together. With that arc in hand, it was much clearer how each group scene needed to function.

Of course, individual arcs are always in play in group scenes, but they became much easier to handle with this simple shift in perspective.

3 Minute Trick

2010-12-11T13:25:00.001-04:00

I'll say one last thing about procrastination (this week) and then move on to more fun topics.

A quick way to beat procrastination is to promise yourself you'll work for just 3 minutes. Sometimes getting your ass in the seat is the hardest part, but if you just focus on the beginning, the rest takes care of itself. And if not -- you've only invested 3 minutes!

Procrastination: What's It Done For You Lately?

2010-12-05T21:07:00.007-04:00

I went back after a long absence to my therapist this week, and she asked me what's good about my procrastination.

Nothing, obviously!

And when I say procrastination here, I'm not talking a little light reading or a spot of housekeeping while I really ought to be working. I'm talking a blockage. You know that feeling like a black weight in your chest that rebels with everything it's got against even the thought of even opening up that file?

And after month after month of this feeling messing with my deadlines, my schedule, my productivity, my life and my self-esteem, I see it coming and I'm filled with dread.

What do I like about it? Fuck off.

But Georgina is no dope. She sent me home with these questions in my head: What's good about procrastination? How is it serving me? How is it protecting me? What do I like about it? Why do I keep going back there?

Those questions percolated for a few days and meanwhile, I got back to work and the black weight thankfully receded again. Today, I had a eureka! moment and recognized how procrastination might serve to protect me. I'm not going to tell you the reason here because, you know, if this sounds like your dealio as well...find your own answer!

But it will be interesting to see whether, if I accept that my procrastination exists for a good reason, that there's a problem it serves to address, however dysfunctionally, and try to solve that problem from a different angle, it will make for a significant change.

Special thanks to Sarah at Slow Industries for permission to use the above illustration, available from her Etsy shop in hand-printed letterpress. I love it!

Oh, is it almost Christmas? I hadn't noticed...

That's About Rewrite

2010-12-04T12:52:00.005-04:00

Guys in pink shirts with d-bag haircuts -- and anyone else out there sincerely wondering what it's like to be a writer -- take note of this reality check by guest blogger Anne Lower on Save The Cat:

"How many times do I have to rewrite this? I’ve heard this question time and time again, usually delivered with a bit of a whine, like the child at Wal-Mart on the verge of going through a full-blown tantrum. My answer? I have absolutely no f–king idea. All I know is that there is work to be done, massive work. There are no shortcuts. Writing is hard."

An Unexpected Path To Almost Everything

2010-12-03T10:21:00.011-04:00

Visiting my Dad's last weekend, I was surprised to see him giggling away at a book called Women Food and God. I picked it up and was immediately sucked in. Oprah fans may be familiar with Geneen Roth, but I'd never heard of her and was delighted to find this fresh and direct writing on the problem of compulsive over-eating.

But why was my father reading this book? Well, he's trying to quit smoking, and he said that with a little transposing, Roth's perspective was useful to him as well. And reading the book, I agreed that it struck a chord for me not just in terms of my eating habits, but for any of my compulsive behaviours -- such as procrastination around writing.

Roth's fundamental observation is that when we eat even though we're not hungry, we're using food to distract our attention away from feelings we don't want to feel. Pretty straightforward connection: for a procrastinating writer, when we, say, minimize Final Draft and cruise on over to lamebook.com, we're not using the Internet for intellectual nourishment, we're just distracting our attention away from feelings we don't want to feel. And that leaves those feelings hanging, unresolved, hence the sense of perpetual unease you can have during extended procrastination.

I'm currently avoiding work like a crazy person, and here go the swirling thoughts: "Okay, I need to put a new Matt and Erin scene in before the lobster supper scene, but when I do that, it's going to mean changing the lobster supper scene, and the idea of that is depressing because why is that scene still sucking so bad after all this time, and if only I hadn't spent the last week madly avoiding work I'd be so much further ahead with all this and that scene would be perfect by now but instead I've wasted all this time and how is it possible I still suck so bad and am throwing this job out the window? How is it possible I'm not a better writer yet?"

Welcome to my head. See what I did there? I started with an objective truth -- I need to write a new scene -- and spiraled into a bunch of self-defeating, unprovable and frightening judgments that I heard as truth even though they are not.

Here's what Geneen Roth tells me about my head: "Minds are useful when we need to conceptualize, plan, theorize. But when we depend on them to guide our inner lives, we're lost. Minds are excellent at presenting a thousand different variations of the past and conjuring them into a future. And scaring us with most of them."

One of Roth's points is that if we stop eating (or smoking, or surfing, or Tweeting, or shopping), and sit still, things will get better. We're so busy trying not to feel our feelings because we think they'll kill us, but the "cure" is worse than the disease: the feelings won't go away as long as we try to ignore them and stuff them back down and cover them over with food and rationalizations -- but it's the food and rationalizations that'll kill ya.

The God in Roth's book, by the way, is explicitly not a religious guy-in-the-sky-with-robes God, but the spirituality all humans possess, regardless of their religion or lack of it. Her belief is that while we're working hard to avoid our feelings, we're also avoiding our spirituality, the thing that connects us most profoundly to the world and life and the people around us.

And that's a connection that writers can't afford to lose. Forgive me if I sound too lofty here, but writers exist to be spiritual -- to be gods on earth, specialists in seeing life as it is, the problems and cures, the rights and wrongs, the truth, and reflecting what they see back so that everyone can share that elevated understanding.

Wow, that did come out sounding lofty. But I believe it. I don't believe it's any more important than being a doctor or a garbage collector or a parent -- but neither is it any less. It's just the job. And to do the job with any kind of sincerity or truthfulness, we have to be prepared to feel the feelings. To sit still and listen without judging. And then to write.

Miserableness

2010-12-01T15:40:00.007-04:00

I haven't blogged for a while. There was a time when I really should have, about a month ago, after I delivered the first draft of the script to the network and I was busting with happy thoughts about writing and all I've learned over the past three years and what a milestone I'd just crossed.

Or tripped over, because now I seem to be flat on my face.

It did feel like a milestone, like something fundamental about my writing self had changed. The draft represented proof, finally, that I'd learned some craft. It felt good. My mind was teeming with useful things to write in my blog. I planned to change my focus from writers block to crafty usefulness, knowledge being the hot new cure for fear, dontcha know.

Then we got network notes -- and they were good, too. Not a ton of them, and nothing in particular that seemed too daunting. But when I sat down to do them, I entered the worst phase of procrastination and depression I've had in ages.

There are all kinds of reasons I could list for my latest bout of fierce resistance, but if I've learned anything from my process-navel-gazing, it's that the reasons are meaningless. They're like so many molecules of water flowing into a hole in the sand. You can scoop the water out, but the hole will just fill up again. The water isn't the problem, the hole is the problem.

And then my mind goes to that familiar place: you've taken too long to fix this, you have the stink of failure on you now and no one will ever hire you to write again. Then I spend a bit of time fantasizing about the brand-new career I'll have. (It's marriage counselor, by the way. I think I'll be really good at it. If you're having relationship issues in a couple years, look me up, I'll help you out.)

Why do I want to be a writer, anyway? Everyone knows writers are miserable, though somehow other writers manage to be miserable and productive, while I have a useless, sad-sacky sort of misery. I'm soooo special that way.

Here's what Steven Pressfield says about misery in The War of Art:

How To Be Miserable

In my younger days dodging the draft, I somehow wound up in the Marine Corps. There's a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful.

The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable.

This is invaluable for an artist.

Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because those candy-asses don't know how to be miserable.

The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.

The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.

So show up, rain or shine, miserable or inspired. Just keep showing up. Okay, then. I'll open Final Draft again even though it feels like every part of my body is telling me not to, and I'll write some more crap that fails to live up to my expectations for my story and my characters, and then I'll write another blog entry telling you how it all worked out, which will also fail to live up to my expectations for blog entries.

And I guess it's possible even if I do those things, the world will keep on spinning.

Stupid world.

I Am Totally Going to Ace The Exam!

2010-10-09T22:55:00.004-03:00

"What We Can Learn From Procrastination," The New Yorker.

Scene Strategy to Avoid Non-Writing

2010-09-29T08:31:00.005-03:00

There's a pernicious thing that happens in writing which is to not write while it seems like you are writing. Words are coming out on the page, but you are - perhaps without even noticing it - avoiding the work of the piece. A common example of non-writing is when two characters are headed for conflict and we cut away, only to return after the conflict is resolved, and exposit what happened when we should have experienced it firsthand.

If you're really clever at something - dialogue or jokes, for example - it's possible to do some great hand-waving to distract from the fact that you're not writing the thing that needs to be written. Because it's hard to show people fighting or falling in love or cleverly getting out of a tough spot, so instead of really doing that, you might first try the cutaway, or try some other things that are almost entertaining enough to have you believe you wrote something that you didn't actually write.

Outlining can help save you from this fate of being too clever, because the bones of what's happening are always exposed in the outline. But once you know you can't avoid the thing you'd really love to avoid, what next?

For the past couple of days, I've been stuck on a scene that I wish I was clever enough to hand-wave past. The stuckness isn't as bad as it used to be, though, because I don't panic and fall into self-doubt anymore when I hit a tricky spot. Aside from a little light procrastination, I'm able to keep my pen moving.

Here's roughly how I keep hammering away at it to find what I want to write. These are kind of escalating steps, beginning with high-anxiety-no-clue-what-do-to intervention up to refining my plan for the scene so that I can get right back into the script:

1) Freewriting - Just talk with yourself about the scene. What do you want it to do? How do you feel about it? Are you bored? How could it be more fun or interesting? Are you scared? What's the thing you're afraid you won't be able to express? Write about that thing for a while, and get as close as you can to your own personal experience of it. Is it a jealousy scene? What makes you feel jealous? How do you react? What's the worst thing you've ever done out of jealousy? Freewriting is where you'll remember or identify the emotional core of the scene and find the raw materials you need to build it.

2) Brainstorming - This is a little more structured than freewriting. It's where you come up with as many options as you can for the scene. Think roughly about the setup, turn, and question you want to create. List possible things that can happen, no matter how boring or how crazy they seem.

3) Fundamentals - The basics you need to know for your scene are function, emotion, and visual. What does the scene need to accomplish? What's the emotion of the scene? What visual will help you convey that emotion?

4) Structure - How do you want the scene to play out? How does it start? What turn or surprise happens? What question does it create by the end?

That's it. Ofen I'm cycling through these steps - quickly if it's a straightforward scene, or over and over if it's a difficult one. If things aren't feeling sharp to me in steps 3 and 4, I know I need to go back to 1 to find the real emotion for the scene, something that will make it matter.

This Season's First SOS

2010-09-23T21:07:00.012-03:00

Kyle Killen created Lone Star, which debuted this week to dismal (the industry term) ratings --ratings so bad there was some surprise that Fox will even air its second episode. Meanwhile, critics say it's the best new show of the season. Save Our Show campaigns are mounting. Kyle is blogging and responding to fans on Twitter.

UPDATE: Killan interviews himself on Daily Beast. Funny guy.

UPDATE 2: Lone Star is officially cancelled after ratings for the second episode were lower than those for the pilot. From "The Hollywood Reporter":

From the beginning critics wondered if Lone Star could draw a broadcast-sized audience. The show best resembled the sort of nuanced character-driven dramas seen on basic cable networks like FX and AMC. But Fox expressed high confidence, with entertainment president Kevin Reilly telling critics the only reason shows like Mad Men pull such low numbers is because they're not on his network.
"The only reason those shows aren't watched by more people is they're not on Fox," Reilly said. "The [basic cable networks] don't have this [promotional] machine."

Reality TV

2010-09-22T10:54:00.008-03:00

The first show I went totally fan-girl on was NYPD Blue.

I was already a long-time tv fan, but my love of NYPD Blue coincided with my decision to write television and with the beginning of internet message boards and Alan Sepinwell's fan site. The NYPD Blue board was the battlefield for my first flame-war, and my second spec was NYPD Blue. I analysed every aspect of the show, transcribed episodes, and felt I knew the characters better than many people in my real life.

One of the things I valued about the show at the time was its "realism." I loved that real NYC detectives helped write the shows, and the way everything about the production, from the heightened naturalism of its dialogue to the documentary-style camera, made you feel you were eavesdropping on an actual squadroom.

My first job on the set of a TV series forced the realisation of just how much television is manufactured. It hit me a little hard to learn the stairs up to the squad room at the 15th dead-ended at a plywood wall. A part of me didn't want to know: I wanted to hang on to the world they'd created, and to the pleasure of believing the stories and enjoying the entertainment.

Since then, the term "reality television" has gone on to expose and mock the idea that anything at all on television is real. But my love and respect for what those artists did with NYPD Blue didn't change because the important thing is not that it's real, but that as a viewer, I was able to experience it as real. It's in some way truthful.

While still beating out the story for the pilot, I asked my producer one day about bringing a hockey consultant on board. He said, "I don't want you to get too caught up in reality right now." He wasn't dismissing the importance of getting the information right - he was just saying the story's important, too. When you want to tell something truthful through drama, the story's not secondary to reality, it's integral.

Our job is not to portray reality exactly faithfully, but recreate it in a new world. And to rebuild reality from scratch in stories that make it live and breathe for fans who would go to flame-war for it?

That's pretty cool.

Cure For The Freak Out

2010-09-21T11:33:00.002-03:00

My two year-old can make a variety of horrible noises: The Whine, The Screech, The Loud Crying Objection To The Thing We Have Already Told You We Are Trying Our Best To Fix If You Could Just Give Us A Moment's Peace.

Added to the noisy assaults is the knowledge that this is a sparkle of a child who has (I say with all due parental modesty) advanced language skills, a sweet speaking voice, and cutely not-quite-developed diction. I love her little voice.

And then it turns on me.

When the noise begins, I try to talk her out of it with logic. I appeal to her to use her "big-girl voice." By the time I start begging her to stop making that noise, everyone in the vicinity knows it's gone too far and Mommy's about to blow.

Not surprisingly, this only results in escalation from the child.

But you know what fixes it all like magic? What makes the noise stop and Mommy's sanity return?

A hug.

Because this is how I spent my morning, I don't now have time for subtlety, so here's the metaphor: my whining toddler is your creative doubt. That stubborn, squalling interference in the smooth running of your writing day is a bleeping two year-old who Will. Not. Listen. To. Reason.

Embrace the thing you want to run away from.

Feeling Stupid? Forget About It!

2010-09-20T09:47:00.007-03:00

My friend and co-writer, Lee Anne, recently told me a story about listening to a twenty-something colleague worry aloud about how she was too stupid to be a filmmaker.

The story came up because I mentioned that I'd been feeling catastrophically un-clever, as though anything I achieve will be the result of methodical plodding, rather than any innate wit or inventiveness. Lee Anne waved me off with some irritation.

"I'll tell you what I told this girl, which is she needs to stop saying that right away. Imagine how much time and energy you can waste over the years with these destructive thoughts. You are who you are, and there's no purpose to worrying about what you're not."

And this was comforting to me, because it showed that I have at least enough wit to choose a co-writer as wise as Lee Anne. She didn't bother to argue with me about whether I am or am not clever, but dismissed the topic outright.

You can't exactly control your IQ - it's a fixed state. You can work to educate yourself and gain experience, and you'll have to do that to make a career in filmmaking anyway. There are many skills necessary to write or direct or whatever it is you want to do with your life, and polishing the thought "I'm not clever enough" to a high shine definitely isn't one of them.

It's easy to identify these wasteful trains of thought because they don't lead anywhere productive - they shut down creativity instead of energizing.

If those thoughts have a any purpose at all, it's to show you a direction you might want to take in your work - I don't feel very smart about plotting, so I'd best practice that and talk to someone about it, for example - but lingering on a suspect statement of "fact" about your capability is a dead end.

That door doesn't open. Find another one.

Writing Love Stories

2010-09-17T09:40:00.001-03:00

Living the Romantic Comedy went on hiatus in July, and lately I've been jonesing for some rom-com discussion. Happily, I found a fix on Amanda the Aspiring Writer with the post, "Why Are Romantic Comedies So Hard To Get Right?"

While critics decry the failures of the genre, Amanda makes the point that rom-coms get a "disproportionately bad rap." I agree: surely there are at least as many box office bombs or straight-to-dvd attempts at action and drama. There must be a few horror or thriller movies made based on the cynical premise, usually attributed to rom-coms, that tickets will be sold to fans of the genre even if this is just a paint-by-numbers movie with good-looking actors attached.

Yet the default context for discussions of romantic comedy and its literary cousin, chicklit, is that these are bits of fluff that oughtn't be too difficult to execute with competence. You know: girl stuff.

Though of course (of course!) any reasonable person who's given this presumption a moment's conscious consideration recognizes that "girl stuff" is no easier, lighter, or less relevant than "boy stuff," and that the whole attitude is a bit retro and perhaps we ought to move on.

Moving on, Amanda lays out the particular challenges that anyone attempting a romantic comedy screenplay will face, and it's great reading for anyone, like me, who aspires to contribute to the genre.

Meanwhile, I recently caught up with some of my neglected rom-com viewing and watched (500) Days of Summer and The Proposal. (500) Days is a good example of Amanda's description of a well-executed rom-com:

We want to believe the love story. We want to feel like we don't know what's going to happen, but be satisfied when our two leads end up happily ever after. We want to see something simple and classic told in a cool new way. We want strong, relatable, emotional themes but we don't want want them to be too obvious or oversimplified. And we want it to be hilarious, insightful and moving.

With one notable exception, (500) Days fulfills all these criteria, and the exception makes it original while still managing to be emotionally satisfying.

The Proposal is also pretty much pitch-perfect. It sets up a terrific premise, has perfect leads, and is laugh-out-loud funny. It also provides a good illustration of one of the challenges of romantic comedies: believing the love story. In the second half, when our two protagonists have to fall in love, the story shies away from the difficult emotional business and leans instead on cute secondary characters and comedy gags.

It's easy to shy away from the emotional stuff. Pretty much all of us have strategies, largely unconscious, to avoid thinking too deeply about the messy machinery of our guts and hearts and brains. But part of the work of the writer is not only to bring those things to your own consciousness, but also to use your chosen form -- screenplay or magazine article or photograph, romantic comedy, drama or thriller -- to translate emotional truth into a form that other people will understand, communicating a piece of human experience in a way that your audience will recognize the truth even if they couldn't articulate it for themselves.

And to do that, no matter your chosen genre -- that is love.

Reading: Dona Cooper

2010-09-14T08:58:00.007-03:00

Dona Cooper's Writing Great Screenplays for Film and TVwas one of my first screenwriting books. I'm enjoying rereading it now with a few more scripts under my belt.

Cooper covers film structure, plot, characters, momentum, and style with the intention of helping screenwriters avoid using formula and instead "use craft imaginatively to express your unique vision rather than as a mold into which you must force your ideas."

The anti-formula agenda doesn't reflect a dislike of "Hollywood" movies, but of soulless ones in which the writer's fallen back on cookie-cutter writing because they haven't learned better process and craft: "What you need to develop is not one blue print that you use for every assignment, but rather a deep, visceral appreciation of each component's inherent qualities and what function it performs. That way you can select exactly the right materials, techniques, and proportions for each building in order to bring your creations to life."

One of Cooper's 15 chapters focuses on creativity, and her intro makes the case for attending to your creative process:

I used to think that the hardest part of the creative process was dealing with the reactions from the outside world. But the more writers I meet, the more I realize the biggest obstacle is often the internal sense of confusion, indecision, and doubt that can plague the creative mind during the writing process. Therefore, before we continue discussing the aspects of a successful story roller coaster, let's examine the core creative process. Writers who find a dependable approach for dealing with creative challenges usually are able to continue writing long enough to become at least a modest success, while those who never master a method of overcoming such problems usually end up dropping out and never achieving their dreams.

Psychologists warn about the power of an unconscious belief; just because impulses aren't conscious doesn't mean they're not dominating your thinking, and I think this is particularly true for the creative process. In fact, the more unconscious the impulses are, the more they can control you, because you don't have a chance to use your logic or conscious willpower to counteract them. You need to bring the entire process up to the conscious level, which will dramatically increase your chances of finding the approach to screenwriting that works best for you.

I wish I could tell you that there is a simple, easy way to avoid this messy part of screenwriting, but the truth is that the creative process is messy--damn messy. There are very few writers I know who go through a story without some moments of feeling lost or confused. However, understanding how the creative process works can take away some of the fear. It will help you find an approach that works for you, allowing you to go deep into those dark interior woods confident that you can find your way out again.

Of course, I read this passage for the first time about twelve years ago, and only discovered the truth about it for myself by writing this blog when I was put to the test with my current project. So my unsolicited advice to you today is: put yourself to the test -- the sooner the better!

Process

2010-09-13T10:21:00.003-03:00

My sister is a teacher, which means that she has an infinite amount of work to do in a finite amount of time. For years she's been chasing a finish line that keeps moving. This summer, as she prepared to go back to work, she told me she'd had an epiphany:

"There's too much to do and too little time, so I need to focus on process rather than outcomes: learning to work more efficiently, being disciplined about start and end times, good attitude, etc. Then I'm doing the best possible job that I can do within the circumstances."

I love this approach for writing as well. For one thing, outcomes are often unpredictable, both in terms of what you'll arrive at on the page, and in terms of how people will respond to your work. Focusing on what you can control -- your process -- instead of on an unknown future can cut down some of the anxiety that comes with crystal-ball gazing. Meanwhile, you'll never go wrong by improving your process.

For another thing, addressing process gives you actual skills to apply to the challenges that come with your work, whereas focusing on the end result to the exclusion of process often gives you little more than, well, an active fantasy life. I recently read that the old self-help standby of visualizing your ideal outcome has actually been proven to be less effective in achieving success than visualizing yourself completing the work that needs to be done, imagining the obstacles that might arise, and planning how you will overcome them.

Drafted

2010-09-12T11:18:00.005-03:00

I'm still counting the ways my trials over the past couple of years have improved my writing, and I'm working on semi-organized versions of these thoughts to pass onto you. One change I notice a lot is that after a bazillion drafts of the hockey show, the word "draft" has a completely different meaning to me than it did when I began.

Screenwriting books -- which I love, believe in, and continue to devour -- mainly talk about the ideals and outcomes of writing. They use produced screenplays as their examples, and they discuss the place you want to arrive, often giving short shrift to the process. I misinterpreted this: I took it to mean that my first draft would reflect those ideals and look like those completed examples.

I remember reading an article with Richard Curtis about Notting Hill or Love, Actually, in which he said he wrote 17 drafts of the screenplay. I was impressed by that. Surely, being Richard Curtis, he could have called it a day after his no-doubt brilliant fifth draft? How dedicated he must be to getting it just right!

I suppose at that time, I thought there was a first draft which spilled out near-perfect; a second draft in which you politely incorporate, as best you can, the brutish notes from some executive; and a draft or two in production where you do things like change a character's hair from blonde to brunette based on casting.

Oh, how cute and innocent I was with my Word Perfect macro for screenwriting!

Now I'm more mature, battle-worn, and wise. Still, after many more than 17 go-rounds, my drafts don' t nearly approach Richard Curtis levels of cleverness, though they are, I say with pride, "Not bad."

What I've earned is a sense of what a "draft" really feels like:

1) Drafts involve making manageable steps forward, not fixing everything at once;

2) They don't have to come out perfect, which is convenient, because they absolutely won't;

3) Each draft isn't worthy of being read by your story editor or even your best friend, because you'll be able to keep seeing things that have to be fixed yourself (see #2). But--

4) --when you can't make it better on your own anymore, you must get notes from an outside reader to really advance from draft to draft;

5) Knowing that there are many more drafts to come, you can put imperfect placeholder solutions in places and have faith that things will change many times over yet;

6) It's okay to write long in some drafts because you can cut later, so don't be entirely strict about the page count in early drafts;

7) There are drafts where you focus mainly on plot, passes for individual characters, drafts where you fix up the prose, and drafts where you punch up the jokes -- different drafts all have important functions;

8) It's easier to take notes and respond to them because you no longer view anything you've written as sacrosanct: it can always get better.

And, by the way, those executives are not brutes at all.

Success Breeds Success

2010-09-10T15:09:00.003-03:00

Things are trucking along really well now, and as they do, I keep thinking about how success breeds success. One happy family member spreads joy. One good scene leads to another. Writing those scenes helps you attack the hard parts with a little more confidence...

So if you're feeling overwhelmed by work and like the big success you dream of is a long, long way away, look for one small success you can accomplish today, and see where that leads.

Hello, Dialogue!

2010-08-31T10:04:00.005-03:00

Woot!

After two years, two different formats, and too many drafts to count, I am DONE THE OUTLINE! On Friday, the network approved our pilot outline and this week I am moving on to the script. I'm just a little bit excited :-)

I know that I struggled over that outline for several different reasons, and now that it's done I can say that while it was one of the most difficult experiences of my life, it was a good thing. I started out thinking that I was a professional (because they were paying me to write) with a job to do. In fact, I had a lot to learn, and through luck, persistence, and the great generosity of the my family, story editor, producers, and the network, I got the time and resources to learn it.

In hindsight, I have been less a professional these past couple of years and more an apprentice. Though that's not what I expected of myself, it's okay. I'm proud of myself for sticking with it and for learning so much. Even better, in addition to the skills and process I've learned, I feel confidence that I know what to do next time I hit a rut. And that is a great feeling to have.

I can't wait to find out what happens next.

Vacation

2010-08-26T20:26:00.002-03:00

Power Tools

2010-08-13T16:36:00.005-03:00

I mentioned a few posts ago that despite suffering from a disastrously negative attitude, I'd managed to come up with 39 positive statements - or power statements, as they're called in Hockey Tough - about my work.

This was an uplifting exercise in itself, and since then I've continued to use it by choosing one or two statements each day that seem relevant to my mood or my work for the day, and writing them at the top of my daily planner.

And voilà! A cheap and easy way to replace my habitual negative thoughts. But there's a trick to it I neglected to mention: These positive statements must be honest. That is, you can't just tell yourself random wishes and expect your mood to improve. Your brain will be all like, "Who do you think you're fooling, sunshine?" As Hockey Tough author Saul Miller writes:

The power thoughts you repeat in your power statements should make sense to you. They are a combination of your strengths and what you aspire to. For example, if you have a hard shot and are working on making it more accurate, you would say, "I have a hard, accurate shot." But if you don't skate particularly well, it would not be truthful or useful to say, "I have great wheels." It would be more effective to say, "I keep my feet moving. I anticipate the play and react quickly."

One of my concerns has been my writing speed. So when making a power statement about speed, I didn't write, "I am a fast writer"; instead, I said, "I am learning to write faster." A few other statements look on the bright side of why I might still not be as quick as I'd like, such as: "I am thoughtful and expressive," and "I have high standards." Still others focused on the component parts of improving my speed, like maintaining momentum: "I can always solve story problems with a little effort."

Now, when I look at my power statements, I don't waste any time arguing with myself. Instead, they are immediately effective. When it comes to happy thoughts: credibility makes all the difference!

Emelie on Discipline

2010-08-11T18:42:00.002-03:00

Stumbled on this blogger via Alex Epstein today - her name is Emelie and she's working on her early specs and planning a television career - while living abroad. Lively blog. Check out her entry on writing discipline.

Dance of Joy!

2010-08-10T22:30:00.004-03:00

The long outline went to the network today. In this job, it's easy to see the next hurdles looming, even as you achieve a milestone. Don't forget to stop and celebrate the successes along the way!

Plan for a Good Day

2010-08-10T13:20:00.002-03:00

My brother-in-law likes to say, "Nothing to it but to do it." It's become a motto in our family, and one of my goals in life. Housework? Nothing to it but to do it! Exercise? Nothing to it but to do it! Being a good, fast, decidedly-not-cheap writer? Nothing to it!

But the truth is, I'm the opposite of a "nothing to it but to do it" kind of person, as this entire blog will attest: before I do it, I will analyse the pros and cons and parse the ins and outs and have very many emotional check-ins about how I feel about doing it. Even then, it may or may not get done.

One of my screenwriting books - I can't remember which one - says that people will always at first attempt to solve their problems the easiest way possible. You need to escalate a character's problems to the point where they are forced to abandon the easy options and try the difficult, life-changing ones. Because that's when life gets interesting.

I feel like that's what's happened to me over the last couple of years: all of the my preconceived notions about how I could and should and would write were challenged, and finally I've gotten to a point where I know I have to abandon the way I was doing things. I've made the decision to stop giving myself a hard time about the time that's already been passed, and the mistakes I've made - clearing the way so that now, there's nothing to it but to do it.

Then I had to decide how to go about that - what new habits needed to be put in place. Luckily, after all the analysing and parsing I've done, it was pretty easy to figure out what to do. As my friend Lee Anne said, "Read your blog. Take your own advice." (Thank god for my smartypants friends!)

So I made a plan by asking myself a few basic questions. YMMV when it comes to the answers, but here's how mine came out:

1) What does a good day look like? I imagined my ideal writing day - what hours I'd be working, where I'd be working, and what I'd be producing. Now, in the past when I've done this, I often got distracted by thoughts like, "I really need my own office." (Right now I work in coffee shops, away from the distractions of home. It's comfortable and there's an endless supply of caffeine, but also gives the enterprise a kind of homeless feeling, like every day I'd have to decide all over again where to go to work. There are also no walls to put my index cards on, which some days can be a real disadvantage.) This time, I decided not to focus on the things I can't change: instead, I adjusted my ideal day to suit the current realities of my life. That gave me my basic schedule and I decided on locations ahead of time, to take that little extra bit of decision-making and insecurity out of the equation. In addition to those practical issues, I tried to imagine my ideal version of myself as writer, and she looked calm, focused, and productive. From that, focus became one of my keywords going forward.

2) What works for me? One thing I can say for myself after these years of analysing my own struggle is that I've figured out a few of my own personal Do's and Don'ts. When it comes to productivity and focus, the Pomodoro is a big Do. I've written before about the wonders of the Pomodoro Technique. But after my initial Pomodoro discovery, I tended to use it mainly in crisis situations, when a deadline was really looming. This was a subtle way of undermining myself: instead of developing good work habits that made the most of my limited work time, I was setting myself up to arrive at deadlines panicked about how much still needed to be done. I want to be reliably productive, and I know that Pomodoro works great for that, so I decided to do Pomodoro all the time. Other things that I know work: positive thinking; planning what to do ahead of time so that I know what I want to accomplish and where my focus should be; getting enough sleep (a significant issue with two kids under 4 years old); and eating a good breakfast.

3) What needs to get done? I've learned that my idea of "writing" was too limited when I started out: I thought it meant sitting chained to my computer physically writing all the time. But there are actually a variety of activities that add up to writing. The ones I came up with are: brainstorming, writing, revising or rewriting, reading (including screenwriting books and other scripts), research, polishing, planning, and communication (getting notes from my story editor, for example, as well as talking with other writers and blogging). I made this list to help myself plan my Pomodoro sessions ahead of time - and as a reminder of my options for those times when I start to lose my way. For example, I often get stuck spinning my wheels on a question and forget to brainstorm, which is the quickest and most reliable way to find the answer I need. By simply listing "brainstorming" as a work activity, it became easier to switch to it when needed.

With answers to these questions in hand, I made a basic daily writing schedule and some guidelines to go with it. It looks like this:

Among my guidelines, "Practice Hockey Tough every day" means to continue working on my mental game. One of the things I did here was to write a few of my 39 positive statements at the top of my daily schedule each day. (I'll write more about Hockey Tough here in the next few days.)

Another of the guidelines is to keep a scratch pad by the computer - this is simply to catch thoughts that come to mind that aren't what I'm working on at that moment, so that instead of navigating away from my work file on the computer, I'd scribble down a quick reminder but be able to stay focused on the work at hand.

I used this basic template to plan my work time for the following few weeks and, as I'd hoped, became reliably productive. By looking at how and when I work best and designing my schedule to suit, I did my creative self the favor of showing up every day. At the same time, it was important to be flexible: to not get distracted if I had to change the schedule, to let myself change the plan when I need to, and to count my successes instead of failures in sticking to the template. I didn't go for a walk at lunch every day the way my ideal schedule dictated - I was often running late and worked through that hour instead - but even when I didn't follow my plan exactly, there were more successes than failures.

This system wasn't the only factor contributing to my recent success. The draft was already close to the finish line, for example, which is simply an easier stage to deal with. But giving myself a schedule and a set of rules to live by has made a huge difference. In the past, I've thought rules, routines and schedules were antithetical to creativity. They're not.

A friend describes her schedule and routines as the scaffolding for her work, and that seems to me like the perfect description. It exists as the framework you can stand on, rely on, while doing the real job you're there to do.

Success!

2010-08-09T11:51:00.000-03:00

The early drafts of my outline were, as you may know, bang-my-head-against-the-wall frustrating. Now, we get closer and closer to delivering the long outline to the network, each draft is a pleasure. While I can still see flaws aplenty when I look for them, the story has gotten to a stage I will modestly call Not Entirely Sucky At All.

Even better, it's at a stage now where I can see more clearly how it can get better. At this point, it's exciting to think that instead of struggling to find footing, each successive draft will bring it closer to the show I've been wanting to write - and the show I've been wanting to watch. In hindsight, all the previous drafts were doing that, too - it was just really, really hard to see at the time!

I've made some changes lately to the way that I work, and the way that I think about the troubles I've had with work over the past couple of years. I'm looking forward to sharing those thoughts here, and now that the draft is on its way out to the network, I hope to have some time to spend getting the blog up-to-date. Get ready for some happy thoughts!

Things You Learn When You Can't Afford A Maid

2010-08-01T11:11:00.005-03:00

A couple of weeks ago, I took out three books from the library, all about housekeeping. Now, despite the youthful naivite I may project on this blog, I am actually 38 years old. (I know: surprising!) I have grown-up things like a house and two little kids and a husband, and I always imagined that housekeeping was one of the many things I'd know how to do by this point in my life.

But I don't. I was forced to recognise this fact in the aftermath of a particularly stark scene with my husband in which I refused to let him invite people to the house because of the state of the baseboards, basically. I had to admit to myself that this was not cool, and that it was time to clean up or shut up. I chose cleaning, but where to begin? How to keep up? It was time to face the inconvenient reality that, despite my age and responsibilities in life, I don't have the first clue about how to deal with the dirt. So it was with a little bit of shame that I chomped the dusty bullet and took out those books.

My shame was not about the messiness, which I'd been aware of for some time, but about the fact that I don't know what to do about it. Isn't that ridiculous? Doesn't everyone else just know how to keep their home clean? This is one of the many things in life that I've simply assumed I should already know: I should have been born knowing, or should have at some point in my wasted youth really applied myself to figuring them out.

You see the flaw in my thinking? The idea that we should be born knowing anything much at all is silly. Further, spending time I could be using to, I don't know, actually clean instead of beating myself up for not knowing how is...one of the reasons I got to this age without knowing how. (Unfortunately, how to not beat myself up about things I don't know yet is another of the skills I wasn't born with! I have rather a lot to learn.)

But this little marital crisis gave me the resolve to stop giving myself a hard time for not knowing so that I could move on to doing something about it. It's a bit of a mystery to me, anyway, how and when and why we learn the life lessons we need. You know how someone (your mother, probably) can give you good advice all your life, and you ignore it or you outright resist it, and then one day it clicks into place and you realize it's the exact right solution and you just start doing it?

Which brings me to my work.

Like housecleaning, how to be a writer is one of those things that I assumed I should know in adulthood. So when I found that it didn't just happen, I looked for reasons: I'm untalented, I'm undisciplined, I fear success, I lack imagination, I don't have enough experience, my story editor is too critical, I fear failure, I have writer's block...it was easy to come up with reasons why the script wasn't just coming out fully-formed.

On the really dark days, the reasons don't matter - it's just me. Something is wrong with me. I'm not destined to do this work, my dream job. It's not in my personality to succeed.

But after a while, that thinking just gets old, and the kitchen still needs to be mopped.

I've exhausted all my negative options over the past couple of years. The fifty big and little excuses ("reasons") for why things were not going my way have gotten oppressive, like too much clutter. I've wanted to quit so many times and still kept going that I finally no longer believe myself when I start to think about giving up. See? The house is still here. The maid is not coming. I will have to do it myself.

So somehow, a couple of weeks back, things clicked into place. Housekeeping and writing: I wasn't born knowing, and that's okay, because there's books at the library. I made the decision: I can get on with business. I will learn to clean. I will learn to become the writer I want to be. And then things got fun...

Hockey Tough (For Writers)

2010-07-13T08:34:00.006-03:00

I missed another deadline last week. I didn't want to tell you that. I keep thinking this time will be different. That any day now, I will get a handle on this deadline thing. But not today.

These are self-imposed deadlines, although I suspect the optics of writing as slowly as I do are poor and get poorer every time. Worse, every time I miss my goal, I put myself through a new round of self-recrimination. I went quite low this week, all the way down into, "I'll never be able to do this." I've worn this rut very smooth. By Saturday, I was so disgusted with myself that I became paralysed and stopped writing all together.

Meanwhile, I've been reading a book called Hockey Tough as research for the show. It's for hockey players and is about improving the mental game. I've lately been making a comparison between writing and sports because the more I get into this television writing thing, the more I think it's like high-performance writing. TeeVee writers are Olympians!

So I decided I would reboot myself by using one of the techniques recommended for players: power statements. These are positive statements about your "game" that you believe and can repeat to yourself to provide energy. I grabbed a couple of hours and set off for the office (cafe) with the goal of writing 20 power statement for myself. Being in such a pit of despair, and practiced as I am at negative thinking, or weakness statements, I feared 20 was too lofty a goal - I could hardly imagine coming up with one positive statement about my own abilities as a writer.

I'm at 39 and counting!

This is a great exercise. I am very practiced at negative thinking, and it costs me. As I've said here before, I need to practice positive thinking. Wear some good grooves in my head, so instead of falling into my trap of counting all the ways this work is impossible and I can't do it, I count the ways it's satisfying and I can do it. It sounds a bit self-help granola, but it doesn't hurt. In fact, it felt pretty damn good.

The next exercise from the book I'm going to try is goal-setting. If you haven't done it for yourself recently, you can play along:

Why do you ~~play hockey~~ write?

What do you want to achieve?

Do you have a long-term ~~hockey~~ writing goal? A career goal?

What is your goal for the ~~season~~ year?

Flying Lessons

2010-07-11T09:51:00.003-03:00

My co-writer sent me this little round-up of advice about writing pilots. Besides being useful, it's actually quite comforting because some of the things writers say to do are things I was doing but telling myself I shouldn't have to do, like writing long to find my way and, haha, having an idea that's better than the drafts. Which just goes to show you, if you're giving yourself a hard time about something, cut it out because you don't know anyway. It's probably normal. Cut it out.

Seems like a good time to mention that I've added a new writer to my blogroll: Margaux Froley writes This Is Your Pilot Speaking. To get you started, here's a selection of her good crafty posts: "Grounded," "What's In Your World?" and "Writer Fatigue." Also check out her brave post about going from the WB Fellowship Program to a job on the CW's Privileged to not getting staffed this season.

Interestingly, one of the things Margeux says is that spec scripts are useless now in getting staffed - people only want to see pilots. This may seem to conflict with yesterday's advice to spec every show, but I don't think it really does. If you're brand-spanking-new, go ahead and spec because your first script isn't going to get you a job anyway - you're writing it for the learning experience. And it's a good learning experience to unravel a current tv show and build your own episode. It's an apprenticeship of sorts. You'll be building skills to apply to your own pilot when you're ready.

Of course, there's no rule that says you can't start thinking about your pilot right away. I enjoy having a few ideas going at the same time - they give energy and momentum to each other.

What He Said

2010-07-10T17:11:00.004-03:00

Just found this little interview with Burn Notice's Michael Horowitz about his advice for aspiring writers and agree agree agree. A little while back, Denis McGrath posted some advice for new writers, and one of the tips was to have tenacity. (Thank god, I thought. Because if I've got nothing else, I've got tenacity!) Horowitz is talking about how to spend your time while you're hanging around being tenacious:

"Nothing gets you better faster than writing a script, giving it to some friends. Have them read it and give you notes. Then go do a revision - actually go through and take it all the way to the end, you know, like two drafts. Then throw it away. Because it's terrible. And then do it again. I legitimately think I would say do ten [different scripts] if you can. I sort of wish I could go back in a time machine to the college me, when I had endless stamina for writing and all the time in the world and liked to stay up all night. Write ten and throw them away. Five is more reasonable for people, but just keep powering through stuff. If you want to do TV, if you want to do hour-long series, you should be writing one episode of every show."

Just starting out? Best. Advice. Ever.

Essential Character Juice

2010-07-08T08:31:00.001-03:00

Here's your basic dilemma when it comes to creating character: do you put a lot of advance work into your characters, or wait until you're plotting to discover who you need them to be?

You can spend lots of time researching and developing your characters. Lajos Egri's character profile, for example, is a long questionnaire about physiology, sociology, and psychology. In my experience, this kind of thing is helpful in a brainstorming way - you'll discover some useful information and details and never look at the rest of it again. It may help you feel grounded and secure in the sense that you understand your characters. But it's not going to become a character bible that will give you all the answers you need for your script.

In the script, what a character does is much much more important than their mother's profession or the location of their birthmarks. In the script, character has to become so tightly woven with plot that if you find yourself married to details you came up with for a questionnaire, it will likely be to the detriment of the story.

The question is whether all the background is a worthwhile way to spend your time. Having done it for the hockey series and packed it in a file box never to look at it again, I'm guessing it's not. Character without plot is character in a void.

I'm working with a friend on a new pilot. The approach I'm taking this time around (and imposing on my co-writer) is to do basic character descriptions and then start the beat sheet. Plotting raises specific questions so the characters continue to be refined, but this time it's a more efficient process.

These basic descriptions we started with are like what you'd see in a bible: a quarter to a half page each, including age, and the most important elements of each personality. The're strong enough to let us know what each character's essential story in the plot needs to be - or, looked at from another angle, what the plot has to do give us a crisp sense of the characters we want to introduce as series-worthy. Because basically, you need character to write plot, and you need plot to write character. Chicken, egg.

So what is essential info for a character? What you really need to know is: what's the thing that prevents them from getting what they want in life?

Think about a friend or family member who has a problem that's quite clear to you, an outside observer, but which they can't seem to solve. Time and again they make the same mistake, somehow dating the same type of person over and over even though it never works out, or repeatedly getting into dramas with their boss.

For me, it's a dear friend who tries over and over to change her profession, but keeps returning to the same kind of job. She's an intelligent, kind, giving person whose friends love her. But no matter what new jobs she tries or new training courses she attends, her efforts never seem to pan out. Soon enough, she's back at square one. I know my friend has the potential to become who she wants to be. But whatever it is that's going to effect that change in her hasn't happened yet.

You know someone like this. Maybe everyone you know is like this in one way or another. Think of the person whose problem and unfulfilled potential is the clearest to you. When you think of this friend, what's your wish for them? Imagine them being their best, happiest selves. What does that change look like? Figure out how to make it happen, and there's your character journey. Or the inspiration for it, anyway.

So the essential question is: what's the thing that prevents them from getting what they want in life? Sub questions flow from this one:

What do they want or need? What's this character's big wish in life? It may be something external (the girl, the treasure, the sex change operation) or internal. In the writing of the story, you'll connect your external to internal and vice-versa. They might not be aware of what they really need, but they do need to want something. For now, just start with thing that you know is important to this character.

How do they know they're not getting it? What kinds of things happen that convince the character they're failing?

What's preventing them from getting it? (aka: What's their flaw?) What is the character doing to undermine their own quest? Yeah, if you're talking Indiana Jones or CSI, the obstacles will be more external, but you still need to know how the heroes are fallible.

How can they change their pattern? This is the part where they achieve their destiny. They make a choice different from the one they've been making all along, do the hard thing, and find out what happens next. In a film, this will be a major turning point and we'll have a definite sense of the new life in store for the character. In television, it's more about incremental steps forward, because if you fix up your characters in the pilot, what's your next episode?

By the time you've answered these questions, you may have also found the answer to this one: what's your muse for this character? What aspects of the character do you really care about? You can put together a collection of traits and call it a teevee person, but if you're not inspired about who they are and the emotional journey they need to take, it's going to be difficult to make them live on the page the way you want. Do a gut check to identify your muse - if it's not there, revise. If it is there, bring it out and don't lose sight of it.

Passion

2010-06-29T08:28:00.003-03:00

One of the many pieces of advice we got at NSI Totally Television was to make sure that you're passionate about your project. You are going to be with it for years in development, and hopefully years afterwards if it becomes produced. So make it marketable, target a network and an audience - but make sure you like it!

Two years and counting into development on my series, and I am feeling the importance of this advice keenly. In the beginning, the idea was new and exciting and held the great potential you feel before you begin making choices and narrowing the vision down into a specific story. It didn't hurt that the network showed interest immediately upon hearing the one-liner in at an NSI panel discussion. At that time, I did pay attention to the need to connect to my material - but I was just as excited that I'd come up with a sellable premise.

When you have a sellable premise you're going to pursue, you'd best find a way to build your own passions into it. Otherwise, on the days when the material feels deathly old, and is sitting on the page like a dead, smelly fish, how will you find the excitement to go back into it? You can't be in that just for the money. You can't just love it when it's shiny and new and the execs are smiling at you. You gotta love it later when you're alone and it's old news and it needs another effing rewrite. You will be giving mouth-to-mouth to an old smelly fish, people!

You gotta love the fish.

At NSI, they were careful to ask us where our connection to the project came from, and what the show was about. This reminds me of advice a friend recently relayed from a conversation with a tv writer: make your show a Trojan Horse, and hide the thing you really want to talk about inside.

My show is a family sports drama. Sports fans might hope I chose this material because I'm a hockey fanatic. In fact, I'm more connected to the family material because I have young children and a marriage. But the part that really gets me endlessly curious - the thing inside my hockey-playing Trojan Horse - is what the show's about: what "success" means to us personally. If you have a happy family, is that success? If you're respected in your community, is that success? Or do you have to be a star hockey player to be a real success? If you are a hockey star, is that enough?

These were the questions I came up with two years back when they asked what the show's about. Thankfully, I still care about finding out the answers today.

UPDATE: Official confirmation of the importance of passion from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, who says, "The important thing is to believe in it. If you're selling something you don't believe in, that if you're successful you're going to have to live with for years … there's easier ways of making money." via Alex Epstein's 3-part notes on Gilligan's session at Banff. (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.)

The Science of the Act-Out

2010-06-28T21:51:00.000-03:00

"We don't pay attention to boring things."

This is rule #4 in John Medina's book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Medina uses scientific research about the brain to form his "rules" about how best to use our noggins.

#4 struck me as particularly useful from a craft point of view: gaining and holding attention for a set amount of time is, of course, the most basic objective of film and television.

However, holding an audience's attention is not easy. As a professor, Medina noticed that his students' attention wandered from his lectures by the 10-minute mark. Other studies confirmed that people check out of presentations around 10 minutes in. So Medina redesigned his lectures using the 10-minute rule, by dividing his lectures into 10-minute segments. Sounds a little like the task of a tv writer, give or take a couple of minutes.

Medina arrived at his lecture design knowing four things about the way the brain pays attention:

1) Emotion gets our attention - emotionally-charged events trigger a release of dopamine in the brain, which enhances attention as well as retention.

2) Meaning before details - attention is focused on the gist, and then uses the gist to recall details.

3) The brain cannot multitask - what we think of as multitasking is actually quick, sequential shifts of attention.

4) The brain needs a break - we need time to digest new information, and don't pay attention to loads of information for a long time.

The resulting re-design involved lectures with 5 10-minute segments. "Each segment would cover a single core concept -- always large, always general, always filled with 'gist,' and always explainable in one minute. I could easily burn through five large concepts in a single period. I would use the other 9 minutes in the segment to provide a detailed description of that single general concept. The trick was to ensure that each detail could be easily traced back to the general concept with minimal intellectual effort."

Like television writers, Medina essentially began to write act-outs into his lectures. "After 9 minutes and 59 seconds, the audience's attention is getting ready to plummet to near zero. If something isn't done quickly, the students will end up in successively losing bouts of an effort to stay with me. What do they need? Not more information of the same type. ... They need something so compelling that they blast through the 10-minute barrier and move onto new ground. Do we know anything so potentially compelling? We sure do. The ECS - emotionally competent stimuli, which I now call 'hooks.'"

In addition to triggering an emotion, Medina found that his "act-outs" had to be relevant to the rest of the lecture, and - as commercial breaks force us to do - form a dividing line between sections, either looking backward to summarize material or forward to introduce new material.

Essentially, he came back to the old tell-them-what-you're-going-to-tell-them rule: "It's key that the instructor explains the lecture plan at the beginning of class, with liberal repetitions of 'where we are' sprinkled throughout the hour. This prevents the audience from trying to multitask. If the instructor presents a concept without telling the audience where that concept fits into the rest of the presentation, the audience is forced to simultaneously listen to the instructor and attempt to divine where it fits into the rest of what the instructor is saying. ... The linkages must be clearly and repetitively explained."

When I'm reading a good pilot script, I notice this happening. For example, the main character is introduced with a description that notes their most important quality in a scene that demonstrates that quality. The plot then goes on to expand on and test the protagonist's defining characteristic. The trick of it, in the case of television, is to repeat the same information without seeming repetitive - while expanding on it and moving forward.

Maybe this is why I've always loved television so much: it gets me - my brain, at least.

Tip for Writer's Block

2010-06-14T10:44:00.006-03:00

In the Summer issue of Canadian Screenwriter Magazine, a profile of Anita Kapila (How To Be Indie, Sophie) includes her answer to the question, "What's your cure for writer's block?"

Talking, with anyone and everyone. On staff it's pretty easy to bust through writer's block since you've got a room full of smart, talented people giving you new ideas and helping you look at a story from a different angle. When I'm freelancing and I get stuck, I try to recreate that feeling of a story room by discussing story problems with friends and family....I think it's also important to put all angles and ideas on the table and consider them, no matter how dumb an idea may appear to be. After all, you never know when one phrase, one word, or one thought will break the story wide open.

Quick Tip

2010-06-10T10:43:00.004-03:00

Go Into The Story posted a good tip for those of us (ahem!) who sometimes lose momentum sweating every little thing:

"When I am not inspired and I don't know the solution I will just type out the most banal solution and know that at least it's on the page and it gets me to the next story beat." -- Wesley Strick

Hidden Superpowers

2010-06-08T09:46:00.000-03:00

When I'm in a rut, the one thing I can do efficiently is identify, analyze, and bemoan my weaknesses as a writer.

This is useful up to a point. Figuring out a problem sometimes helps me to solve it faster than if I ignore it and hope it goes away. And sometimes bringing a lurking negative idea into the light of day helps me dismiss it. Ever notice that some thoughts you've been obsessing about sound utterly ridiculous once you speak them out loud?

But developing our emotional writer muscles can't be all about lifting the bad stuff. It's also got to be about running with the good stuff.

If we're going to dedicate some time to working out our weaknesses, why not also get to know our strengths? Catalogue them, practice talking about them - without qualifiers like "maybe," and "I think" - and explore how you can build them up even further.

The things you do well - and know you do well - will become your brand. As well as developing your confidence, obsessing at least a little bit about the things you're good at will help you build your niche. Because when someone hires you, it's not going to be in spite of your shortcomings (real or imagined), but because of your particular strengths.

Screw that, indeed

2010-06-07T15:31:00.012-03:00

It can feel lonely to be a fearful writer. That's why I started this blog. To feel less lonely about it, and so other people would know they're not alone. One of the things that makes me feel lonely is when people say things like, "What are you afraid of? Just write!"

That's fine advice, of course. Yes, by all means, just write. Writing, in the end, will be your salvation from fear.

It's the attitude of these messages that wounds. Like the attitude I read into a guest post that appeared on Screenwriting Tips, You Hack this weekend: "Screw that romantic bullshit about the miserable, suffering artist. Cut back on the self-pity, eat a good breakfast, and DO THE WORK. - tip by Martha."

Not to get too cocky here, but I imagine myself the reigning queen of self-pitying screenwriters in the blogosphere. And so I took this one personally. Ouch, Martha!

I'm joking, of course. Martha's offering sharp and colorful advice based on her experience. It's just easy to take these things to heart if you are already sensitive about your fears and suffering. And the "just buck up and write" is inescapable - it will come at you from all quarters. But on the days when it hurts you, how will you handle it?

How you interpret these messages is up to you. You can focus on the impatience, judgement, and superiority you think you hear, and be hurt by it. But you don't need to be, and the best reason not to be is that it's simply not useful to interpret it that way. You can choose to use the advice if it's helpful to you - for me on that day, I was inspired by Martha to eat a good breakfast, and I'm sure was more productive for it.

As to the rest, try saying to yourself, "I don't accept it." I don't accept the premise. Fear is not self-indulgent. Actually I'll say that fear can be self-indulgent, or self-indulgence can masquerade as fear, but it's not always so. Sometimes it's real. People who are telling you to just forget it might think they're being helpful, but if what you have is real, telling you to stop feeling that way is about as helpful as telling a depressed person to, you know, cheer up.

Bless the people who are immune, or have been immune so far, or who have mastered their writing fears, but they're none of your business. Their experience doesn't invalidate yours. It proves nothing about the quality of their writing or the quality of yours. Every writer is going to have their strengths and weaknesses. Your fear, if you think of it as a weakness, must carry with it a strength, like the two sides of a coin. Maybe on the other side is a determination to write something really fucking fantastic, or a sense of empathy for the weaknesses in your characters.

Maybe your life experience makes you more prone to fear than the other guy, but now that you're a writer, your life experience is more than tough luck - it's your material, your point of view, your reservoir. So it's good it's different from theirs. It's good to be the way you are.

Of course, if a kick in the pants works for you, use it. Use whatever helps. I just find it less useful to take advice about fear and suffering from people who purport to have none. I think it's more useful to remember that whatever you're feeling is just...what you're feeling. As Pema Chodron says, it's very therapeutic to remind yourself, "Other people feel like this." Telling yourself you shouldn't feel the way you do creates resistance, and resistance slows everything down.

Because attitudes and all aside, the real point of this is to find a way to be productive even if you are afraid. To not let the fear stand in your way. And my advice about that is, don't waste your time resisting how you're feeling. Look for the source, look for the cure. And keep writing as best you can. Of course you will do that. If you weren't about to write, you wouldn't be afraid of it.

My producer, who might have been very intolerant of my writing fears, inconvenient as they were to him and his company, showed me tolerance. He said, "Write through it." This is essentially the same advice as all those who say "just do it" - the difference is that it acknowledges the fear. It's there. Keep writing.

An Oddball Profession

2010-05-30T10:23:00.006-03:00

On those days when I feel like I must be quite too unstable to be a professional television writer, dispatches like this one from Jeffrey Stepakoff's Billion Dollar Kiss are comforting. If I'm crazy, I may have come to the right place!

(This is a much longer quote than I would normally do -- an excerpt, really -- but I find Stepakoff so enjoyable to read and this topic so reassuring that I think it's worth it.)

Tom and Gina were my colleagues and dear friends over the next few years [in the room on Dawson's Creek]. As we went through the war together, the more I got to know them, the more I realized that they were nut-jobs, pretty much total nut-jobs, just like nearly every other TV writer I had worked with so far.

From Milch to Bob Brush, from Ron Cowan, who would lie on the sofa clutching a pillow while he broke story, to Joe Dougherty, who chewed out the network, to Alex with the sheep thing [a Batchler sheep castrator, which he would grip in his hands whenever he was forced to take a call from an increasingly freaking-out James Van Der Beek], I was working with a bunch of lunatics. And these were my bosses. My colleagues were even crazier. As my career progressed, I used to think that it was just TV fate that had brought me to such oddballs. But by the time I was on Dawson's Creek, I was sure this could not be simple chance. There was a definite pattern here.

....I knew that, quite simply, there is just no other group of professionals anywhere in the world that are like television writers. I once wrote a pilot with someone who refused to stop working for any reason once we got on a roll -- even when his wife was in labor in the next room. Hang in there, Linda! Jeffrey and I are almost finished with the second act! I worked with a writer who had OCD so bad he couldn't punch-up a joke without tapping his hand in highly ritualized patterns -- crazy, yes, but man, he was funny. I worked with a writer who moved his bowels frequently during the day and pitched his best jokes to me through the door while he sat on the toilet smoking a cigar. I worked with pencil-biters, nail-chewers, people who burst into tears. I worked with screamers and whisperers and those who say nearly nothing at all. The collection of tics and quirks and phobias and dysfunctions and downright paroxysms that I saw regularly displayed by a group of people in this country's top tax bracket must surely be without equal. The people I knew and worked with were so neurotic they made Larry David look tame. When my colleagues walked by my office and heard me in there mumbling to myself, no one though twice about it...well, usually.

....Why are TV writers like this? By Season Three on Dawson's Creek, I had developed a theory. First, like so much in TV, I think money has a lot to do with it. I think it messes with writers' heads. In most businesses you work your way up, earning more and more each year, expanding your lifestyle and expenses accordingly. Even in industries where young people can make a ton of money, like Wall Street, there is a training period of some kind. Even seven-figure-a-year brain surgeons start out living like monks during their many years of residency. Even Mike Ovitz and Barry Diller and Bernie Brillstein started in the mailroom. But none of this applies to the new TV writer who presently starts at an absolute minimum of $3,581 a week but usually makes much, much more.

Professional sports is perhaps the only useful comparison. But even athletes don't all of a sudden one day discover that the entire world thinks they have talent and is willing to throw money at them. A kid who's drafted into the NBA has had a pretty good idea for some time that professional success was a real possibility. But in television, one day you're cranking out a spec in the Starbucks on Third Street wondering how much longer you can keep writing all day without having to start working behind the counter, and the next day you're putting a Warner Brothers parking sticker on the windshield of your new Saab and talking to Realtors in Marina del Rey.

And because of this, the sudden success and the seemingly arbitrary nature of it, the sense in TV writing that your success is all a big mistake never really goes away: How did I do it? This time they will find out I'm a fraud! In basketball, you make the shots, you get the stats, you validate the pay. You validate it for all to see, including yourself. In TV, there is no such clear measurement of success, so no one ever really takes comfort in his or her laurels, no matter how grand they may be, no matter how much money they may have generated. Most TV writers will tell you -- I sure as hell will -- that there is almost always a pervading sense when facing the blank page that up until now it has all been One Great Fluke, and that this time I will be found out! Living like this tends to make one a bit wacky.

In addition, there is a the pressure of regular regimented inspiration that is so unique to television writing. Sure, all kinds of writing and all kinds of creative endeavors require good ideas and innovation, but try coming up with twenty-two TV episodes every single season, year after year. It simply is not the same as writing a book or writing a play. Not even close. TV writers under this kind of pressure do all sorts of nutty stuff. I have heard of sitcom writers who won't work during the day because they think they can only be truly funny after nine o'clock at night. I heard about a one-hour drama writer who gets much of her writing done naked. I know another who conceives entire stories in the bathtub. I know an Emmy Award winner who likes to take transcontinental plane trips just so he can write. I keep a pen and small notepads in my car, my bathroom, my kitchen, my nightstand, and in a pocket of my bathrobe. On more than one occasion, I have pulled off the road and written whole outlines with my hazard lights on.

And finally, I think TV writers are nut-jobs because TV writers are nut-jobs. I think a lot of them come into the world wired this way and somehow find their way to Hollywood. Everyone has a good story to tell and many people actually work on them. And history has been very clear about the personalities of writers; everything from alcoholism to opium addiction to clinical insanity is well-documented. But imagine the mind of someone who can sit in absolute solitude behind a computer day after day, night after night, year after year, making up imaginary stories. Imagine the kind of person that can sit in a closed room sixteen hours a day making up stories with a bunch of other people. I'm talking about people who not only want to do this, but have a need that compels them to.

....By this time, just like I saw a pattern in the pathology of all my colleagues, I saw similarities among the most talented. Obviously, they all have good skills, a mastery -- or, at least, an intuitive understanding -- of craft. But with hard work and commitment that can be picked up. There's something else, too. The best way I can explain it is that they have a sensitivity to the world around them, a sort of sixth sense. They pay attention to the little things that others miss. Every outing to the bank, mall, or post office is a chance to people-watch. They listen for subtext instead of just what someone is simply stating. They watch body language, what someone is wearing, how someone is behaving. They always look for the inside joke. They examine and consider how everything tastes and smells, to the point where even a simple lunch from Baja Fresh is subjected to extended critical analysis. Everything is turned over, reflected upon. They look for connections in the chance. Meaning in the random. Metaphors in everything. Their interactions with the world become a process of looking for secrets and clues that will unlock the Great Truths, so that these things can be examined and written about for the ever-approaching next episode.

....Simply put, TV writers are original and whacked-out people. And by the time I got to Season Three on Dawson's Creek, I knew for certain that they were my kind of people.

Two Heads

2010-05-28T13:45:00.003-03:00

A friend and I are starting a co-writing project. This is something I would normally avoid like the plague, control freak loner that I am. But after a few big and productive talking-about-writing sessions, I'm thinking that possibly two heads really can be better than one. We already have a new idea in mind that's pretty thrilling. I think we're a great fit, with similar interests and sensibilities, good communication and understanding of each other, and a shared passion for television. So we're going to give it a whirl.

Have you tried co-writing? Have any tips? Things to avoid? Recommendations for making the most of it? Please comment!

Gut, Meet Brains

2010-05-27T08:37:00.001-03:00

In the beginning, you're writing from instinct. Things feel right. You hear the rhythm of your dialogue and your scenes. You get your characters. It clicks - or it doesn't. Your writing comes from the gut.

Then, as you send your writing out in the world, you discover that you need to be able to explain why you're doing what you're doing. What's the point of that scene? Why would this character do that? What are you really trying to say with this line?

One of the skills to develop as you move toward professional writing is the ability to understand and articulate why you're instincts are saying what they do. Your writing comes from your gut, and then your brain has to get involved.

This is actually a pretty special skill. Once you start trying to listen to your own subconscious, you realize how much activity goes on there unheeded, flying by like a high-speed train on the tracks, influencing not just your creative choices, but also your moods, your relationships - the whole banana. What you want to be able to do is slow down that train - step back and watch it go by. Catch the details. Identify the impulses. Hear the thoughts.

Because as soon as you send that script out there, a reader is going to ask you why such-and-such is in your script. The answer, "I just like the idea" isn't going to cut it. Good scripts are such efficient machines that you can't just throw in every likable idea and expect it all to fit together. You have to be able to listen to your gut and understand why it's telling you what it is - and that understanding will help you know whether the idea works here and now or not.

As you refine this ability, you're not only better able to defend your choices to your readers, you're also better equipped to make the most of them in the script. Have a feeling that your protagonist is totally okay with his wife making more money than him? Let your brain work on how to show that so it's crystal-clear to the audience.

Your gut can write it, but your brain has to know why it's good and how it works with the other moving parts of the script. The clearer the lines of communication between gut and brains - or instinct and craft, if you prefer - the better you'll be able to write.

Character Passes

2010-05-26T08:19:00.011-03:00

"I look for writers who can make me believe every character they write."

- Unknown.

Found scribbled on a scrap of paper circa 2000, on which

I'd also rated shows I might want to spec.

(Felicity came out on top.)

This week while waiting for feedback on my latest draft, I've been working on character passes. That is, looking at the outline from the point of view of one character at a time. I'd done this for three of the four main characters before I sent it in, and now I'm doing it for the fourth and the secondary characters.

When I'm writing a draft, I find it difficult to hold each character's POV at the same time - it's kind of beyond my multitasking abilities, especially when I'm working on plot, too. So I'm usually writing with the perspective of the two most powerful characters in mind, which works just fine for getting a draft out. But since the ideal is to have every character, no matter how big or small, behave according to their own unique personality - as though they are the lead in their own show, sort of - it's useful to go back through again focusing exclusively on a single character.

As a practical consideration, because the draft is out for notes, I'm not revising in my outline document. That would just be confusing when it's time to discuss feedback. (In fact, if you can afford the time, it's best to just leave the draft alone and work on other things when something is out for notes. I just don't have the time for that this week.)

Instead, I've got a separate sheet for each character. I put their important qualities at the top - the information about that character I want to make sure the audience has by the end of the episode - and then listed the scenes in which they appear below. Then, for each scene, I did a summary of where I think they are in that scene, and any changes I want to make accordingly in the next revision.

The best thing to come out of these character passes is heightened conflict. When I'm looking at the story through one character's eyes, the action is often weighted a bit in their favor - out of understanding of where they're coming from, perhaps, things go a little bit more their way. When I look at it from the POV of those around them, I find more places where those characters want to bump up against my main characters. And that's good for business!

Brave Words

2010-05-25T08:59:00.003-03:00

My pilot is coming down to the crunch in every way - personal, business, and creative - and although it's tempting to feel awash in the pressure, I've decided to opt for confidence instead. I've worked on this for a long time, and I've learned enough to know I can do it.

It's hard to leave those words there, actually. There's that intense feeling that saying brave, positive things will tempt the gods to smack me upside the head. As if, when this all goes down the drain, I'll be kicking myself for having written that one upbeat blog post that time.

Of course, the truth is, I'll probably be kicking myself for all those anxious posts instead. I was talking over my pilot story with a dear and clever friend last week, and she said, "It's all there, you just have to get out of your own way." When all's said and done, will I be sorry for the confidence I had, or the pessimism I wore like a protective cloak?

This was my horoscope last week: "When people are truly dehydrated, the impulse that tells them they're thirsty shuts down. That's why they may not know they're suffering from a lack of water. In a metaphorically similar way, Pisces, you have been deprived so long of a certain kind of emotional sustenance that you don't realize what you're missing. See if you can find out what it is, and then make measured (non-desperate!) plans to get a big, strong influx of it. The cosmic rhythms will be on your side in this effort!"

Now, I don't know from astrology, but I take my signs as they come. This one coincided with my discussions with my friend - discussions that got me excited about my story again and reminded how much I already know about the world I've created - and dusting off that feeling of confidence I used to have but haven't felt for so long reminded me what I've been missing. I have been thirsty for a long time.

Last year was a long, ugly struggle to write a two-hour MOW backdoor pilot for my show. We delivered an outline in January of this year, and then, happily, CBC changed their order from 2-hour MOW to a 1-hour pilot. This is the first point on which I've decided to give myself a break: it is really effing hard to write a 2-hour pilot movie.

After trying my damndest to do it, I know now there's a reason it's not really done anymore. There's a difference between a movie and 1-hour drama, and my story wasn't designed for movie format. (Since I'm being all confident here, I will say that I'm pretty good at coming up with concepts and also at knowing what format those concepts belong in.) So on this point, I'm going to give myself a break: last year's difficulties - creative blocks, missed deadlines, crap drafts - were not all about my worth as a writer. They also had something to do with the ill-fitting 2-hour format.

The second point where I want to let myself off the hook is that it can be isolating to work in Halifax. Most story meetings are held over the phone, and I didn't think that would be a big deal, but sometimes it really is. I suppose a sense of isolation can be true of anywhere, if you're shy about socializing or reluctant to ask for help - but it's something to take into consideration for those of us working outside Toronto and Vancouver. Sometimes we have to make our own ways to get mentorship and community face-to-face.

This is all just to remind myself that last year doesn't prove I can't do this. It's about acknowledging the challenges I've had - both internal and external - and the lessons learned. Most importantly, it's about putting those difficulties behind me. It's spring. The sun is shining. It's a good time for a fresh start.

Problem Making

2010-05-23T19:15:00.003-03:00

Reluctant to make things really bad for your character because you don't know how you'll fix it? I can't put them up that tree because I don't know how I'll get them back down.

Of course, as we know from all the screenwriting books ever written and, more importantly, from all of our favorite tv shows and films, you must put them up the tree. I was reminded of this while watching a recent episode of Grey's Anatomy. Say what you will about Grey's, it's a great place to observe all of the fundamentals of dramatic television at work.

In this particular episode, Mark Sloan's pregnant daughter comes back to Seattle and promptly delivers her baby on the floor of his condo. The daughter has already arranged for adoption, recognizing that she's not prepared to be a mother. Mark doesn't want to give up the baby, who he sees as a second chance to parent, since he didn't even find out about his own daughter until recently. So his problem is: keep his grandson, or do what's best for his daughter. He's up a tree.

At this point, I'm asking myself What's next? When you're writing, and you get to a place where you can write your character into a fix knowing what comes next - won't your audience know, too? Once I realized I was pulling my punches, listening to that voice in my head that said, but I don't know how to..., I stopped and instead started using those problems that made me ask "What's next?" And then everything started to get more interesting.

Because our task as writers is not just whether we can solve the problem, but how. It's really the how that's interesting. (Often you know that the problem will be solved - when the shooter comes to the hospital, he's unlikely to kill Meredith Grey, for example. But even as we can watch that scene pretty confident they're not going to off their title character, we're curious about how she avoids the bullet.) What I noticed while watching Mark decide what to do was both that he had a big dilemma, and also that I was curious how he'd solve it. We're watching to see the how.

Which brings me to my second impulse around creating problems for my characters: once I gave them a good big problem, I wanted to solve it immediately - like, in the next scene. Because the son hates feeling his father's disapproval, and he's eager to stop feeling bad, so going to his father to resolve the situation is his first priority. That's how I wrote it the first couple of times around, but something was wrong.

Now that I've created the tension, it's a shame to wrap it up with a bow right away. Better to let the tension linger while we explore the anatomy of the solution, go deeper into the characters, and make something really interesting of how they resolve their problem. So I want to let it remain unresolved - or get even worse. Then challenge becomes how do you extend the tension plausibly?

Your first impulse might be that the son is interrupted just as he's about to apologize - actually, that was my first impulse, so I'm going to go back to that scene and look for a more creative, character-illuminating way to keep the disappointment flowing...

Not So Bad To Feel So Sad

2010-05-07T09:37:00.001-03:00

I started to write a post on this article back in February, when it appeared in the NY Times: "Depression's Upside,"which talks about the positive intellectual, emotional, and creative aspects of depression. For example, depression may be a way to allow the brain to focus on a single problem exclusively until a solution is found. In other words, it may be a path to self-improvement.

In fact, I look back on my periods of depression in this way - though painful, I don't know where I'd be now if I hadn't been driven by the pain to solve some of the problems that made me most unhappy. While I wouldn't wish depression on anyone, I do feel regret for people my age who don't seem to have faced the negative feelings driving them, and are so are still largely at the mercy of unresolved problems.

Not, obviously, that I don't still have a few of those myself. Would I be writing if I didn't? The last page of the Times article talks specifically about the connection between depression and creativity. Nancy Andreasen is a neuroscientist who studied 30 writers. Andreasen "argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus [depression] makes possible. 'Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,' she says. 'If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.'"

All that said, I don't personally believe in prolonging suffering for the sake of art. A creative writing teacher I had in university told me she wouldn't go to a therapist because she was afraid it would hurt her writing. I chose to risk creativity in favor of happiness - or rather, I believed that I could have both. Now I believe that there must be a way to harness our emotions in service of creativity, and exercise some - if not control, then perhaps awareness - in our personal lives, too. That's my goal, in any case.

Finally, an encouraging thought from Andreasen, who says, "One of the most important qualities is persistence...Successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won't go down."

More Scene Work

2010-05-05T09:34:00.004-03:00

They say that everything in your script needs to be memorable and interesting to you - or why would you expect it to be so to your audience? My tv script is now approaching this standard, where I can tell you off the top of my head what happens in each scene. The beats have titles (for my reference only), purposes, actions, and turns. The structure is solidifying.

This is huge not only because of what's on the page, but also because of the effect it's had on my level of anxiety about the writing: once I felt the outline was really on its feet, I stopped procrastinating. There was no new special effort on my part to stop feeling anxious. This time, I find the excitement and sureness of having an actual form to work with carrying me through hours where I barely look at the clock. Before it all felt rather quicksandy, and I expect that created some of my dread.

There's still plenty of work to do - a script isn't finished until post is complete - but now I can focus on improving what's already there, instead of continuously searching for the story. Getting a grip on scene work was definitely one of the major things to get me to this point. I posted some scene articles here, and for more help, Julie Bush (yes, I may just continue to link to her every day) has another post on scene design today: "How A Scene Is Like A Joke." So go on: scene it up!

Every Moment Meaningful

2010-05-04T11:07:00.004-03:00

My son was in his bed last night, playing with a little board game that has lots of "dots," as he calls them, small round playing pieces. They were dumped out on his bed and I asked him to put them away in their box before I got in to cuddle with him. He wanted me to sit in the chair by his bed and watch while he put the dots away.

So I'm sitting there watching him, and I'm watching the clock, because I've got things to do and he's supposed to get his twelve hours of sleep every night (not gonna happen, but that's another story), and he puts one dot in the box and picks up the next and then stops to stare out the window for a long moment. It's on the tip of my tongue to say, again, "Hurry up, it's time to get to sleep," but I stopped myself because it was a Moment, one of times when you get to look at your kid and love that all they really want to do just now is gaze out the window, and for you to be there, watching them be.

It felt meaningful that I didn't say, "Hurry up," again. Like this was small but significant, a change from all the past times when he's been rushed through this part of his day, and an understanding that he could store up and take with him as part of his story.

In a script, every moment is supposed to mean something in this way, connected to the things that come before, and affecting the things that follow. And these moments are also supposed to be captivating - but not only to you, the mother who loves your script like a baby and will gaze at it with a bursting heart even when it's doing nothing more interesting than drooling gently at the sky. The moments of a script have to be interesting to look at for, let's say, a million people all at once.

That's why TV is as hard as it is to write, and as fun. To entertain more than just yourself, or a couple of people, you have to be pretty damn entertaining. You have to take it a step further than your first, second, and third thoughts, and then a few steps more. It's a great challenge, a great puzzle.

If I can write such a script and get my son to sleep twelve hours a night - then I will really know I've arrived!

;-)

Breaking Story

2010-05-03T09:15:00.007-03:00

I've been pressed for time lately, and now have what some might call an impossible deadline to deliver a first draft script by the end of this month, which is why I haven't been blogging much. But, inspired by this post by Julie Bush, I'm going to try to write quick-and-dirty posts here as regularly as I can for the rest of the month, if you'll all forgive me in advance for what may come of that!

For today, I wanted to share an excerpt from Jeffrey Stepakoff's hugely enjoyable book, Billion Dollar Kiss: The Kiss that Saved Dawson's Creek and Other Adventures in TV Writing. A friend passed this on to me and it's a real page-turning history of television writing in LA, including Stepakoff's own story from when he arrived in the late 80's as well as other history, craft, and a look inside writer's rooms and agents' offices.

Here's how Stepakoff describes breaking story, which pretty well describes one of the most important things I learned over the past year:

There are countless ways that writers go about the initial story-development process. Some work alone, some with one other person, some with entire rooms full of people. Some jot down scenes on note cards. Some work on dry-erase boards. Some just shoot the shit for hours on end and have assistants construct a story line from the stream of consciousness. When I first heard this process described - "breaking story," everyone calls it - I thought this seemed like a rather violent way to reference what I imagined to be a fairly cerebral process. But after doing it, I understood that the name made perfect sense. When you work on a story, you basically spit out whatever comes to mind and then rip it all apart. Then you examine the pieces that are left, get rid of the junk, take the good stuff, and construct a story. Stories aren't carefully baked or lovingly hatched. Good TV stories are cracked like eggs, snapped apart like fortune cookies, smashed into tiny pieces with the ruthless wrecking ball of absolute impartiality and then custom-built from the ground up. Breaking story is in fact an aggressive task, not, I quickly discovered, for the faint of heart.

First Drafts

2010-04-26T22:00:00.001-03:00

On the subject of getting to know what your first draft is all about, please read this.

I Will Be A Scene Bitch Yet

2010-04-21T11:58:00.003-03:00

I've spent a lot of time worrying about writing scenes, but I feel like I'm finally getting it. Scene work is underserved generally in screenwriting resources, but I found three descriptions that helped me work it out:

For the purposes of a quick-and-dirty guide to getting your story out, Julie Bush's Story Shorthand boils down it down two elements, character arcs and beats, with three parts to each. My own challenge was clearing away the details that don't make a scene, and focusing on the action, emotion, and question that does. I pinned Julie's post up above my desk and used it to help me stay on track.

In The TV Writer's Workbook, Ellen Sandler also describes scene structure in 3 parts: the setup, power switch, and arrow - or beginning, middle, and end, in which the middle contains a turning point, and the end directs you forward to the next scene.

A much less quick-and-dirty but very persuasive scene discussion is 6 Tricks of Scene Structure, written by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and originally posted on the blog Alien Romances. One of Lichtenberg's 6 tricks echoes the three-part scene structure Julie and Ellen describe.

For me, really focusing on this three-part structure is changing the way I write scenes. I forced myself to write three lines for each scene, including a setup, turn, and question or arrow to the next scene. When those elements weren't there, I knew I wasn't done yet. Sometimes I couldn't do it with the material I had, and had to cut things and create altogether new scenes. Other times, I was able to rework the existing material and form it into the more robust structure.

It's incredibly satisfying to see my outline begin to transform into actual scenes - and to know that I'm learning to do something I used to think I couldn't do. The more I do that, the less afraid I am about my work. I handed in a draft this week and, while it took me longer than I wanted, I finished without any significant anxiety. Knowledge and practice have to be the greatest antidotes to fear.

Tough Love

2010-04-15T09:24:00.002-03:00

This week, my husband suggested that I quit working on my television project. If this were an episode of How I Met My Mother, now would be the time for the Epic Marital Spat montage. One thing I learned about myself during this montage is that I am not doing a great job of looking like I enjoy my work.

Sure, I started a blog that might sound a tad complain-y, and used it to set about analyzing, in fine detail, the difficulties of having a sweet tv writing gig. It's true the number of days I think I'm writing crap far outweigh the number of days I'm happy with what I've written. And often when people ask me how my work is going, my answer is "Ugh." So maybe I do tend to focus on the downside a tiny bit more than is strictly helpful.

The fact is, I enjoy my work. I was actually surprised to realize that I haven't been communicating that side of it, too. But if even my husband thinks I should "save myself the mental anguish," it's time for an attitude adjustment.

I want to write about the good stuff for a while - and the first good thing I can say about my work is precisely that I haven't quit. Talking with Story Editor about this yesterday, he reminded me of the Thomas Edison quote: "I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." It does seem dark at times, but this is the process: you keep doing the things that don't work to discover what does.

As a neophyte writer, I truly imagined that the work would come fully-formed out of my head and leap onto the screen - what else would one imagine? In the beginning, you know nothing of what it really takes, only see the finished product - other people's NYPD Blues and Six Feet Unders and Almost Famouses - and yearn to do that. That's the dream. And you have to start with a dream, because you have to start somewhere.

Much of the work of the past year has been discovering - then learning deep in my cells - how impossible that dream was, and what the reality is instead. I don't suppose there's any way around this education, difficult though it may seem at times, and so ultimately of course it's a good thing, because I've done it, and I know that much more about myself and my work now. It has to be done, so I have no advice for how to skip over that step, only to say that for anyone going through it, maybe you can look at my experience and let it remind you once in a while that you don't have to suffer quite so much - because all this that feels like failure, this is the process, this is the road to competence, and this is the way it's meant to be.

The truth is, all those "ughs" eventually add up to a deeply satisfying, strong, confident kind of feeling, from knowing simply that I persevered long enough to learn a few things. Now I just have to get used to showing that confidence to people, and writing with it, too.

Sounds fun, right?

I Heart Julie Bush

2010-04-12T10:33:00.003-03:00

If you're interested in TV writing craft and the writer's life, check out my newest blog-crush, Julie Bush. I'm just smitten with the way Julie talks about writing craft with such emotional openness and strength. And, if you're looking for bona fides, I saw on Twitter she's now working at Sons of Anarchy. So in addition to being smart and inspiring, she's also speaking from experience.

If you haven't been reading Julie, I recommend cruising through her archives - there are many jewels in there. For example, her "Write Back to Front" post recently caused one of those tiny, perfect revolutions in my writing. I'm starting to think it takes a village to write a screenplay - and I'm so glad there are neighbors like this in it!

Outline Red Flags

2010-04-11T12:35:00.011-03:00

Working with Story Editor over the last year, I got some of the same notes over and over. Breaking bad habits and replacing them with new skills apparently takes considerable time and practice. Who knew? But I persevered, and as a reward for all my hard work, I'm now pleased to able to bring you the following well-researched list of What Not To Do in Outlines.

Don't lose the thread - Disappearing or shifting plot threads can cause your reader mental whiplash. In the beginning of your outline, your protagonist is falling in love. In the middle, their love interest has disappeared without explanation, and your protag is worrying about winning a race. By the end, the race idea fizzled, and now their great triumph is catching the killer. Instead of a story spine, you've got a bland pudding. So when you establish a plot point, connect the dots and follow it through to its conclusion (or back to its beginning, as the case may be). Plot points that go nowhere may be a clue you're attached to a moment, an image, or a character aspect that isn't serving your story. You want to either cut it or work out how it can be exploited to serve your plot. This is not to say that your protagonist's goals won't shift throughout your story, but changes need to lead one from the other. Falling in love leads to winning a race to impress the girl leads to the angry loser of the race killing the girl leads to a hunt for a murderer. Track your beats for each character, one to the next. Think action-reaction: how will the consequences of this scene play out in the next?

Don't lose your protagonist - Ah, the trouble with protagonists. You've painstakingly worked out their deep and meaningful character, set it up to contrast with your other main characters, and can rhyme off their backstory like it's your own. And now you don't want to do anything too mean to them, or let them do anything too offensive to anyone else, so they're fading into the background while one of your less important characters hijacks the plot. This will not fly. To fix it, check each beat to make sure it's told from your protagonist's point of view (or, in the case of an ensemble cast like mine, from the POV of the most important character in the scene, whoever this storyline belongs to), and that the action turns on what they're doing or what's being done to them. If you find them dropping out, you may need to up the ante for that character.

Don't make characters passive-aggressive - Similar to the point above, if you find your characters "responding" with passive-aggressive behaviour, you're missing the meat of the story. Does your character pointedly walk away without saying anything? Do they complain behind their antagonist's back but never confront their nemesis? Do they take abuse with unending inner calm? Look out for this passive-aggressive behaviour. It's infuriating in a spouse, and it's not going to win your hero any friends, either. To be totally honest, when my characters were doing this, it's because I hadn't yet figured out what action they should take. If they're doing nothing, it's because you're doing nothing with them.

Don't let the texturitis spread - Many of my "scenes" were all texture, no plot. Atmosphere, character, and setting without forward movement of the story. This became very clear last week when, in an effort to help me cut my four pages down to one, Producer suggested I get rid of all the adjectives. All the cutting got me down to naked plot - or exposed the lack thereof. I've had such texturitis that it's really illuminating for me to ruthlessly cut out all description. Details that added up to a scene in my head were just that - details, not story. Now I'm thinking that from now on, instead of writing long outlines and cutting them back, I'll start every new script with a very short outline, and slowly add the color in only after the bones are very clear.

Don't rely on conversation - When I watch tv, I often think that many scenes are just walking and talking. But I am not Aaron Sorkin, and if I write an outline full of he-said-she-said in hallways, it falls flat. In fact, once I started looking for it, I found there's some kind of action even in those scenes that look like just talk. This is not as simple as saying that your characters are making a salad while they talk - you want the external action to develop or illuminate the internal process as closely as you can. As an ideal, you want to write your scene so that the emotional content is clear without indicating any dialogue at all. My current favorite example of this is a scene from Parenthood, which I haven't gone back to check whether it has any dialogue at all, but the way I remember it, it doesn't need any: at the end of an episode in which Adam resists and resists his son Max's Asperger diagnosis, and focuses on getting Max to stop wearing his pirate costume, Adam puts on a pirate costume of his own, and goes out into the yard to play with his son. It brings me to tears just thinking about it. As so often in real life, on the screen, actions can mean more than words.

Don't repeat beats - Is your character having essentially the same experience in different settings until it's time for their climax? Think rising action. Things don't get same before they get better, they get worse. If you're having trouble with this one, your plot may be thin. Look for complications and escalating consequences.

Don't leave plot orphans unattended - One of the many sub-skills of screenwriting is re-writing, and this is a red flag related to that. A plot orphan is a beat that may have worked in a previous draft, but doesn't anymore because the things around it have shifted. You may be keeping it because you haven't noticed it's not useful anymore, or because you liked it so much back when it did fit in. But a good script is a very tight thing, and everything has a purpose. When I first sat in on table reads on the movies I worked on, I was amazed at how the writer (usually Donald Martin) was able to say exactly what function each beat or line of the script performed. This meant that when an actor or director wanted a change, Martin knew what the new line had to accomplish. You're aiming for a piece in which every part does a specific job - the thigh bone's connected to the hip bone, and so on - and the better the writing, the more jobs a single beat can perform. But if you've got beats that are only there to look cute, cut 'em. (Update: Julie Bush has an interesting post here about identifying cuts.)

Don't write stiff - Actually Story Editor doesn't flag this in so many words, kind human that he is, but a boring read indirectly attracts notes about other things. Are all those "I'm not feeling it" notes really about the content or are they a result of bland style? Also, when the prose doesn't convey tone, it can become really unclear to your reader whether an action is appropriate to the story. As a broad example, a line like "she smacks him," could mean something very different in a slapstick comedy than a domestic drama. Yes, outlines can be working documents, for your eyes only, in which case you don't have to look for the exact right turn of phrase every time. But if you're writing an outline for network approval, funding applications, development, or even to get feedback from friends, the more readable it is, the more effective it will be. In any case, any practice you put in mastering the rigorously efficient descriptive style of outline prose will become an asset.

Rejection!

2010-04-07T21:56:00.001-03:00

I got an email yesterday making it official: I didn't get into the Inspired Script program. This is where I give you my rah-rah speech about the bracing benefits of rejection. Yeah, I did not prepare one of those. Losing sucks! Suckity suck sucks. The nasty thought I have when it comes to rejection is that there are Winners and Losers and, well, you know what this makes me.

However, since I applied for Inspired, I've been back to work on my pilot, and I feel like I'm learning a lot about outlines as I push this one ahead with lots of help from Producer and Story Editor. With what I've learned even in the last couple of weeks about plotting and outlining, I'm looking forward to taking another stab at my feature outline and re-writing it. Then I'll send it to a few friendly readers, get feedback, and re-write it again. This next step is actually taking up more of my thoughts than the Loser ones, so the rejection's more disappointing than crushing.

I guess that's my lesson for that: work on something else while you wait, so by the time you hear back you can be all, like, "Yeah, well I've totally moved on from you, too!"

She's back!

2010-04-06T20:27:00.003-03:00

Not me, Jane Espenson, who posted today after a long hiatus. Check it out.

Me, I might be back soon, too...

Relief!

2010-03-22T21:20:00.002-03:00

Can I just share with you the great feeling I had as I strolled down the street today at 3:45, with my outline ready to print and more than an hour to deliver it? It was a great feeling. The opposite, really, to that now too-familiar feeling of inadequacy that comes with missing a deadline. I felt kind of powerful.

I felt like, hey, I should do that again!

And I will, because in the last couple of weeks we've learned that our script order from CBC has changed from a 2-hour MOW/backdoor pilot to a 1-hour pilot (squee!), and our new aim is to finish the script before June. My next two-and-a-bit months are now filled with interim deadlines for outlines and script drafts. Jam-packed.

So it was nice to have skipped that deadline anxiety this week and gone straight for the finish. It's good to know that I can do it. Of course, I'm sure the outline isn't perfect, but I'm not dwelling on that today. That's for another day. Today I'm just going to enjoy the feeling.

Panic!

2010-03-20T09:47:00.005-03:00

I now have 3 working days until the Inspired deadline, and last week moved on from my second draft (11 pages) to my third (2 pages). It was therefore lucky that I happened to watch this TED talk last night, just when I was thinking about whether I'd be in a productive panic this weekend, or a blocked one. In it, Shekhar Kapur (director, Elizabeth) talks about tearing up his script on the morning of a shooting day - deliberately inducing panic as a means to creativity.

Yesterday, I also happened to overhear a woman talking about her husband's procrastination. She said that his habit irritated her, until she came to understand that his mind tended to range over lots of topics, and that leaving things to days before the deadline served to focus his multi-tasking mind. When she thought of his procrastination as a thing he needed - ultimately inducing productive panic - she became less impatient with him. Procrastination, for him, was serving a purpose.

Sometimes I think it's good to consider that there are reasons for the things we do, like procrastinate or, in this case for me, move on from a possibly perfectly acceptable draft and start again. You may have been trained to think that whatever impulses lead you to this moment of panic are bad, but instead of resisting them, give yourself at least a few moments to listen to your mind's strategies. Maybe there is actually a good reason for them.

In any case, that's how I'm choosing to look at it for the next few days!

Day 16-21: Deadline Anxiety

2010-03-04T16:51:00.007-04:00

Writing a movie in 21 days

The other day on Screenwriting Tips...You Hack, which is, as you may know, one of my very favorite crafty sites, Bennett posted this tip:

"Don’t miss deadlines. Not unless your hands fall off and your computer catches fire."

If you've been following my blog and you know that my last year was FULL of missed deadlines, you'll understand when I say that this tip caused a sharp pain in my soul. Out of many, many missed deadlines, my computer had only caught fire once. On that day (actually, it just died with a sad little whimper), I was first afraid that my producer would believe I was lying to avoid that day's deadline - until I realized that having missed so many deadlines with no excuse better than "it's not really ready yet," he might reasonably believe that I wouldn't have bothered inventing computer catastrophes at this late date.

Deadlines in my world are notsomuch dead as they are walking with a slight limp, thinking perhaps they should see a doctor. In university, I routinely handed essays in late. I came to think of the letter grade I'd lose for being a week late - or in one case, a year - as simply the unavoidable cost of my deadline panic.

I've been cruising along happily with this outline and then last night, with five days to go before the AFF Inspired deadline, the anxiety hit again. The fertile outline I'd respected the day before suddenly became fraught with problems, and I was acutely aware of how little time I had to fix them - so acutely that I couldn't figure out what to tackle first, or think of any creative ways to do so.

Deadline brain freeze.

This bites balloons. At the time I want to speed up, instead I come to a crashing stop. I've given myself a break this problem up until now, believing that I have a lot to learn about screenwriting, and it's not going to happen all at once. I chose to work on improving the writing, and focus on my ability to meet deadlines, you know, later. But one day soon I'll have to find another way of dealing with my intense deadline aversion.

On the bright side, if I've learned anything in the last year, it's that change and improvement are completely possible. It's simply a matter of motivation and practice. I'm also getting better at recognizing what's going on in my own mind - identifying when the anxiety starts and figuring out what's feeding it.

My worry last night seemed to be fed by the fact that I've paid relatively little attention to the ending of my movie. And endings are terribly important. And one of the things that happened to me on the tv project was over-revising the first half while under-serving the second and now I'm repeating that mistake and to make matters worse, the beginning I thought was good is starting to unravel and if I don't know what I'm doing in the beginning, how can I write the ending? And around we go.

These thoughts are in direct contrast to the loose and easy productiveness that I've been enjoying for the past couple of weeks. But it's like my body's braced for the impact of the deadline. I once heard that if you don't brace yourself before a car accident, you're less likely to be injured. Certainly the anxiety I have around deadlines could soon become injurious - it's definitely causing me more harm than good, and if I'm lucky enough to be able to continue screenwriting, eventually it will be a big problem. Shooting schedules being what they are and so forth.

Now this morning I would have said this is all a problem for a different day, because I have to focus on the outline that's due Monday, but funnily enough, just as I started to write this post, I got an email from the AFF and the deadline for Inspired has been extended by two weeks. So I get to unclench for the next draft, and make an effort to greet the new deadline without the panic.

It's kind of a novel idea in these parts. Suggestions welcome!

Days 9-15: Fresh Feeling

2010-02-22T14:01:00.003-04:00

Writing a movie in 21 days

So the movie outline is going very well. Sometimes everything just seems to come together just right. Like last week, I took this book out from the library: Organizing For Your Brain Type: Finding Your Own Solution to Managing Time, Paper, and Stuff. I took the quiz and got diagnosed with an "Innovative" brain type, which frankly I'm pretty chuffed about.

What this means first of all is that my flaws are no longer flaws. I'm not messy. In fact, what I have is "little concern for appearances." I'm not vague: my "visionary" thought processes are just so complex that they're difficult to articulate. And my lifelong failure to maintain routines is actually a reflection of my "adventurous, artistic, and nonconformist" type. I prefer originality! I excel at seeing the Big Picture!

I'm not a bad person after all.

As if all that liberation wasn't enough, there's an added bonus: I don't have to file anymore! Since my mind doesn't deal well with mundane details, instead of filing, I get to just throw everything into one box labelled "Important Papers." Score!

Really, reading this, I suddenly felt liberated from judgments I've been heaping on myself my whole life. The main message of Organizing is actually that if you've been trying your whole life to conform to someone else's idea of filing, labeling, and time management and failing over and over again, the problem may simply be that you have a different style. You will have greater success if you plan according to how your own mind really works.

Of course this is an idea that I immediately extrapolated to writing styles, already well primed for it by Viki King's 21 Days book, in which she talks consistently about writing what's important to you, and writing from the heart, which isn't something you can do just by strictly adhering to someone else's directions.

Ironically, King's directions and the "be yourself" theme that's been developing for me over the past month allowed me loosen the reins on myself and move away from King's book a bit as I work on the second draft of my outline. Instead, I've been letting myself do what works on the day.

For the past couple of days, that's meant going back to the Save The Cat beats for structure (thanks for the suggestion, Naomi!); re-reading parts of Writing the Romantic Comedy; taking what I find useful from the first draft; and building from there. I'm now 3 pages into the second draft (with a goal of 10 finished pages), and I'm really happy with how the story and main character are shaping up. It's also looking more substantial this time around like, you know, a real movie.

One of the things that's making this one a real pleasure, too, is that I love the premise. It means something to me personally and I think it's strong as a romantic comedy premise as well. Having this solid foundation to work with and come back to when I start to feel I'm losing my way makes a huge difference in both the process and the story. A world of difference.

Grooves are so much better than ruts. I highly recommend them.

Day 5-8: Completing the first draft

2010-02-15T12:51:00.001-04:00

Writing a movie in 21 days

Don't check my math too closely, but I'm on Day 8 of 21, and am going to finish my first draft of the outline today. At the moment, it's roughly sketched in from beginning to end, and about 5-6 pages long.

There are places where I've said things like, "Here some big event forces her to realize that she hasn't really changed at all." So I'll be working today to bring more specific action and strengthen the last act - but at the end of the day, I'm going to accept what's there and get ready to move on to the next draft.

My current theme - both in the movie and in my life - has been knowing and accepting myself the way I am, and making choices according to that. So I'm going to get back to work and let this video post by Scott over at Go Into the Story say more about that: "Know thyself."

Day 3 and 4: I love being "good enough"

2010-02-13T20:03:00.005-04:00

Writing a movie in 21 days

The single best thing I've done so far in writing this draft of my feature outline is to suspend judgment. All ideas accepted - no idea too small, stupid, clichéd, or ugly. Get it on paper and don't worry about what kind of shape it's in. Assume there will be many more drafts, many more opportunities to fine-tune what's there. Whatever it is right now is good enough. I've tried to be very strict about this while writing this week.

And that's all I've been strict about. Otherwise, I've let myself flit around from idea to idea, task to task. A bit of character brainstorming here, a bit of scene-building there. Because although I've always wanted to write things linearly and by-the-book, I find that it's actually a cyclical process. Discoveries about character inform story development, story informs place, place informs theme, theme informs character - and then we're back to the beginning.

So instead of forcing myself to write a complete character outline off the top, for example, I wrote down as much as I knew at that moment, and then took that info as far as it could go with the story. I'll come back to the character profile again later when I need to know more.

Even that description makes it sound more linear than I think it really is. Basically I just wrote down what I knew when I knew it. (That sounds pretty obvious now that I'm writing it, but really, I don't always make it that easy on myself. Hence, the beauty of No Judgment.) And, when I didn't know anything, I brainstormed.

And of course, the first rule of brainstorming is no judgment. The second is to go for quantity. Write down everything. Sure, you throw out 90% of what you've written later, but that remaining 10% is what you need to get the job done.

I did my metaphor exercise, brainstormed about place, character, sequences, and theme, and even about the type of movie I want to write. I was surprised at how much I got out of that last one. I've known for years I want to write romantic comedies, but why? What do I like about them? What's the value of them? Because I want to be writing something that's meaningful in some way - the dream is to make a contribution to more than just my bank account - and it's easy to lose sight of how movies can do that. So taking some time to look more deeply into why romcoms are important to me proved valuable.

I even brainstormed love. I'm going to make two characters fall in love - but what does that mean? In fact the word "love" is so abstract, it was a great to ask myself what true love looks like to me. In honor of the season, I'll post part of what I wrote below. It's not poetic or brilliant or anything - it's just...good enough.

Respectful. Honest. Exposed. Accepting. Enduring. Sexy. Simple. Sophisticated. Sacrificial. Changing. Resilient. Chemical. Natural, unforced, fundamental. True. Faithful. Trusting. Pro-active, thoughtful, attentive. Strong. Hardy. Divine. Honor. Surrender. Above the fray.

Days 1 and 2: My cheating ways

2010-02-10T20:17:00.006-04:00

Writing a movie in 21 days

So this is my second stab at following Viki King's book How to Write a Movie in 21 Days, and the project is going very well this time around - I mean, this sucker is suddenly writing itself - but I was thinking it's not exactly a pure experiment this time, either. That is, in terms of following the book faithfully to learn its lessons and find out whether and how it works, I'm deviating a bit.

The most significant departure from King's method is that I'm aiming for a 30-page outline at the end of the three weeks, while the book sets out to help you write a full script in that time. In fact, now that the Inspired deadline is fast approaching, I'll be happy with even less than 30 pages by the end of February, as long as I've got the story worked out start to finish - the Inspired application requires just 10 pages.

This time around, I also improvised with my prep time as well - instead of following King's directions to the letter, I mainly used the time to brainstorm elements of the idea that weren't clear to me. From there, the story started unfolding naturally - and what a great feeling that is! (I'll say more in a coming post about what I think is working this time out.) So although I'm not strictly following the book, I think I'm following the spirit of it by listening to my instincts. And anyway, as long as it's working, I'm not going to question it.

But my departures from the book did get me thinking that I'm not following through on the experiment as I said I would - and then I thought, well, March is another month. When I finish this one, I can just do another. Crazy? Maybe, or maybe that's exactly what I should have been doing all along.

Development update

2010-02-08T23:26:00.002-04:00

Heard from my producer tonight - he met with our exec at CBC, and it so far it sounds good. At this stage, we're getting feedback on the outline. The way I understand it, because they ordered a script, there wouldn't be a yes or no at this point. However, he said their interest doesn't seem to have lessened and they continue to like this as a potential series. So here I am jumping up and down with cautious optimism.

More notes to follow later in the week, and in the meantime I'm sticking with the 21 days project. I feel pretty good about the prep so far. Tomorrow: the return of Day 1.

Mommy blog

2010-02-08T15:29:00.003-04:00

Last week, I took my daughter to a new playgroup. She was eager to go - particularly since it was in a school, and she reads her older brother's books about school, so it's got this wonderful, big-kid glamour at the moment. But as soon as we walked through the door to see a big, new room filled with new people, she did a one-eighty. "No. No no no no no," she said. "Home?"

That moment in the doorway reminds me of writing. The unfamiliar room ahead of us like an unknown script. The escape available by just retreating back the way we came like the many ways there are to avoid writing, or to avoid committing to it, or to avoid writing truth. The fear of what the other moms or teacher would think if I or my daughter did the "wrong" thing like the fear present for every writer - fear of falling short, of being judged, of public failure.

I'm happy to say I did a good thing in that moment. I didn't give into my 2-year-old's plea to leave, and I didn't force her into the middle of the action. I sat down just inside the door and pulled her onto my lap and said, "Let's watch." I didn't judge her for being skeptical of a new situation, and I wasn't afraid of other people judging us for doing something different. We sat and waited.

I'm brainstorming for the outline now, and it's kind of like that - sitting back a bit while you see what's what. Checking things out, seeing faces that you don't quite know yet, getting used to the idea and what it might become. Spotting the cool toys you might be able to get your hands on.

Soon enough, my daughter hopped off my lap to join the play. She was still tentative of the other kids, but she ended up enjoying herself - and losing a bit of her inhibitions, like when she took one step up a ladder and announced loud and proud, "Way! Up! There!" I know she'll be even braver when we go back this week. If we'd left when she first got scared, her opportunity to get through her fear would have been lost. If I'd hustled her in too fast, ignoring her objections, I might have created new anxiety - Mom can't be trusted to listen to me.

More and more, I'm thinking that writing anxiety isn't much more complicated than a two year-old. It's pure and straightforward: it's fear of the unknown. All we need to deal with it are absence of judgement, opportunity, and time.