Writing About Hating Writing
Tuesday July 2009 10:44
I have learned a few things about writing stories and specifically scripts which I thought might make a nice topic for today’s Thinking in Ink entry. Its not advice, as usual its just my thinking out loud. Or if it is advice, its only advice for myself 
“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”
- Otto von Bismarck
I’d say the same thing about the writing process.
Right now, I’m writing more than usual.
I have some time off in Europe and I’m using the time to get some short film scripts out so that when I get back to Australia I have something I can direct and produce.
My friend Myles is a director who doesn’t tend to do much writing. Concepts and stories he does but he likes the idea of handing over a story idea to a writer to write it out...
A few months back, I was that writer and the challenge was to bang out a pilot screenplay for a TV drama.
Apparently, I’m pretty good at this writing gig. And to be honest without wanting to sound self congratulatory, I don’t disagree.
I like having written something, having nailed an idea, having structured a good story or script or comedy routine or whatever it might be. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of having created something like that from thin air - except maybe actually seeing it through to performance or production.
So after I had shown Myles the script, and after I had shown him another short that I wrote a little earlier, he had a lot of praise which is always nice, and any criticism was criticism that i had already identified myself. I respect his opinions, so that was all very nice. However, then he asked me “Do you enjoy the writing?”
That’s what I want to write about today.
Because you see...my answer was a very confident NOPE.
And I was telling the truth.
The actual process itself...is excruciating for me. And I’d love it not to be.
The truth is that every script, comedy routine, or story I have ever written has gone through a phase on me hating it.
I get about 10% into the writing process and I can’t help but look at this half developed ugly duckling script in progress and feel genuinely shitty about it. It is the worst time in the writing process. Its not that I feel uninspired (though that’s part of it) its that I think its a genuine waste of time.
Maybe if I bang out a few thoughts here it will help me to make sense of the process and learn to stop worrying and love the process - or at least not lose all hope when I’m in the middle of it!
Ideas are easy. Stories are hard.
When I get an idea for, say, a short film, it pops into my head like a flash. But like a flash it is usually devoid of substance - and alive with promise.
Never-the-less, ideas are the spark that make a story worth writing.
Without a story for the idea to inhabit, its just an idea living out its days in the purgatory of good intentions. I suppose that is the reason that I write at all. Undeveloped ideas have a way of hanging around my head telling me how shit I am for not every finishing anything or doing anything worthwhile with my days. Little bastards.
It probably wouldn’t be such a big deal if at least some of them were produced from time to time. So I have decided that that’s exactly whats going to happen.
So I’m working on one of them now - Its about a grown man’s fear of having a baby. Working title: SPERMICIDAL.
Nice. Now lets see if I can vault it over that great big daunting wall that separates ideas from stories. Intentions from deeds. Doers from wankers.
Bloody wall.
I would love to discover one day that there is a process that works for me unfailingly. I haven’t found it yet.
But here are some things that I have heard and thought over time that seem to help.
The are a combination of ways to keep perspective and ways to keep going.
A conversation has a life of its own. You have to have faith in that.
I’ve no idea where I heard that, but it chimed with me immediately.
Because the act of writing is a form of conversation.
No novelist has ever sat down to write with the entire novel already in his head: He is having a conversation with a piece of paper.
And the more you write, the more you know about what you are writing. Don’t beat yourself up because you don’t know what’s going to happen next, or three chapters away. Generally, you’re not supposed to.
In fact, that is exactly what I am doing right now.
My mind doesn’t hold the answers to the challenges and hurdles to writing. Yet somehow, it appears that my fingers do if i set them free on a keyboard. Not at first but eventually they always do.
I have no idea what is going to be on page 13 of my next script, but I’m confident my fingers will tell me.
Get the tone down.
I like to know the tone of what I am writing. Once that’s down, the writing flows a lot easier.
As soon as you figure out what actor you’d ideally like delivering the lines, lines tend to come by themselves in a way that they don’t when you writing them.
Music helps here too. Get a theme song, or a style of music to write to.
Maybe put a play-list together.
I was writing about a young guy trying to get his first gig in the advertising industry, I was meandering around for the feeling, an underpinning tone.
I always have an instinct for this - its just a matter of putting my finger on it.
When I hit on the REGURGITOR song I SUCKED A LOT OF COCK TO GET WHERE I AM I knew I had hit the tone, and the writing flowed. It just said it all.
At the moment I am writing this script about a guy is confronting his fear of having a baby and his girlfriend might be pregnant. Its a short film about guys and the way they think, and I knew I wanted to say it like it is without being a downer and without the guy looking like a scared arsehole. It was important that he ws likable and I knew I wanted him to occasionally step out of the context of the movie to address the audience directly so we empathized with him. I started thinking about Woody Allen films - and I remembered BULLETS OVER BROADWAY with John Cusack. But then I suddenly realized that the tone wasn’t quite Woody Allen, it was something else.
In the end it hit me what I wanted was embodied in another John Cusack film, HIGH FIDELITY. Perfect.
Whatever works.
Find it early because it will become your anchor.
Writing is a bit of a misnomer.
Writing (the physical act) and writing (the evolution of an idea into a story) are two completely different concepts sharing a common name.
Lets call the physical act writing and process of creating a story WRITING.
If you want to WRITE, write.
Start the conversation, and then make sure to bare the next point in mind:
Always move the story forward.
This is a good one.
Every-time you WRITE, no matter how little time you have, always make something new happen.
Later you might correct it, or strike it completely, but it should be your goal every time you put even a little time into writing.
Sure, re-read what you wrote yesterday, but then writing something new - don’t change yesterday’s writing.
If a conversation doesn’t move forward and progress sentence by sentence, idea by idea, then its a conversation I don’t want to be wasting my time having.
Same goes here.
Writers block is for amateurs.
"Writer's block is a condition that affects amateurs and people who aren't serious about writing. So is the opposite, namely inspiration, which amateurs are also very fond of. Putting it another way: a professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are."
— Philip Pullman
Well if that’s true - and it sounds true to me - that means you probably ought to have some tools at the ready for when you’re not inspired.
Time yourself. Write for 10 minutes and see how much you new stuff can write (sheer quantity) into your scripts. Intend to throw it out. Maybe you will, maybe you want. What else are you going to do with the next 10 minutes anyway?
Write down everything you know about the script before you start WRITING.
But be aware that at that point your not really WRITING yet, you are simply writing.
Break it up and organise it.
Screenplay, as they say, is structure. So start structuring. Then you can see easily what you have and what’s missing.
I use a program called SCRIVENER to do this and to do all my writing in. Mac only, but I highly recommend it.
So anyway - I gotta get back to this screenplay.
For me, I think the most important concept is Always move the story forward.
Everything will come out of that. The other ideas are just ways of making that happen when self doubt or loathing take it out of you.
Doug Suiter
Berlin, Germany
29 July 2009
“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”
- Otto von Bismarck
I’d say the same thing about the writing process.
Right now, I’m writing more than usual.
I have some time off in Europe and I’m using the time to get some short film scripts out so that when I get back to Australia I have something I can direct and produce.
My friend Myles is a director who doesn’t tend to do much writing. Concepts and stories he does but he likes the idea of handing over a story idea to a writer to write it out...
A few months back, I was that writer and the challenge was to bang out a pilot screenplay for a TV drama.
Apparently, I’m pretty good at this writing gig. And to be honest without wanting to sound self congratulatory, I don’t disagree.
I like having written something, having nailed an idea, having structured a good story or script or comedy routine or whatever it might be. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of having created something like that from thin air - except maybe actually seeing it through to performance or production.
So after I had shown Myles the script, and after I had shown him another short that I wrote a little earlier, he had a lot of praise which is always nice, and any criticism was criticism that i had already identified myself. I respect his opinions, so that was all very nice. However, then he asked me “Do you enjoy the writing?”
That’s what I want to write about today.
Because you see...my answer was a very confident NOPE.
And I was telling the truth.
The actual process itself...is excruciating for me. And I’d love it not to be.
The truth is that every script, comedy routine, or story I have ever written has gone through a phase on me hating it.
I get about 10% into the writing process and I can’t help but look at this half developed ugly duckling script in progress and feel genuinely shitty about it. It is the worst time in the writing process. Its not that I feel uninspired (though that’s part of it) its that I think its a genuine waste of time.
Maybe if I bang out a few thoughts here it will help me to make sense of the process and learn to stop worrying and love the process - or at least not lose all hope when I’m in the middle of it!
Ideas are easy. Stories are hard.
When I get an idea for, say, a short film, it pops into my head like a flash. But like a flash it is usually devoid of substance - and alive with promise.
Never-the-less, ideas are the spark that make a story worth writing.
Without a story for the idea to inhabit, its just an idea living out its days in the purgatory of good intentions. I suppose that is the reason that I write at all. Undeveloped ideas have a way of hanging around my head telling me how shit I am for not every finishing anything or doing anything worthwhile with my days. Little bastards.
It probably wouldn’t be such a big deal if at least some of them were produced from time to time. So I have decided that that’s exactly whats going to happen.
So I’m working on one of them now - Its about a grown man’s fear of having a baby. Working title: SPERMICIDAL.
Nice. Now lets see if I can vault it over that great big daunting wall that separates ideas from stories. Intentions from deeds. Doers from wankers.
Bloody wall.
I would love to discover one day that there is a process that works for me unfailingly. I haven’t found it yet.
But here are some things that I have heard and thought over time that seem to help.
The are a combination of ways to keep perspective and ways to keep going.
A conversation has a life of its own. You have to have faith in that.
I’ve no idea where I heard that, but it chimed with me immediately.
Because the act of writing is a form of conversation.
No novelist has ever sat down to write with the entire novel already in his head: He is having a conversation with a piece of paper.
And the more you write, the more you know about what you are writing. Don’t beat yourself up because you don’t know what’s going to happen next, or three chapters away. Generally, you’re not supposed to.
In fact, that is exactly what I am doing right now.
My mind doesn’t hold the answers to the challenges and hurdles to writing. Yet somehow, it appears that my fingers do if i set them free on a keyboard. Not at first but eventually they always do.
I have no idea what is going to be on page 13 of my next script, but I’m confident my fingers will tell me.
Get the tone down.
I like to know the tone of what I am writing. Once that’s down, the writing flows a lot easier.
As soon as you figure out what actor you’d ideally like delivering the lines, lines tend to come by themselves in a way that they don’t when you writing them.
Music helps here too. Get a theme song, or a style of music to write to.
Maybe put a play-list together.
I was writing about a young guy trying to get his first gig in the advertising industry, I was meandering around for the feeling, an underpinning tone.
I always have an instinct for this - its just a matter of putting my finger on it.
When I hit on the REGURGITOR song I SUCKED A LOT OF COCK TO GET WHERE I AM I knew I had hit the tone, and the writing flowed. It just said it all.
At the moment I am writing this script about a guy is confronting his fear of having a baby and his girlfriend might be pregnant. Its a short film about guys and the way they think, and I knew I wanted to say it like it is without being a downer and without the guy looking like a scared arsehole. It was important that he ws likable and I knew I wanted him to occasionally step out of the context of the movie to address the audience directly so we empathized with him. I started thinking about Woody Allen films - and I remembered BULLETS OVER BROADWAY with John Cusack. But then I suddenly realized that the tone wasn’t quite Woody Allen, it was something else.
In the end it hit me what I wanted was embodied in another John Cusack film, HIGH FIDELITY. Perfect.
Whatever works.
Find it early because it will become your anchor.
Writing is a bit of a misnomer.
Writing (the physical act) and writing (the evolution of an idea into a story) are two completely different concepts sharing a common name.
Lets call the physical act writing and process of creating a story WRITING.
If you want to WRITE, write.
Start the conversation, and then make sure to bare the next point in mind:
Always move the story forward.
This is a good one.
Every-time you WRITE, no matter how little time you have, always make something new happen.
Later you might correct it, or strike it completely, but it should be your goal every time you put even a little time into writing.
Sure, re-read what you wrote yesterday, but then writing something new - don’t change yesterday’s writing.
If a conversation doesn’t move forward and progress sentence by sentence, idea by idea, then its a conversation I don’t want to be wasting my time having.
Same goes here.
Writers block is for amateurs.
"Writer's block is a condition that affects amateurs and people who aren't serious about writing. So is the opposite, namely inspiration, which amateurs are also very fond of. Putting it another way: a professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are."
— Philip Pullman
Well if that’s true - and it sounds true to me - that means you probably ought to have some tools at the ready for when you’re not inspired.
Time yourself. Write for 10 minutes and see how much you new stuff can write (sheer quantity) into your scripts. Intend to throw it out. Maybe you will, maybe you want. What else are you going to do with the next 10 minutes anyway?
Write down everything you know about the script before you start WRITING.
But be aware that at that point your not really WRITING yet, you are simply writing.
Break it up and organise it.
Screenplay, as they say, is structure. So start structuring. Then you can see easily what you have and what’s missing.
I use a program called SCRIVENER to do this and to do all my writing in. Mac only, but I highly recommend it.
So anyway - I gotta get back to this screenplay.
For me, I think the most important concept is Always move the story forward.
Everything will come out of that. The other ideas are just ways of making that happen when self doubt or loathing take it out of you.
Doug Suiter
Berlin, Germany
29 July 2009
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