Life Work

I am starting to feel like a broken record but I am going to keep at it while I know that there are the stragglers out there.

Why aren’t you doing the work?

The amount of time and energy required to make excuses far exceeds the amount of time spent doing the work.

How much time? How about 30 minutes a day? How about 15? Spend 10. Write a page. In a year you will have 365 of them. That is 3 to 4 scripts.

That will be a lot further ahead than the direction you are going right now.

If you are telling everyone this is what you want to do for the rest of your life, then why aren’t you doing it right now?

My Internet

When I first saw this, I wondered if there could not be a similar list for scriptwriting.

Any ideas?

The original is from Design Notes by Michael Surtees

The order of importance

Time to Write is breaking down Louis Danziger’s ideas and one good bit of advice caught my eye:

: In the best work there is always a benefit for the audience; the client; and yourself (in this order of importance).

s writers, we might think of the publishers or producers as the clients. Unless they can see the benefit, they won’t buy the project, so it’s useful to start thinking about this right from the start. Convincing them is getting more difficult, but that’s balanced by the fact that going around them (for instance, by self-publishing) is getting easier.  ”

Link 

Don’t make it difficult

I want to do a few posts on what I have figured out about structure.
I wanted to draw my pretty line drawing that I use all the time to show structure but I didn’t want to use my own.  
I was going to hire someone to it for me because he has a nice drawing program but as I tried to explain to him what I wanted, I drew it using the “-” and “|” of my keyboard and decided to skip it.
When those posts come, they won’t be as pretty as they could have been but they’ll get the job done and it will follow a rule I keep try to hold to: Don’t make it difficult.
We don’t need the expensive screenwriting program to writeWe don’t need the fancy computer to writeWe don’t need the perfect pen or notebook to write
You should be able to buy the cheap notebook and the cheap pencil and still as good of a job as someone with the most expensive tools in the world.
So, when my posts on structure arrives, they may not be sexy but they get the job done and isn’t that what we are trying to do first with our writing?

One of those days

When you are feeling down on the writing, think about Gearheads don’t get it from 37signals.

“Figure out what you have to say that’s interesting and then unleash it. Use whatever tools you’ve got already or what you can afford cheaply. Then go.”
Take the risk and put the work out there and do it with heart.  

Let it go

Let go of superstitious thinking. Our passions define our self and our identity.  We allow our obsessions to control us, even when it causes us conflict.  Harmonious passions allow us balance between our identity, our passions, and our life.  Rigid, obsessive ways weaken the writing. Over the past months, I have let go of the way things are done and I have embraced new ways. I am in a new way of thinking .  I can see the answer now that I am here but at the time I didn’t know how to from there to here. Where are you now?  If you can only see one way of doing it, you haven’t let go.

Don’t Be This Beaver

From The Onion: Beaver Overthinking Dam

“Local beaver Dennis Messner is spending an inordinate amount of time and effort in the planning and construction phases of building his dam, according to neighbors close to the project.”

Remember an idea means nothing if it only remains an idea.  

Allow yourself to make mistakes.  Allow yourself to be messy.

Start writing your story today.