Arrogance, Humbling, and Surrender

WELL LESSEE. I normally try to avoid Saturday posts because they're pretty low traffic days, but I'm going to guess that everyone's a little familia'd out right now and might be drifting back to surfables for some fresh intel.

Not sure I've got that. This is more of a little process observation.
A few weeks back I was talking to a class of writing students at Humber College. And the subject of writer's block came up. I don't know if I brought it up or they did, but I gave my standard answer in those cases, which is that I think it's mostly kind of a precious construction; that working screenwriters didn't really have time for it. When you're on deadline in a TV show, with a crew waiting to prep an episode, not delivering is simply not an option. If you're "not feeling it," you have to simply grind through and deliver a less confident draft -- and hope that you have a wonderful and generous story department that will help you trowel over your shortcomings and sift through the blasted rock of your painful first draft to bring out the gold.

I mostly believe that -- that writer's block is 90% affectation. I again default, if you haven't read it, to Steven Pressfield's excellent procrastination-killer The War of Art, where he talks about the phenomenon of resistance. As he puts it in his author's note:

I had an excruciatingly difficult time facing my fear to write The War of Art. It's stuff that's been boiling inside of me for years. The book is all about facing down the enemy within ourselves, what I call "Resistance": the emotional/psychological force that stops writers from writers, painters from painting, and all creative people from being creative. Resistance was working on me too, overtime, and giving me a million reasons not to do it. I was getting extremely depressed. Then I finally plunged in and everything got clear.

I've read books by writers about writing. I've attended seminars and workshops. But, in all of my years, I never heard a word about the phenomenon of Resistance. I've been fighting it every minute of every writing day and watched it break up my marriage and screw me over in a hundred ways for years and years. Was I the only one? I couldn't be, because I saw friend after friend crap out on writing projects and other creative enterprises, all because of Resistance and fear. In the end I had to write the book, just because I knew what I was fighting was real and other creators were fighting it too. The War of Art is one working artist's report from the trenches, sort of "this is how it feels to me; does it feel this way to you?"

I hope it helps. I hope it tells aspiring artists and entrepreneurs that they're not crazy to be feeling the fear they feel. We all do. It's part of being human. And I hope some of the tricks of the trade I've learned can help too. Resistance never goes away. I've had to reread parts of the book myself already, just to keep me firmly planted in my writing chair and working on my next project. It helps!

The reason why "resistance" to me is such a cool word is because it properly puts the onus back on you. "Writer's block" sounds like some evil external force that's doing this to you. And that's not what it is, at all. You can't let yourself off the hook that easy.

But...

Over the last few weeks -- and here's where the humbling comes in...I've discovered that resistance does sometimes have its uses.

But first let's talk about the arrogance.

When setting up a delivery schedule for the pilot that I'm currently developing, I made a serious, grave, and in retrospect silly mistake. I overpromised.

I took my experience over the last few years writing on TV shows, and how long it took me to work out the outline, and I padded it out a bit and said, "I can do this."

What a mistake.

What I'd left out of the equation was the effect of having an already established canon of characters and template can do for you. It's the reason why in a pinch, I can write a good draft in five days, and why I can knuckle down an pump out an outline lickety split, too. That's the single most-overlooked skill from the novice screenwriters I talk to in classroom situations or informally -- they don't yet realize that writing well is important, but that equally important is writing fast.

But writing fast requires some work ahead of time. It's like the difference between chopping and prepping all the ingredients in a stir fry and pulling them out of the fridge where you cleverly chopped and prepped them the night before: only one of those methods is going to get you a stir fry inside of ten minutes.

So it goes with outlines and scripts.

And especially pilot scripts.

My first massive bout of resistance on the current project was conceptual. There were a couple of hairy things about it that we always knew I was going to have to work out at the outline stage. But it wasn't until I had some down time, and was sitting out in the Florida sun in early November that I realized the true shape of what was missing. It took a few days of thought, after which I came back and wrote it all up and circulated a three page document amongst my partners. It slightly rebooted and reframed the idea, and locked down the other stuff that had been out in the ether. It got a great reception, and I immediately thought that now I could proceed to quickly writing the pilot script.

Uh uh.

I got three acts in and was seized with despair. I truly felt I was spinning wheels. What I thought was five acts of my story wasn't. Now my instincts were telling me that my Act Four out and Act Five were chock full of events that had to go into Act Three. I had an ending. I had a strong start. I just didn't have the right tentpoles.

I was paralyzed for about three days. These three days also happened to coincide with some WGC business, and a bit of personal crap, and a couple of other things. But the fear was there. The fear never left. And the fear, the resistance, the block -- whatever it was -- was telling me that I had a serious, insurmountable, terrible problem with the material.

Oh, guess what? I had a cold, too. Yeah, when it rains.

Sitting here comfortably on the other end, I can't tell you exactly how I got through it. But there was a combination of factors. Some of it was putting that sage Pressfield advice about avoiding resistance to work. Some of it was stubbornly just putting in ass-in-seat time. But the third thing was something akin to surrender. It was a result of the churn and the sturm and the drang, and the panic that I'd felt. All of that roiling emotion made me go back and look at each scene anew. And the fear and angst gave me new eyes.

In the end, here's how the floodgates opened: I had a key reveal scene at the end of act two, where one character revealed something profound and surprising about themselves to our main character. It was a big bombshell. It was the kind of big bombshell that we don't often get dropped on us in life. It happens a bit more often on TV because, well, it's TV. But it sure was big.

And it was at the end of Act Two.

I like nice meaty act outs as much as the next dude, but suddenly I felt, "Hey, maybe this is too much." And I started thinking about what happens when we have to tell people big things like that, and how often we tell half truths. Or the truth up to a point.

And suddenly, there it was. This character had to tell my main character enough to get her to go off on a tangent, but not so much that she saw the person, or herself, differently. That had to be saved for the end.

I know that, especially without the details, that must seem an incredibly simplistic solution. But that's the point. Most solutions are. And if they're not simple, then you probably really have gummed up the works and have to go back to the drawing board completely.

By holding back the why of what this character revealed, I had a new denouement. And then it rippled forward, and within the space of five minutes, I'd found a plot point in Act one that could echo and resonate and come back in Act 4. Characters who had been functionaries lengthened and deepened, and started to reflect the main character's quest. That one logjam broke, and the better part of a week of worry gave place to two full acts worth of discovery and breakthroughs in the space of about five hours. And then, the outline was done.

That's the bloody thing about resistance. Sometimes it's like that little spinning "wait" symbol you see when your computer's CPU is chugging along. Calculations are being made in the background; you just have to be patient. Before you force-quit and start over, you need to stop. Sometimes the thing that you think is the resistance, isn't. In this case, the resistance was telling me that the whole thing had to be torn apart.

I thought the resistance was the inability to focus. But it wasn't. The resistance was the fear telling me that the problem was more serious than I thought, and more serious than it subsequently was. Does that make any sense?

So, lessons learned: Don't overpromise. And be sure to...uh...be sure what the resistance is really telling you.