On Writing
The title is kind of a joke. I have the book next to me by Stephen King, but the thing about Stephen King is he’s a professional. Still, I’ve been doing a good amount of writing this past week (at least for me), and I feel like I’ve been completely wrong about the process.
When I started screenwriting, and thinking I wanted to do it for a career, the creativity of it was what gripped me at first. Putting settings and characters on the page that were only in my imagination. You’d think up an environment and some banter between apocalyptic space pirates or gunslingers, write it down, and boom. It was no longer in your head anymore. And in a way, that made it real, at least to a small extent.
Writing, the actual process of writing, is no longer distinguished by the sweeping bursts of creativity and imagination I experienced with my first screenplays. Those bursts are actually very few and far between. Back then, it was more important to get the sentences on the page, to paint a picture with words, however the words sounded. Even though in screenwriting, it’s really about the visuals, moments, and feelings. You’re writing for a visual medium. The words I believe are important, but they’re secondary to the feelings, scenes, and story. Coming from a world of novels, it took me a long time to figure this out.
I’ve been trying to write every day, for better or worse. And what I’ve discovered the process of writing to be (again, at least for me) is something more akin to manual labor, with fixing a leak or changing a tire, rather than a sweeping burst of inspiration. In my experience, you spend much of the day dealing with problems, and finding solutions to these problems through tinkering and creativity. But creativity has less to do with an endless flow-state than it does with micro-mechanics of details and language. You reread a scene that’s flat and add an emotional beat to it, and that one beat adds a new, vital dimension of feeling for the reader/audience. With your scene direction, you condense words, drop sentences, add more precise language, with the goal of describing the essence of an action, image, character, or moment, so your reader can truly understand what’s happening and how a character feels and be immersed in the story, and
without unnecessary words hindering the flow of the read.
And the solutions to screenplay issues aren’t always obvious. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking up how to improve the story. And when I say thinking, I mean throwing a bunch of ideas at the wall, or staring into space vacantly. I typically have to write out a lot of words and develop ideas that don’t work, before landing on a thought that leads me in a fruitful direction. But the bearing of fruit typically doesn’t happen without many, many minutes of feeling like I’m getting nowhere. This feeling used to give me a lot of anxiety — you’ll wonder if you’ll ever get to that good idea (what if you can’t figure it out?) — but lately, I’ve been rolling with it. The Feeling of Getting Nowhere is as much a part of the writing process as finalizing a screenplay. And I’m grateful for being able to understand that this feeling isn’t and shouldn’t be a reason to panic. It’s something to work with and work through.