Year: 2015

Posted on by Shelley

Julia Cameron says you have to write with a pen. Eric Maisel says you should write on a computer, why waste time doing longhand. Julia Cameron says you should write three pages of bla bla bla. Eric Maisel says never write bla bla bla. Is your goal to be a perpetual therapy client or a writer? If you want to be a writer, stop talking about the writing you want to do, the writing you will do when you write, the writing you didn’t do, or you are avoiding. Just write.

I point out these differences because they are both creativity coaches I trust, with some reservations, and they take entirely opposite positions on most matters. They share an idea of commitment– that you must keep the contract, make the commitment to write sacred. Beyond that, they have differences. She talks about God, and spiritual aphorisms title her essays: Easy Does It. One Day At A Time. His philosophy as dry and comfortless as Camus: life is hard and then you die.

I’m very rule based. So when Julia says you need to write with a pen I panic a little bit, even after I remind myself that Eric doesn’t care, even after I make a strong case for typing. In the end, I have to decide for myself. The only important question must be: what is important to me?

Posted on by Shelley

I learned something again yesterday, something I have learned before, lots of times. I pushed and pushed against the story, thinking there was no story, thinking I had no way of telling it, writing ugh, and shit, and yuck, day after day, ready to give up, and then yesterday, with a sudden click, the door swung wide open, and I had the structure I was looking for. What did I learn? This is how it goes, you think you don’t have it, and then you do. The trick is staying with the story when you don’t have it, tolerating the frustration and uncertainty. It was funny to look back over my notes, as I pulled the important parts out to make my draft—how many completely wrong starts I had, how much testing, mistakes. The parts I needed were clear, bright on the page like a secret message, revealed by the magic light.

Posted on by Shelley

Being a screenwriter is like having a love affair with a narcissist, or an alcoholic, or a gambler, somebody who makes powerful, intoxicating promises and then forgets, doesn’t show up at the appointed time, has an affair, lies. All these moments of disappointment line up like dominoes, their arrival as predictable as the moment the first one falls: they say the movie is definitely getting made; they find a great director but it turns out he doesn’t like your script; they get a star, who had one Oscar nominated performance and will come in with a broken ego and trash the character you wrote; they have to drop the five most important scenes in the movie because they are over budget and running ten minutes long. In the story meetings we talk about the characters as if they exist, forgetting (even me) that I invented them, that before I started writing there was no Fishman and no Maddie and no Jenks. I keep coming back because of that intoxicating, joyful promise: finding characters. Finding story. Finding life.

Posted on by Shelley

A practice. What is a practice. A practice, I am learning from yoga, is something you do regularly, that changes, and your relationship to it changes, and you keep doing it, whether or not you feel the same way about it today as you felt yesterday. Like any relationship, the feelings are strong and fleeting. If you used the feelings as the only compass you would be quickly lost. How can it be that you fall so hard in love with a person, certain that this person is the one you were meant to be with, the one made for you, and then one day later, or fourteen years later, it’s gone in a wink, all those feelings, and in its place, as with J and L, is fear, and dread, and rage? I fall in love with yoga, I realize that doing it makes me feel centered, keeps me reverent and alert. I sign up for a year of it, thinking, yes, this is my practice. Suddenly it looks kind of raggy around the edges. Is this really what I want? Is this really worth doing every day? It’s so dull. It takes so much time. And who the hell is this weird guy, talking to me about breathing, and holding my shoulder blades back and down?

So practice. Practice is riding that out, until the next feeling arrives, and blooms, and passes, and the next. Sometimes the feelings will be tempting and intoxicating, places you want to stay a long time, this feeling of being strong, or peaceful, but those feelings pass, and then you are bored, or nauseated, or tired, or irritated. You think, why did I make a commitment to this? Look at all these people. Why in the world are they here?