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.
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?
I have been getting better at letting there be silence in my day. At waiting, when I can’t think of what to say, or I can’t muster the will to do it. I haven’t ever really learned how to moodle, how to just sit there until some silverfish of an idea flickers by, get still enough that all the silverfish come out, and hold my breath, and watch them, and see what shapes they make. My unhelpful voice says what if no fish ever come out? Isn’t that lazy? Isn’t that an incredible waste of time? You need to prove your commitment to writing by making words. But maybe, something that I haven’t really thought of before, maybe writing is both an effort and a not effort. Maybe there is waiting, and poking around, and wondering, and then working really fast, and hard, for a concentrated time.
John Updike observes that everybody, even the most prolific poet he knows, considers being blocked as a regular part of the cycle of writing. Somebody else said they can only write for two or three hours when they are incubating ideas. Even Stephen King said he always has two stories going– one of them his real project, which he does in the morning, and the other one his “toy train”, which he fiddles with in the afternoon, trying to see if it will ever become something he wants to commit to.
More recently I try not to hurry myself, to let myself be patient, to cultivate the silence out of which some idea might slip, silver fish, and hover long enough for me to notice it.
What am I scared of. Everything, it seems, but especially starting. And the deadline, having to get it done in a certain amount of time. And competition, the idea that there are writers everywhere, working for the same goals, writers with better confidence, long claws, and talent. My own hesitation scares me, the fact that I linger so long at the door, afraid to go in, that by the time I make up my mind the party is over, everyone has gone home.