…but I was wrong. Growing up, I thought, "When I get old and grumpy, I’ll
go live in a cabin away from everybody, and then I can write and play music
and not be bothered." I was wrong. I just spent nearly a week in a cabin (it’s
not really a cabin, it’s much nicer than my house), without another living
soul, except for my dog, Brando.
Sure, the writing group came
up for a day or two, and Laura (the wife) came up for three days. I really
needed it. But, all told I’ve spent 6 of the last 9 days alone.
The good news is that in one week I wrote 75 pages of my next screenplay.
I actually wrote 55 new pages, but I ended up rewriting a whole lot of
the first 20 that I had. Plus, I had to restructure it, reorder scenes, reduce
the number of characters, and realize that I had written myself into a corner.
Sequestering myself (or growing the beard) was key to finishing pages. I’ll
admit that, but I still only wrote a max of six hours a day. What does this
mean? It means that I can go back to my regular life (sans mosquitoes and mean
rural dogs) and still get pages done within my cliched urban lifestyle: freelance
work, great coffee, dog-friendly stores, satellite TV, Indian food, and good
old fashioned human contact. I just have to be more protective of my creative
time, and I urge everyone else to make a date with yourself to write every
day, even if it’s just journaling.
Amazing! I must admit, I had taken about a month
off of writing, and like the trumpet (my ex-harsh mistress), a month
is just about enough time for your chops to atrophy. The first day of writing
felt like blowing on that mouthpiece and feeling the air escape from
the corners of my mouth. Of course, with writing, nobody
else has to suffer through horrible long tones, arpeggios, and lips slurs.
My brother-in-law/ex-roommate/ex-coworker/ex-bandmate still recoils at the
thought of hearing all that Allen Vizzutti stuff. With writing, others just
have to suffer through the 1st draft screaming fits, the 2nd draft blues, and
the third draft questioning of one’s talent. Those later drafts
are just so much fun, aren’t they? Polish, polish, polish. OK, we know these
suckers are never done even if they’re D-O-N-E.
So, why bother anyone with this useless blog entry? Well, I think it’s important
that we remember to keep writing no matter what, every day, whether the muse
strikes or not. We have to make the time and if we write shit, so what, we’re
writing. Thinking about writing isn’t writing. Talking about writing
isn’t writing. Writing is writing. We hear it all the time, but now I get it.
It’s not so scary to stare at the blank page once you realize that it is OK
to write crap, cause you’re gonna have to rewrite it anyway. That’s been my
problem all along. Just get it down–the mantra of every teacher/mentor I’ve
had. I have to lock that editor in the closet with his wee red pen and his
wee beady eyes and his wee beady thesaurus. I’ll let him out, but not until
we’re done with that first draft or maybe even the second.
I also forgot that I love to write screenplays. I get so obsessed with research,
character bios, outlines, and beat sheets, that I forgot that I discover so
much while writing in Courier 12 point font and yelling at Final Draft for
adding spaces or forgetting scene headings.
We have a lot of power as writers. We have the ability to escape the doldrums
of a remote luxury cabin or the clamor of a tiny house near Aurora, without
physically going anywhere. For
hours a day, we get to forget the world around us, fall in love with or kill
off our characters, put in a fight or chase scene (at the beginning of the
second half of Act II, I promise), throw a few dogs (ruff ruff, not bang bang)
in there, blow up the car, make someone’s clothes fall off or see-through,
create secret societies, make people cry, and show people having a good time
even though they’ve fucked up their life or we’ve thrown down the gauntlet
before them. On top of all that, it’s legal, in this country.
That’s pretty cool in my book/screenplay. Off to bed. Gonna drive back to
Seattle in the morning and meet up with our guests for this weekend, Bill True
and Dean Hyers. I am stoked. That’s dude for elated.
