blog

Circumstantial flummery from a would-be spoonbean hustler.

"It's like a discipline//without the discipline//of all of the discipline"

Somehow the conflux of JK Rowling’s Harvard graduation speech and John August’s advice regarding “wanting to write something else” has me feeling a blog post. With regards to JA, it’s always nice to have something like…

“The time to move on is when reaching the “best version” of your script ceases to be interesting to you.”

…externalized from some kind of authority since that’s how I’ve tackled things in the past.

It feels very slow. Like I’m somehow incapable of rolling my Rs and therefore will never be able to properly speak Spanish.  When revising the same thing get distracted by coming up with new ideas, I feel like I have to tuck the scrap away for later. However, I have tried jumping ship mid-crossing  and haven’t seemed to be able to focus on other characters as keenly as then ones I’ve been extensively trying to grind to perfection. Which seems a pretty natural consequence. It’s not that the new ideas aren’t damned fresh, seductive and exciting, it’s just both barrels of the lazy guilt: Am I coming up with new ideas to stall, dragging my feet on finishing a draft? Am I Working on the same script over and over because I can’t write anything new?

Then there’s news of a sale or some production note that comes back and as supserstitious as I am, everything gets parsed as an omen- ‘You should be working on something else. This idea is a waste of time. You’re going to die a failure and alone.’

I eventually get back to kicking out pages and scenes, but I’d love to figure out how to switch gears a little faster, get into the story groove without the whole production. The only way I can work it out is that I just need to keep writing more scripts. Read more theory. See more movies. (though, the last two might be working against me since some film theory seems to be in a culture+causal vacuum compared to the process of storytelling and I distinctly feel like there’s a lower standard of quality in popular cinema these days).

Anyway, I’m hoping that I can find a new job and they’ll have a sandwich day.