Sloth vs. Sloth

“How’s the writing going?”

“How’s the writing going?”

“How’s the writing going?”

“How’s the writing going?”

“How’s the writing going?”

“How’s the writing going?”

You are all way too damn thoughtful. Well, let me tell you....

SLOTH VS. SLOTH

What a mind-fuck it is to “pursue your dreams.”

Here I thought that focusing my life on writing would be the most freeing and liberating thing that I could do for myself.

It is not.

You feel brave, then you feel excited by your rebelliousness and bravery, and then you feel the weight of the dream, hefty on the scale prepared to be weighed against every breath you take that isn’t propelling the dream forward.

The guilt of the dream was (and will be again...and again) unbearable. Suddenly everything in my life is getting stacked against it… because when I’m not writing, learning, reading & watching “things of value” a voice pops up in my brain that scoffs “I thought you said you wanted to be a writer. I thought this was your passion...Oh it is?! Well then why are you popping booger bubbles while you watch The Masked Singing Origami Maker on NBC?”

To which I retort, “Let me live my life, I’m just not in the mood today... this week…” and think to myself why the fuck did I opt for the David Goggins subconscious coach? Just back the F-off will ya? I don’t get like a moment to unwind?!

And that’s the plight. Which is not fun. Even now, writing this wonderful little piece I am attempting to smother the voice that is saying. “Are you just writing this post because you’re too scared to focus on your script?” Even classes and things I’d deem educational can feel like elaborate procrastination, because it’s not writing the script. The fact that it’s irrational doesn’t make the voice any less present or critical.

The voice is the worst.

The voice echoes around in my brain until it completes its metamorphosis and turns into a butterfly, a really really stressful butterfly. I'm a pretty stress-free guy. You’ll never catch me huffing and puffing into a brown paper bag, and I handle myself with the composure that should be, frankly, mandatory FAA regulation for anyone planning to fly commercial. To those stress cases, relax, seriously I’m trying to get 27 minutes of restless sleep before I spasm in a dream and throw a reflexive flying knee into the seatback in front of me, and you, my sweaty friend, are interrupting that.

My writing stress is different, it puts my brain in the freezer. And everything just goes quiet. That quiet place is not a fun place to be and it’s an easy place to get stuck. The only thing that pulls me out of it is the work. Not words of encouragement, not adventures, not new ideas for my story. Simply words on a page.

So it goes, and I grapple with that and recognize that I won’t spend every waking hour writing, but I am trying to build the place for writing so that I’m doing it seven days a week, and then, most importantly, not taking a nosedive the following week.

It comes down to this: You need to build the places for a dream to exist in your life, because you can dream all you want but following a dream has a lot more to do with what you do while you’re awake.

The Builder’s Diary

Household Remedy for Idle Hands: Superficial Ambition

We’ve all been here, and I am sad to report that this pitfall comes included in the “I wanna be a writer” starter kit.

A week goes by and you are less than impressed with your output. So the solution..? Simple, from here on out I solemnly swear to INSERT absolutely ludicrous goals and timeframes.

Here’s how it goes: I acknowledge my shortcomings, tell myself how much better I can do, and promise to increase my productivity 10x. Over the past 9 months I have made plenty of absurd promises to myself.

• I planned out a 6 day work week with 10 hour days broken down into what I would be doing the entire day in 45 minute intervals… Weird that that one didn’t stick.

• Judd Apatow says he writes 5 good pages a day… fuck that guy. What does he know? I’ll do 20.

• I vowed to not write anything else other than my script until it was finished. And to the penpals I’ve ghosted in the process, I’m sorry.

In the end it comes as no surprise that these strategies simply don't work.

It’s equivalent to getting your car stuck in a snowbank. After hours of rocking back and forth. Spinning tires going nowhere you decide to wave down a Mack truck for help. You say “Sorry to bother you but I’ve been stuck here for hours and I could really use your help to get out. Before I got stuck in the snowbank I was doing about 60mph, but as you can see it’s a high performance vehicle and realistically I probably should be doing about 85mph. So if you wouldn’t mind backing down the road about a quarter mile and then ramming my bumper at about 70mph that should be enough to get me back up to 85 mph by the time I touch pavement and I’ll be able to make up all that lost time. Thanks chief.”

GOAL SETTING: Trying and Errors

How do you set goals for something you’ve never done?

Option One: You set highly ambitious and untenable goals. I’m going to crush this, duh. We’ve established that... I’m glad I think so highly of myself. Strap in for the big let down.

Option Two: Listening to people who have done it professionally for years...OK but I’m adding x2 to everything they suggest because their method seems like it will take wayyyy too long.

Option Three: Use work from related fields to gauge output. So it takes me 3 months to write one Christmas present thank-you-note to my grandma, therefore it should take me about 4ish? million years to write a 120 page script?

With my tail between my legs I return to Option Two and add a little guesswork based on what I've actually been able to achieve on my best days and worst days.

Eckhart Tolle says "The Now" is the only thing that matters… forget the past and the future. I appreciate his perspective and I think we can all benefit from focusing a little more on the present… that being said:

- The footprints that I’ve left on this journey serve as a crucial instrument for establishing what I can accomplish today and moving forward. I peek back over my shoulder at the path I’ve walked to estimate how far I can walk the next day, and how much further I will need to go to better myself over time

- The other thing is that if ole Tolle took a half-second to acknowledge the past he might have realized that in his book The Power of Now he’s saying the same damn thing over and over and over again!

• Chapter 1: Introducing the Now

• Chapter 2: Nothing but Now

• Chapter 3: Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 57

• Chapter 23: Know Your Now

• Chapter 24: The Future… Jk lol Still Now

• Chapter 45: How Now Brown Now?

• Chapter 83: Final thoughts? No, just more Now

Yo ET, go home, we get it dude.

Phew! felt good to get that off my chest. Let's talk goals!

Tangible Goals:

I write two scenes per day. I write in one hour blocks… nothing good comes out after an hour of staring at a blinking cursor. That’s it. Two rules are harder to break than three.

I have 26 scenes left to write in the first draft. It’s about ⅓ of the total scene count. I’ve written 134 pages of what I’d estimate will be 180 pages.

And when I am finished in two weeks *gulp* the editing process will begin… but I will address the ins-and-outs of the process next. The point here is that it will be a new stage where I will have to figure out through trial and error how quickly or slowly that will go. Slowly being the more likely of the two.

Catching a Wave

Of momentum I will say this: Riding the waves of inspiration is one of the most intoxicating and invigorating things I’ve experienced. While I ride the swell I am totally barreled by a sense of purpose and I feel the most tapped-in I could ever be into my brain and the world around me. It is a heart-pumping high, a truly righteous ride.

But that wave of momentum is a fickle lil’ B-word. The kind of lil’ B that goes out for a pack of smokes and doesn’t come back. It never writes, never calls, it just leaves a note that says “thanks for the good time, see you in a long one.”

I could be absolutely MC-hammering the keys for three days straight. Lightning flying from my fingertips and for no rhyme or reason on the 4th day the spark is gone. No fanfare, just static.

The voice is the worst, but static is a close second.

So we start over. Paddle, paddle, paddle.

Sloth vs. Sloth

I’ve come to terms with the fact that slow is my new operating speed and so we are brought to the cornerstone of this entry. The choice I face on the daily. Which version of sloth will I be today?

Will I be a lazy sinful expletive?

-or-

Will I be the arboreal Neotropical xenarthran mammal? Who moves so slowly that moss, a plant, is like “yo, randy check out that furry almost-inanimate object hanging from the tree! I think we can catch up to him and live there!”

The sloth inches along at a top speed of 0.17mph “when threatened,” but hey that’s still progress baby!

Today I chose the path of that weird little critter hanging upside down in the trees in Central America and/or South America and I can only hope that tomorrow I make that choice again.

The Process

I think it’s important that I track the approach I’ve taken to screenwriting either as a lesson for others who want to do the same or more likely to bulk up my resume and story for the hiring manager at Wetzel’s Pretzels when I attempt to explain what I’ve been “up to for the last 2 years.” Of course it will be just a small prelude explaining that it was simply a layover on the way to discovering my true passion... toeing the line with Cinnabon for the title of Supreme Administrator of Cinnamon-Coated-Diabetes in the Malls and Airports of America Division.

A Writeous House of Learning:

I’ve spent a lot of time absorbing resources to better myself as a writer. Here are the ones that have made a difference.

1. Aristotle’s Poetics: Aaron Sorkin turned me onto this goldmine. He calls it the writer’s bible. I couldn’t agree more. Back in a time when the Roman Empire was literally building their first roads my boy Aristotle laid out the foundations and components required in every epic, comedy, and tragedy. He did this approximately 2000 years before Alexander Cumming (more like Going) was granted the first patent on the “S" shape piping that makes indoor flushing toilets feasible, and bearable, and 2,100 years before Thomas Crapper improved the flushable toilet with the invention of the ballcock. You just can’t make this stuff up. But the point being that between the time that Aristotle wrote his Poetics and now tons of shit has flowed out of the quills, pens, mouths, and asses of the human race and the essence of his Poetics stands untarnished with nary a single skid-mark upon it's pages. As relevant as ever.

2. MasterClass: You’ve seen the ads. Looks pretty neat right? I can’t speak to the effectiveness of learning gymnastics from Simone Biles via laptop but as far as their writing courses go I’ve been very impressed. Often serving more as inspiration than education these morsels of goodness have been a great guide for getting in, getting learned, and getting back to the work. My faves so far: Judd Apatow, Aaron Sorkin, and David Mamet.

3. Brent Forrester’s TV Writing Class: This dude has serious street-cred, writing for or leading some of the strongest writer’s rooms in television. Shoutout to BDRL for sending this my way. Brent gave six lectures breaking down all aspects of comedy writing for television. They all rocked

4. WonderBook by Jeff Vandermeer: A guide to creating imaginative fiction. It’s brilliant and it has lots and lots of pictures.

5. Screenwriting by Syd Field: So this dude basically pulls the curtain back on screenwriting and scientifically outlines the quantifiable structure of a script. He leans in hard to his method suggesting that every good movie follows the exact structure. Maybe I don’t agree with all of it but this was a huge help. It gave me the guide rails I’ve used in my first script. Convention isn’t necessarily the place creativity goes to die, I would instead say it’s a starting block to leap from.

6. Pixar in a Box: Pixar’s done it again. Online they offer a free course outlining everything that they do to create a movie. It includes a section on “The Art of Storytelling.” Swoon.

How to Write a Movie: by a writeous dude

In the third grade we were given an assignment to give step-by-step instructions to a task of our choosing. I laid out the steps required to lace your sneaks ladder lace style. Now I am going to employ what I learned then to outline movie writing, but let me know if you’d prefer to see the ladder lace instructions. It will make your shoes super fly.

Ideation - The Freewheeling Imagination Part

1. The script that I am writing happens to be animated. Why? Because one day I gave myself the task of listing non-living things that I had and hadn’t seen (when I reveal what I landed on you’re gunna be like “ummm Jeff those are living things.” I know that smart-ass.)

2. I found that Pixar has done a good job covering the bases, but I made a long list anyway.

3. I also had this notion that I wanted to write a story about good and evil, but in an environment where the definition of both sides were obscured by the conflict between how people are perceived and how people act. So I needed characters that are universally considered bad, to be goodhearted beings, and universally good characters to be dickheads.

4. The Outcome

   1. My world: The human body

   2. My protagonist: a cancer cell named Mel

Direction- What will the point of the story be?

1. So I found my star, now what’s the point that I hope to make? This is where I start thinking about the theme. The glue that holds the whole story together, that gives it purpose, and gives the audience a reason to care about the thing I’ve created. If it’s successful it won’t be because of the laugh (oh, this cancer story is a comedy by the way… good luck Jeff) it will be because of the message that resonates with the audience in a way that connects back to their life and reality.

2. This starts vague and becomes more polished and clear as the story evolves. There is a constant push-pull relationship that I have with my story. Sometimes you have to force bulky-awkward ideas into places in order to move forward and then come back to refine an idea. Other times the north-star at the end of the tunnel guides you in the direction the story needs to go as if the path is already there and just needs to be walked to make it real. Most often though I feel like the cartoon character building a bridge with two pieces of plywood. Hammering nails into the ends to connect them, and then retrieving the first piece as I stand on the second to hammer it to the forward end. Suspended in the air only by my imagination.

3. The direction for my story:

   1. Not everyone is born knowing their place in the world. Even when it seems obvious what someone is meant to become, it does not mean it’s a life they want to lead. They yearn to be more. That’s Mel’s story.

World Building- Building my sandbox

1. This part is fun. Oh the possibilities! What can the world include? Who are the characters? What are the settings? How many puns can I come up with before I finish this pot of coffee?!

2. I do research at this point. Anatomy 101. Not only is this important for maintaining some semblance of how cancer works and how the body works, but it’s also a majorly valuable source for characters, places, and events inspiration.

3. BEWARE THE QUICKSAND: I’m spitting out ideas left and right and next thing I know I am up to my neck in ideas and realize that I still have 75% of the organs to study, numerous systems in the body unconsidered, oh and what kind of clothes do they wear? They wear clothes?!?. It feels like my world has more holes in him than Operation’s Cavity Sam.

4. A world that serves the story, not a story that serves the world.

   1. The task of building an entire world crushes you like a trash compactor. Until you remember that your goal is not to build a world, it’s to write a story.

   2. Build and ideate until you have enough runway to start writing your story

   3. Leave question marks that you can come back to fill in later.

   4. The world will continue to build itself around the story, and the rules that you create in the world will be there to move the story forward.

Story Structure- Begin it, Middle it, End it

1. At this point we have a lot of stuff, but we don’t have a story. This is where the resources that I’ve leaned into for my education have played a major role.

2. Using Syd Field’s Three Act Method and Ari’s Poetics, I create the bones for my movie.

3. And from here forward my movie’s details will not be provide :(

Storyboards- Seeing the story

1. Cork-boards: Good for tracking serial killers, taking down mob bosses and visually mapping the arc of the story.

2. One cork-board for every act, and one index card for every scene.

3. This is a tool I will use over and over again. I can move scenes around, see holes in each act and play with ideas in a malleable format

1. The Outline- When it starts to feel repetitive but we trust the process.

   1. When I have the whole story storyboarded we move all the scenes to the outline. I embellish upon what I’ve written on each index card to detail the purpose and situation that every single scene presents.

   2. As David Mamet says, if a scene does not move the plot forward it is not a scene. Scrap it.

The Vomit Pass- I’ll write, I’ll write, I’ll write

1. After inserting the outline into Final Draft (the script writing software) I go top to bottom writing every single scene from start to finish.

2. It’s called the vomit pass because the words should be spewed onto the page without pause or second thought. This is not the time to be critical, this is when you lay it on thick. If a scene requires a joke and I have two, I write them both. A script should be approximately 120 pages, a comedy even shorter. My first draft will be closer to 200 pages.

3. Michelangelo said “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” The vomit pass is how I create the marble block from which I will reveal my finished product.

4. It is much easier to refine and condense than it is to create and who knows what kind of brilliant inspiration will possess you when you let your fingers and mind run wild within each scene.

5. I have a lot of bad stuff in my draft right now. Super obscure references, truly horrible jokes and scenes with major plot holes and continuity errors and it will all need to be tightened, but not on this day

The Edward Scissorhands Pass- “Hold me.”... “I can’t.”

1. It’s not a rewrite but there will be a lot of writing to go with the deleting. No tenderness and keep the wax on the shelf, we haven’t reached the final buff and polish yet.

2. This is the round of heavy edits, big changes with very coarse hands

People Review- raise your hand if you want to read

1. Hell if you made it this far into the post you might be exactly who I am looking for… people with too much time on their hands. Just kidding... if you'r reading this I appreciate you more than you could know.

2. First and foremost the main objective is to understand if the story is comprehensible

3. From there it’s just good to see how the story makes people feel and what comes to mind when they read it.

The Super Edit- Sprinkle it with holy water

1. Dotting i’s and crossing out the stuff that still sucks

2. Only thing to confirm here: Am i proud of my work?

Judgement- Is the script flame-retardant?

1. Hand it over to the pros and await their blessing.

2. While I wait to see if my script survives Dante’s Hollywood Inferno I start the process over with the next story.

OK the voice beckons. I hope you thought this was nice. Back to the script.

- a writeous dude