Good one-day-late Dan. Sorry about this but
I’ve been both sick and extremely busy, and I’m sure you know that the two
don’t compliment each other nearly as much as they make each other unbearable.
Anyway, you’re problem doesn’t fall on deaf
ears, in fact everyone has the same problem. That’s why strategies like
Dee-Sisp are, while kinda stupid, effective. I think people get their best work
done during in-between times, when we are on our way from one thing to another.
The train is the perfect time for this, cause it’s an in-between time that we
have the lap space and free arms to get some work done. I think the problem is
that you’ve made a conscious effort to spend more time on the train, so it’s not
as much of an in-between time anymore. That’s my theory anyway. Who knows, your
strategy could easily qualify as the far more sensible one when it’s measured
against my sleep deprivation one.
I guess to get my writing done, it kinda
involves tricking myself. I come up with my best ideas when I can’t actually
write, like when I’m showering, or in school, or driving. So I have to do
diversion tactics to make myself think I can’t do any writing, and then when an
idea comes I can quickly break out and write it down. Dee-Sisp is a strategy,
though it leaves you a wreck the next day, and often you only write your
good ideas down in about half detail, so you’re left not sure if it was
actually a good idea or not. More rationally though is that I’ll
start reading books, or watching good stories, or listening to great music, and
my mind thinks I’m going to continue doing this, so sometimes good ideas will
emerge. I don’t always get the great ideas doing this, cause sometimes I’ll
just get wrapped in the story I’m reading, or watching, and often the ideas
that come out are just shadows of elements from the story.
I think, ultimately, there is no great
strategy. Objectively, writing is one of the hardest mental taxes. There are no
rules or guidelines, cheat sheets or hidden page of answers. You’re creating a
whole world yourself, both in book and film, and this requires a lot of work. And
not only do you not always get good ideas, but you get burn out, run into dead
ends, get great ideas that don’t fit into the story, and thousands of problems
that occur.
So that’s a little bit about my creative
writing process. Sorry I’m late with my blog, I owe you another chapter out
line or something, which I will post back up once we have a way to put up PDFs.
Perhaps contact google about it? I’m sure they can by the rights to PDFs easily
enough, or whatever they’d need to do.
Speaking of needing things to do, Dan, you
are one short film behind. Two if you count the fact the I haven’t read your
Harry Potter fans on the Train one. You’re in charge of this blog, so get onto
that. And Andrew, here’s a challenge for you, learn something difficult on the
piano. Or at lest something that sounds difficult. Dan, there’s something else
for you to, figure out how to play music files on this blog. Clearly google
blogger can’t actually contain our combined amounts of talent.
Dan, I’ll hear from you tomorrow.
R. A. Lyons.
No comments:
Post a Comment