So far today I’ve dusted some shelves, hung a picture, taken out my busted cable box, sketched out a couple more beats for this screenplay idea, had a half-hour workout and taken a twenty-minute walk. That’s after sleeping in late. And yet I persist in thinking of this as a lazy Saturday.
I think, because I give 40 hours a week to The Man, and grab what writing time I can in other wakeful hours in order to pursue a life that doesn’t belong to The Man, that I have trouble with doing Nothing. If I’m not at the office or being social, I wonder why I’m not writing. Re-organizing a bookshelf the other night felt downright restful; I think because it was something with a visible result that didn’t involve staring at a screen.
There’s a technique many screenwriters use where they will lay out their ideas in a series of notecards – dividing up the prospective script by story beats so they can visualize the skeleton of it and see where things are lacking in material or just not connecting up. I’ve never tried it myself because I have this ridiculously self-defeating resistance to adopting the methods of others until I’ve blundered through something myself. I blundered my way into proper formatting and blundered my way into outlining and treatments; now I’m prepared to give this a try.
So last night I went to yon office supply store and picked out a corkboard, pushpins, and a big pile of 3×5 cards. I hung it on the wall, stared at it, and then started filling out cards with the names and summaries of story beats, then tacking them up in a rough order. This started stimulating ideas unbelievably quickly, and by the time I stopped I realized I had already blocked out over half the movie, and I don’t even have a title for it yet. And once again, I find it very refreshing that it’s a working mode that doesn’t involve staring at a screen. It’s right there in the analog universe – all the plot elements, and all the blank spaces that need filling. Whenever I have an idea it’s no trouble to scribble it out and tack it up. I did two more cards this morning without even making up my mind to work.
It’s writing I can do on my feet. When Adam and I work together, he’s the one pacing a mad groove in the floor while I type. Now I can be the pacing one, and get things nice and prepared for the Typing Me to take over when it’s time. This script could get written very quickly if I don’t overthink it, which is the only way I want to write it. This is a shot at a payday – no sense dragging it out.
And that all sounds so good and productive, and yet I still feel like this is a calm, breezy Saturday overall. I like that.