How to power through writer’s block
Penguin December 19th, 2007
I read this roundtable with a few feature screen writers the other day. The writers taking part were (pictured from left): Ben Affleck (who wrote “Gone Baby Gone” with Aaron Stockard for Miramax), Ronald Harwood (Miramax’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and New Line’s “Love in the Time of Cholera”), Diablo Cody (Fox Searchlight’s “Juno”), Paul Haggis (director and screenwriter of Warner Independent’s “In the Valley of Elah,” from a story co-written with Mark Boal) and David Benioff (Paramount Classics/DreamWorks’ “The Kite Runner”).
One quote that particularly stuck out was the following:
Harwood: I was very lucky. When I was writing novels, I knew Graham Greene, and he gave me the best piece of advice ever given to any writer. He said, “Always stop when it’s going well.”
Cody: Because you’ll feel compelled to return to it?
Harwood: No, because you know what to return to. So you don’t have those sleepless nights.
That’s a wonderful idea. To stop when the writing is just flowing because you have a sense of direction and purpose to where the script is taking you. So, when you come back, you know exactly where to pick up. This should also help with the cyclical aspect of writer’s block.
Writer’s block can come from being creatively drained, writing yourself into a corner, or just sheer laziness. Each of these has their own issues, but by forcing yourself to sit and write, you can usually just blow through these things and end up on the top of the cycle.
I haven’t tried this myself yet, but I think it’s a great idea. You still need the discipline to sit and write and to ignore the distractions of email, IM, and phone calls, to really get in the flow.
I’m interested to hear people who have tried this and its results in the comments.
- Penguin
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