I got an email from a person about the difficulty of writing:

 It feels overwhelming to sit and do. Writing is daunting; mostly I sit and stare...

 It is. One does. I do.

I myself have been a writer for over two months now, and I’ve never gotten past how difficult writing can be sometimes.  Most of the time? One thing I’ve learned along the way is that a lot of writers feel that way, and they love to write about THAT. Writing which I love to read, and I do, because maybe somebody out there somewhere will have a solution for me. I’m kind of addicted to reading what other people say about writing. I have shelf upon shelf of books that contain all kinds of writing about all kinds of writing, and I’ve read them all, and reading them has done one good thing and one bad thing for me.

The good thing is, it has slowly, over time, with extensive research and study, upon reflection and with careful consideration, become clear that I am not the only one who has difficulty with writing. My difficulty might be worse than other people’s, probably is, certainly I feel it more personally, it can’t be as hard for them as it is for me, but they have difficulties too. And they have thought about those difficulties, and the craft, in ways that fascinate me endlessly.

The bad thing is, all that time I spent reading about writing was time I spent reading not writing. Good excuse!

 As it turns out, the only way I can get to writing sometimes is to accept that it’s hard, and do it anyway. I remember years ago listening to an interview with Jerry Seinfeld, and he mentioned something that happened early in his career when he was having trouble just sitting down and writing:

One day I was watching these construction workers go back to work. I was watching them kind of trudging down the street. It was like a revelation to me. I realized these guys don’t want to go back to work after lunch. But they’re going. That’s their job. If they can exhibit that level of dedication for that job I should be able to do the same. Trudge your ass in.

 He’s done okay since then. 

Sometimes I feel like I don’t know exactly what I want to write. Or I do, but I don’t know exactly HOW to write about it. So why bother sitting down to do it, if I’m not inspired?

I can’t control when I’m going to be inspired. All I can control is whether I’m ready when it comes, and if I’ve decided to watch TV for a while, or doomscroll on Twitter, or bake marzipan bites for later, or check my email, I’m actively pushing it away. I’m not saying I’m good about this, but I do TRY to put myself in position to be ready when it comes. 

First thing I learned in tennis… class? workshop? symposium?… was “grab the racket like you’re shaking hands with it, bend your knees, then with your other hand grab it by the neck. There. That’s the ready position. Now if somebody serves, you’re ready to hit it back.” So whatever that is for writing, I try to do that every day. I don’t. But I try.

Grab the computer by the neck like you’re shaking hands. Wait for the serve. Hit it back.

Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

That one was Jack London. Also did well.

So:

1)    Understand it’s difficult, and not only for you, so it’s okay.

2)    Do it anyway.

3)    Don’t wait to be inspired. 

And finally, consistency. I’ve recently started following a guy named Scott Myers on Twitter. He’s a screenwriter who blogs extensively about writing, and I enjoy reading his stuff, both  because he has some good insights and because it helps me avoid actually writing (addicted!).

 Here’s something he wrote that I’ve been thinking about a lot.

I like all of it, but the number that stands out to me is 1. Had I been writing one page a day just since I moved to Hollywood, I would have close to 6000 pages by now! How many pilots? (200) How many screenplays? (66.6 repeating) And obviously it's more complicated than that, because I've been working a lot of that time... but not all of it, by any means, so still, a lot of wasted time. That one page a day adds up, and I have let lots of time go by.

 It's definitely a struggle. Commit to the struggle. 

I got another email, just the other day, this one from a friend who writes wonderful stories about his childhood in the 50’s in the deeply rural west of Ireland (he left there as a young man and moved to London for a while, and then he and I arrived in America the same week, as it turns out). His wife of many, many years died last year, and it hit him pretty hard. And that sadness clearly hasn’t left him. His grief is not gone. But, he told me, the writing helps:

My escape is the stories. While I’m writing, I’m there at a time when I could do anything. 

The act looms so large in prospect, is so easy to avoid, but often when I sit down to do it (though not always by any means), I look up and it’s four hours later and I haven’t had a care in the world except the page in front of me, and I know a little more.

I’m contradicting myself. It seems I’m saying the writing itself isn’t hard, it’s the sitting down. And sitting down is easy.

So maybe ultimately the best answer is just let gravity work? Wow. Writing is suddenly so easy.

See? Now I know a little more.

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. 

That one was Louis L’Amour, and I like that one enough that years ago I scribbled it won on a scrap of paper and stuck it on a bulletin board in my office in New York, and I still have it.  Somewhere. I can’t find it right now. That New York office was great. I gotta try to recreate that out here. Maybe I can do that instead of write...

By the way, I get the sense that nobody ever told L’Amour it was okay to turn the faucet off once in a while. I mean, geez Louise, Louis, not every thought needs to be a novel.

I kid because I am jealous, and he is dead.

I’ve worked in a bunch of writers’ rooms, on a lot of unsuccessful shows (by which I mean shows that lasted one season and were then cancelled), and some failed pilots. By the way, most shows are unsuccessful, and most pilots fail ( in TV,  luckily, not airplanes). I’ve also been fortunate enough to work on a couple of really successful shows.  Now let’s say you’re successful too. You get hired to work on a TV show. You’re going into a writers’ room for the first time, getting paid to be a writer. Dream job! You are not asking me for advice before you start, but if you did I would tell you stuff like the following:

1)   “Shut the fuck up. Shut. The Fuck. UP. Just shut the fuck up. Shut the. Fuck. Up.”

I took a writing class over 20 years ago from I guy I love and admire, who has worked on a lot of stuff and is really smart. On the last day of class, somebody asked him about the one thing he would say to people going into a writers’ room for the first time, and that was his response. I’m not paraphrasing.

This is Tad.

 Here’s the thing. You got the job because you’re smart, and probably funny, and maybe extremely verbal (maybe not, but that’s okay!). Oh, and let’s not forget you went to Blickmell with Tad Fuffton, but leave out the “who you know” part, because maybe that got you there but now it’s on you. But you have all these things going for you. And you’re coming into a new situation and you feel the urge to show off your funny or your interesting. 

Don’t. Just wait. Your skills will come out. You’ll get your opportunity to shine. But much better if you first figure out stuff like whose opinion matters (obviously the showrunner, but there’s always a pecking order in the room- sometimes it’s people with more experience, sometimes it’s people who are funnier, sometimes it’s people who just have that thing that Ripley had where people are gonna listen to them no matter what), what plays and what doesn’t in the room, what’s already been suggested, how people pitch in this particular room, and how everybody in the room works together. 

Because the room is an organism, and you’re a liver transplant. You’re gonna help the organism, but it will take a while for the organism to adapt to you and allow you to help. Let the process happen.

And obviously it’s different when everybody in the room is brand new to the room, but not by much. Shut the fuck up.

2)   Know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.

A room full of funny people making each other laugh is a blast. It’s what I love about coming to work every day.  At any moment anybody can come up with a great piece of comedy, a great joke, a bit, that will make me laugh as hard as anything ever has. But sometimes people fall into the trap of just following the bit, instead of focusing on what needs to be done in that moment. Yes, it’s fun to have fun. But there’s also a budget, and a schedule, and lots of things have to get done by certain times.  Nothing is more frustrating to me when I’m running a room than having people around who won’t stop doing bits and riffs and make-a da funny to focus specifically on helping me fix whatever the problem is at the moment. And yes, part of that is probably jealousy because I too wanna just fuck around but I can’t. The job is about making the funny, but it’s also about solving problems. And sometimes the second is more important than the first.  Get good at knowing when to focus (and still being funny!).

3)  Pitcher’s got a rubber nose, wiggles when he throw-ohs.

 Learn how to pitch your ideas, and your jokes. Like medicine, it’s an art and a science.. You can have good answers, but you also have to know HOW to put them out there. I’ve seen people with terrible ideas get their stuff into a script just because they were so fun to watch while they were pitching, and people with brilliant stuff die as the words were coming out of their mouths. Figure out what works for you. The best analogy I can think of for pitching is... well, it’s pitching. Pat Neshek and Max Scherzer are totally different stylistically, but they both get people out. And don’t even get me started on the late Mark “The Bird” Fidrych.

Bonus advice, given to me before my first day in a writers’ room in the early part of the 21st century by my good friend Andrew Secunda (not sure who gave it to him): when you are pitching a joke in dialogue, always repeat the line or two before the punchline, so people get the set-up and the punchline. It also gives people a moment to focus on your voice, where you are in the script, the context, all the stuff they need to really hear the punchline. One time after I did a TV spot (yes, I’ve been on TV) I complained to a much better comic than myself about how my first joke didn’t go over to the studio audience as well as it usually did in the clubs. He said, “That’s because they spend the first 30 seconds trying to figure out why you’re wearing THOSE shoes.” Let everybody figure out why you’re wearing those shoes before you hit the punchline.

4) If you don’t have anything nice to say…

 When you do start pitching, don’t just say stuff just to say stuff. Put some thought into it.  Any solution to a problem is not necessarily a good solution, and if you’re throwing out whatever you can possibly think of you’re taking up bandwidth in everybody’s thought process. I’ve known people who feel like part of the ROOM’S brainstorming process is to share THEIR INDIVIDUAL brainstorming process with the room. Where could the two main characters hold their secret meeting about murdering the Chancellor of the Exchequer? “They meet in the throne room, in the scullery, out by the battlements, in the stables, on a hunt, by the princess’s mattress, in the library...” Not only is this not helping me or anyone, it is making me unable to go through my own ideas. See number 1, above! Those are all halfway decent possibilities for where to plan an assassination (if it’s a Chancellor of the Exchequer it’s not mere murder), but what are the pros and cons of each? I can literally name places all day. Think a little. Earn your check. Show us why you’re here.

Of course, the flip side of this (there’s always a flip side) is don’t not say anything. Sometimes people shut the fuck up long enough to know what’s going on, they know when to focus on the work and they do, they know what their individual pitching style is (what’s gonna work for them, and of course that’s something you only get better at if you do it a lot, like Crossfit, or the tuba, or sex, maybe), they’re not just saying stuff to say stuff, but they don’t say anything. Take a chance, even with an idea that might not be the right one- it might push the room in a different direction, open things up, or even make people realize that because that is a bad idea they need to go in a completely opposite direction. That’s all helping.

Some of these things might feel contradictory. They are. Tough shit. Life is messy.

 5) If you’re gonna eat chips, don’t eat them straight out of the bag.

Crunching is one thing, but crinkling? No.

Good luck, and happy writing!