You Will Come Up With Something

Anxiety.  Writing.  The best of friends!  I have piles of journals that I un-ironically filled with writing about how hard it was to write. 


Why does writing make us so anxious?  I doubt aspiring bridge engineers spend days procrastinating on a bridge design because they’re anxious about if they’re “really engineers.” (Engineers: please let me know if I am wrong about this.)  For me, and I know I’m not unique, there’s a whole mess of different reasons.  Fear of failure and fear of success.  Bad work habits.  Fear of change.  The fear of accessing difficult emotions through your characters.  The fear of moving to Los Angeles.


Most of the time, these anxieties lead to the same place: procrastination town.  There’s plenty of productivity blogs with hacks to beat procrastination and I could write about a bunch myself.  (A few years of therapy is the best “productivity hack” I’ve ever found.)


But I want to point out one reason for writing anxiety that I rarely see mentioned in these places.  Probably because it’s so obvious it sounds almost too dumb to name:


The fear that you won’t be able to come up with anything.


It’s not that you’re worried what you’re going to write is bad (though you’re probably worried about that, too).  You’re worried that you won’t be able to write it at all.  But I promise- you will come up with something.


Last month I was given a writing assignment. Three years ago, I would have freaked out.  I would have cleared my schedule so I had ALL THE TIME to work on it, then thought about whether or not I could actually even do it the entire time, then do it at the last minute.  It would have felt awful.  But this time, I figured it would probably take me a week to complete.  I worked on it for a week.  I finished around when I thought I would, and I handed it in.  I had virtually no anxiety about getting it done.  Why couldn’t I have just felt that way the whole dang time?


Because I didn’t always know that I would come up with something.  Now, I’ve done it enough times to know that I will. 


When bridge engineers want to engineer a bridge, I doubt they’re worried that they’ll be able to “come up with something.”  Because they’re going to come up with a bridge.  The same is true with stories!  But it’s much harder to see stories that way.  Because stories are a little bit magical.


A good story is good precisely because it obscures how it was made. That’s the reason I wanted to make stories in the first place: they seemed like magic!  Like they must have emerged from the head of the author fully-formed.  Writing was impossible because it was literal magic; you had to be a wizard to do it.  


I wonder if there’s some number of stories that you finish and you suddenly get the sense: oh yeah!  A story is like a bridge!  You build it beam by beam.  You need to have certain things to make it structurally sound, and every bridge is a little different so it takes some time to figure that out.  And then you make the bridge pretty or particularly useful or emotionally gratifying by adding fun architectural touches and cool lighting (or, you know, whatever makes bridges exciting).  Is the number three stories?  Ten stories?  For me, it was about eight years of writing, most of the beginning and middle of that time taken up by not writing very much due to anxiety.


Of course experience doing a thing makes doing it easier.  But I do wish someone had said this to me.  You need to sit down and do the work.  Once you finish some stories, you’ll feel more confident that you can do it.  A little bit of that writing anxiety can slip away, making it easier to write, making it less anxiety-producing.  A virtuous cycle.  You will come up with something.

Secret Sauce: Jony Ive

Another episode I wrote for Secret Sauce dropped this week! It’s the second one here. This was my second arc for Wondery, and this time it was all about Jony Ive and Steve Jobs. The research was fascinating- the Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs book does a really compelling job of asking whether or not someone has to be cruel to be a genius. I think the answer is obviously no, of course, and I’m happy that it seems like society has moved away from the answer possibly being yes in the years since the Isaacson book was published. That’s not at all Jony Ives’ deal either- he was kind of a quiet leader, it seems to me. It was a very cool writing challenge for this particular episode, trying to piece together how to keep the narrative interesting when Jony Ive had success after success after success in the years I was writing about. I think it came out nicely! And as always, it was a joy working with the hosts Sam and John, as well as my good friend Marina, who wrote the other episodes this season! Take a listen here.

Secret Sauce: Airbnb

I’ve been working on a new writing adventure in 2021, and I’m so excited that I can finally share it! My good friend Marina and I were hired to write for a new show on Wondery called Secret Sauce. It’s hosted by two young entrepreneurs, and tries to look at successful businesses and figure out the keys to their good fortune.

Let’s just say that I’m not exactly….a savvy businessperson. The cutthroat startup world is definitely interesting, but not something I have any first hand knowledge of. As a writer, I don’t have a ton of experience even working “normal” jobs. So crafting a narrative around a behemoth like Airbnb was really outside of my comfort zone. And you know, I really enjoyed it! It was so interesting to find that almost all the same things that apply to fictional stories still applied. Plus, I always love working in the audio space, which adds another layer of fun challenge to the project. Here’s my first episode, and I think it came out great!

Getting Through That Awkward Phase

I’ve been teaching pilot-writing for a few years.  My approach is generally that writing the script is the best way to learn how to do it.  But I also do some lecturing about structure and character and story.  I have a new thought about why this is inadequate, but why it’s hard to teach around that inadequacy.  Maybe it will help you!

One of the hardest things about writing is simply knowing what your idea is.  And when you do know what it is, getting that idea onto the page clearly is very hard.

On the flip side, really great scenes often disguise what the writer is trying to make clear.  In most scenes, as in real life, characters communicate via subtext and subtlety. 

So screenwriters have to do two things at once: know clearly what their idea is, and communicate this to the audience via textured, interesting subtext. 

As a teacher, unlike as a writer, my job is, at first, to get beginners to write “bad” but very clear scenes.  They’ve got to be able to express what they mean first.  As a long-time sketch teacher (scenes only, no story structure), I know how valuable this is.  Then I have to tell students to stop doing that, and make the scenes have subtext.  And that’s a very difficult pivot!!!  

The second step is confusing after learning to do the first step.  I’ve learned this recently as I’ve now been teaching a few of the same students for more than one class.  I can see their progress! They know what they have to say and they’re saying it!  But I see them getting stuck on this step and psyching themselves out.

It’s true that as you get better at writing, you kind of just do this all at once.  But how to explain that?  The writer part of me wants to say: eh, just do it.  But the teacher part of me isn’t satisfied with that.

I once got advice from a very good writer who said that she does a first draft of a scene where everything that needs to happen happens without subtext, and then she goes back and “makes it good.”  I think I’ve said several times to students, “Make it sparkle!”  “Put icing on the cake!”

But what does “make it sparkle” mean?  Once you get to that step, how do you achieve that on the page?  It’s definitely harder to explain than structure, which is maybe why so many of the big books focus on that instead (books like Save the Cat).  Make the dialogue better? It’s a bit instinctual.  The things that make great dialogue and subtext are things like: understanding your character, understanding human psyches, understanding the poetry of the way a person talks, the poetry of what a person wants, understanding yourself.  Sometimes I want to give useless notes like: go to therapy if you can afford it or live a few more years.  Listen more.  Be more open to the world. “Make them sound different,” is the lazy, easy way of saying that, and it’s maybe the best I can do.  Think like an actor?  That’s more advice than pedagogy.

This is a growing pain in the life of a screenwriter, and my hope is that by even pointing this out, I can help some folks who are in this awkward phase feel better and push through to sparkle-town!  I’ll do more thinking about how to teach “make it sparkle” more clearly!  As of now, all I can think to say is that it’s instinct, it’s fun, it’s adding something surprising and (in comedy) delightful to every scene.  And if you’re still in phase one, getting ideas clearly onto the page, that’s good, too!  You have to learn how to do that first of all.  And a lot of the same things apply: know yourself.  Think about people.  Keep writing. 

Villains

I’ve been thinking a lot about villains this week.  

I’m writing a big fantasy story that needs a great villain.  And I’m completely stuck on it.

As I conceive of him now, my villain is power-hungry.  He wants to enslave humanity.  Simply because he is selfish and wants the power and can do it if no one stops him.

When I explained the villain’s plan to my partner, he said, “Sounds a little Voldemort-y.”  That was not meant as a compliment.

I think right now we tend to value villains with motivations that make sense. 

Malthusianism has been used a lot to justify a villain’s actions lately.  Richmond Valentine in The Kingsmen and Thanos in The Avengers are two examples.  Killing half of the world’s population isn’t the right solution to climate change, but you can logically understand how these villains might arrive at this conclusion.

The greatest villain in recent memory is Black Panther’s Killmonger.  At times you wonder if he isn’t the hero.  His anger is justified.  How could he not be angry?

For years, I have believed this to be true- the more the audience can understand why the villain is doing what they’re doing, the better and more interesting the story.  Even Dan Brown summarizes this succinctly in his Masterclass (I admit I am a Masterclass dabbler): “Every villain needs to have his own morality.  If a villain spends part of the novel killing people, you need to give him or her believable reasons for doing so.  Make the reader understand exactly what desperation or belief has driven him to it.”

Voldemort represents a cliched villain to my partner because Voldemort doesn’t have a consistent reason for what he’s doing or what he wants.  He wants power because he wants it.  He wants to construct differences in those weaker than him to consolidate that power.  He sits in dark castles and plots how to take over the world.  Muahahahaha. 

But what if selfish, greedy, purely “evil” villains are the only thing that make sense to me now?  There is a pure, hungry evil in the world, and it is far scarier to me than a logical villain.

I didn’t viscerally understand this five years ago, but I see now that the fight against evil is never over and that the opponent cannot be logically reasoned with.  Power is the belief.  I don’t need to understand why the racist, capitalist villain does racist things.  They are not justifiable.  It’s not based in something psychological that their parents did to them when they were kids.  The system we live in produces some selfish people and that system helps them consolidate power by oppressing others and that is evil.*

Do justified villains and purely evil villains come in and out of fashion depending on how close we are to the precipice of totalitarianism?  I suppose Sauron would say yes.

I’m worried that if I make my villain a bigoted, power-hungry, selfish monster that he will read cliched, or one-dimensional, or hack.  But right now, that feels like the only villain I can write.  Has anyone else been struggling with their villain?  Do you think we’ll see a change in our villains to more pure evil in the coming years?  

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*(Killmonger was such a great villain because he knew this.  He may belong in his own very special villain category.  I hope one day I will be a good enough writer to find a villain even nearly as good.)