Inspiration Strikes!
"Do you want it good, or do you want it fast?"
"I want it fast."
That was a pretty common exchange when I used to make movies with my friends back in high school. I wanted my little VHS extravaganzas to be good, but more than anything, I just wanted to make them. So if it came down to getting a scene in the can, or giving the actors a little more time to work out their lines, I erred on the side of haste. After all, when you're in high school, and your cast has to juggle homework, other commitments, college applications, and what-have-you, who knows when you'll be able to get everyone together again to refine a scene. I almost always chose to plow ahead. Sometimes it worked out well. A lot of the time it didn't. Course, there were some fun surprises to be found. Improvised one-liners, happy accidents, and out-of-the-blue comic gems, like the dodgeball sequence above. None of that was planned, but we only had an hour to get that whole scene shot before classes started for the day. Fortunately, the camera was rolling during a comic misfire.
Back in high school I used to doubt my screenwriting ability (rightly so I might add), so I'd ask one of the regular cast members, Mike Coviello, if he could pull some scenes together for whatever movie we were working on at the time. Inevitably he'd fail to get me the pages as fast as I wanted them, and he'd always ask, "Mike, do you want it good, or do you want it fast." Then he'd laugh when I gave the expected answer: "Fast."
In college I switched from production to screenwriting, and though my writing improved, and my ability to fashion scripts with actual structure developed, more often than not, I still preferred a shaky rough draft to a few Swiss engineered finished pieces. I guess it worked okay for me. Over the last two years at RIT I finished 4 television scripts, three feature length screenplays, and a whole stack of poems and short stories.
Then I graduated. That's when I found a whole new way of putting off hard work: Perfectionism. For three years after college, I didn't complete anything. I'd outline, and outline. I'd start out in a fresh notebook, jot down a few ideas in careful, draftsman-like pen strokes. I'd write a page of perfectly formed cursive jibberish, only to tear the page out and copy the whole thing down again if I so much as smudged the ink. I'd do this until my hands cramped up, then I'd move to the computer, where I'd write a scene, then tinker with it, and tinker with it, and tinker with it, until whatever zip the original words once held, has been all but drowned in the slow-drying cement of overworked prose.
If I wasn't rewriting and reworking something to death, I was questioning my basic story ideas and wondering if I'd be better off just starting from scratch. So once the writing wouldn't give up another comma, or allow for another word substitution, I'd hit save, banish that little snippet to some computer file vault, and start the process all over again.
In 2004 I wrote 80 pages of a novel, scrapped it, tried it as a screenplay, then somehow convinced myself that it was okay to let it go.
In 2005 I finally broke the cycle.
As I've said in the past, the book "No Plot, No Problem" played a big part in knocking me free of my little writer's hamster wheel. But more than anything, I think hitting my late-twenties and still finding myself working some truly dreadful jobs, made me realize that I either had to start churning out some material, or stop talking about wanting to write. In 2005 I completed a draft of my first screenplay in four years. Later that year a wrote a draft of a book called "Cinematic Immunity." In 2006 I wrote my first full novel, and later that year I went back to the 80 pages I had set aside in 2004, and found that, rough as they were, I liked what I had been doing. This is how I found my pattern. Outline a little til I feel comfortable with the direction I'm going, then jump in. If it's messy, so what, write until I need to find my way again, then outline some more, then go back to writing. When I finish a draft I put it away for a couple of weeks and either start outlining something new, or go back to the last draft of one of the other projects and rework it again. Repeat, and repeat, until I hit a point where I can't do anything more, and the next natural step is to send it out into the world, and either repeat the process, or start something fresh. Either way, at the end of the process, I always have another rough draft of something rather than a neatly printed plan of attack for a story I'll either rework ad nauseam or banish to electronic oblivion.
Anyway, thats what works for me. This last paragraph is a half-baked mishmash of mixed metaphors, which I guess is sort of perfect for making my point. When an idea hits you, go with it. You might have to wade partway into things before the real inspiration strikes, but if you never get out there, you're just gonna sit around watching your ideas drift by with nothing to show for them in the end.
How to Kindle for Fun and Profit.
I've read a number of titles already, some surprisingly fascinating (including Life's a Campaign and Hardball), some promising, but dull as dishwater (Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life), some inspiring, but dripping with snake oil (The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich), and some delivered in a supremely satisfying 30 seconds, despite being sold out at bookstores across the country (Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope). The experience has been book-like and not at the same time. I also have a number of thoughts on the physical design of the reader itself, all of which I'll be covering in a new Cryptic Bindings web magazine in the coming weeks, but at the moment, I just want to point out two ways in which the Kindle can be an invaluable tool for people who work in publishing.
First is the ability to publish your own books without risking any of your own money. Cryptic Bindings (the publisher of this site) just put out my first novel in November. Doing so cost the publisher many hundreds of dollars, including costs for editing, formatting, cover design, database registration, publishing expenses, distribution, and press releases. The Kindle edition of the book didn't cost Cryptic one penny. Sure, there were the expenses accrued in preparing the manuscript for publication, but this second avenue of release was as simple as preparing the digital files and submitting them through Amazon's digital text platform, where the price of the Kindle edition was set, and within days, the book was available as an electronic edition through the world's biggest online retailer. Depending on the subject of your book, and the the timeliness of its release, the inherent possibilities of such accessible and speedy distribution are mind-boggling.
Coming at the publishing world from another angle, the Kindle also makes for an interesting, and as yet little publicized tool for working your way through manuscripts and the slush-pile. Every Kindle comes with its own email address. By sending a Word or html manuscript file to your_email@kindle.com, you can convert this manuscript to a digital file which is then wirelessly transmitted to your reader, all for the cost of ten cents. Now young Joe Editor can enjoy his trip on the Long Island railroad while carrying only his MacBook Air and his Kindle, loaded up with a dozen manuscripts, rather than lugging roughly, say 3600 sheets of double-spaced paper back and forth from Manhattan to the North Shore. Pretty handy. Good for Joe. Good for his back. And doggone it, good for the environment.
As I said, my thoughts on the Kindle, as well as my reviews of the latest and hottest titles, will soon be available regularly at Digital Dust Jacket, but I've definitely found the Kindle to be an invaluable tool for someone working in writing and publishing. If you haven't done so yet, take the leap and give it a try!