Professionals Hate Writing Too!

I always dance with glee when I hear professional say that they hate writing, too. On the Q&A Podcast Simon Kinberg (writer for X-Men Days of Future Past and The Last Stand) explained his feelings about outlining and he says, "I hate writing. Any excuse to not write a script is golden to me. So outlining is another way to avoid writing a screenplay. It also is very useful because it gives me a roadmap, but it helps take some of the anxiety away from actually writing the script." High five, Simon Kinberg, I'm EXACTLY the same way. In fact, my sister often gives me grief for spending too much time on outlines, but he's right that having a detailed outline is a huge help in taking away the anxiety of writing script pages because all I can think when I look at a blank page is "I don't know what to write, I don't know what happens next," but if I have an outline, I never have to ask that question.

Here's a link to the podcast with Simon Kinberg:

http://www.theqandapodcast.com/2014/06/x-men-days-of-future-past-q.html

By the way, I encourage everyone to listen to Jeff Goldsmith's Q&A podcast about screenwriting. He talks to the writers of all the major films coming out. My favorites are the podcast on Frozen, Iron Man 3, and Les Miserables. You can find these podcasts on his website or download them for free on Itunes.  Have fun!

Good Writing Makes You Want to Scream

I just finished a watching a brilliant 8 hours of the British series Broadchurch. The writing was, of course, excellent but I was stunned by the gorgeous lighting effects and cinematography. Wow! Such beautiful night shots, especially the scene in episode 8 where Hardy and Miller are talking after the big reveal, at night, on the beach, with all of the cliffs lit behind them to frame their shot. How many 10K lights did that take? It was GORGEOUS! I could die of happiness. Of course, I see something like that, and desperately wish that I could write something so brilliant and beautiful and then I get stuck between the pessimistic side of my brain that says, "No, you can't, you aren't that good yet," and the optimistic side of my brain that says, "Yes, of course you could, if you took enough time to do it." My sister LOVES tap dancing, so much that when she watches a brilliant dancer, she too jealous to enjoy the performance. Sometimes when I see something brilliant I think, "You suck," and I curl up in a writerly ball of misery knowing that my writing will never come close. But my optimistic side is gaining a lot of experience points and will soon be strong enough to defeat my pessimistic brain parts once and for all! (But if that happens, I'll have to change the name of my blog...bugger.)

Oh, (hee hee) have you seen the trailer for the American show that's copycatting Broachurch? It's called Gracepoint and David Tennant sounds so funny with a Canadian accent! The whole rhythm and pitch of his voice is weird and it sounds ridiculous! Here's links to both trailers so you can compare:

Broadchurch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOnus6OvViM

Gracepoint:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9IWvbbZPZc

Networking and Ebooks Make My Head Hurt

Whew! I just finished a long weekend volunteering for the Great American Pitchfest and I finally get to sleep in until 7am instead of waking up at 5:30 to beat LA traffic, be on time, and impress everyone at the pitchfest so that they will someday hire me to be their personal assistant so I can start my path to being a famous writer. For 13 hours a day I was the happy, friendly, help-you-as-much-as-I-can, no-task-is-too-small, goody-two-shoes volunteer. Although I enjoy playing that role because I make a lot of friends and I get an avalanche of warm fuzzies for serving others, (high five for warm fuzzies!) it's exhausting. It's fun meeting new people and socializing, it just takes a lot out of me since I'm an introvert. It's funny how most writers tend to be introverts, but their success depends on their ability to be social butterflies and social-media experts. I admit, that part of being a writer is a challenge for me. When the weekend was over and I was ready to put my feet up, my brain immediately started chiding me, "Amy, start emailing all those people you met. Amy, you need to post your pictures on facebook. Amy, for heaven's sake post a blog about your fantastic experience, then send thank you notes to all the other volunteers, and then send emails to all the film executives you met, and then check out the youtube series of the cool actor you met so you can share his videos, and then send, send, send, post post post...AAAHHHHHHH!!!!!! Can I at least sleep in first? and of course my brains say, "NO! You must post! Post until you die!!"

Well, this post is coming two days after the weekend, so obviously I figured out a way to ignore it. (Ha! Take that, you pessimistic old slave driver!) After two days of sleep, looking at my writing projects doesn't make me want to gag anymore and I've been able to get some work done! Yay!!! So now I'm finally going to format the ebook that's been hanging over my head for two months. Reading the Smashwords guide made me want to curl up in a ball and die, various blog posts on e-publishing were a little better, but not by much. And on top of that, my version of MS Word for some reason looks completely different than everyone else's. I don't have a home button or cute little tabs and easy-to-find icons. I have menus, a toolbox, and obscure arrows that love to hide secret menus. It takes me twice as long to reformat because I'm finding MS Word functions embedded deep in my menus. If anyone can tell me how to wave a wand and switch the look of my Word program, please tell me.

Venting-Good for the Soul

Venting. I can do that on a blog, right? I mean, that's what they're for! Millions of people across the globe can rant and rave to their heart's content to a worldwide audience. Although, my kind of complaining is never in the "The world is unfair!" category. I complain because my stories don't work. It's ANNOYING. One of the horrible things about being a professional writer is that you know exactly how badly your stories are written. And you can think of a hundred things that are written better than yours. When you think like that, plunking out page one of a new story is pure torture. But then, you get past the first page, and then you sort of remember that writing can be fun, and it's not so bad anymore. But getting past the hump of the first few pages is why so many people do NOT become writers. You have to decide not to care how bad it is, and that takes GUTS. That proverbial hump is the enemy of all writing. Get past that, and when you take your stuff to writing group you find out, 'Hey! My stuff isn't as bad as I thought!" because you hear stories that have just as many problems as yours and you feel a whole lot better about yourself.

When in Doubt...Add Aliens!

I'm trying to come up with a Television pilot. But I can't tell you what it's about. Writers are awful that way. Unfortunately, sharing all your story ideas on the internet is a great way to go out of business. This makes us writers seem unsocialable and paranoid, like, "No! You can't have my ideas! Stay away!" Kinda lame. But I'm definitely on a trend with aliens. My feature film is about aliens, my TV pilot was like, "hey, let's do this idea...with aliens!" This was inspired by a guest speaker producer from Cartoon Network talk about the series Ben 10 and how the toy companies complained that no kid wants to be an alien, and boys don't like watches. And how many seasons of Ben 10 have aired? At least ten? Fifteen? So yeah, now I'm putting aliens into everything now.

Sequels. Crap.

Ha! You thought I was going to tell you about metaphors, but I didn't!  Ha ha ha! See? that's what evil writers do. They raise your expectations by hinting at things to come, but then they blindside you with something totally different! Unfair huh? Just like cliffhangers. All that anticipation is SO rude. Anyway, down to business-I just saw How to Train Your Dragon 2 and one of the parts that sucks about being a writer is that as soon as you publish something, that means everyone in the world can diss on your material. In other words, you get to feel like dirt when people say that the precious baby that took four years of blood, sweat, and tears to grow look ugly and doesn't deserve to live. But luckily, I don't have to say anything like that about How to  Train Your Dragon 2. It was an awesome movie! In fact, I spent most of the time drooling over how handsome Hiccup had become. As soon as we left the theater I wanted to see parts of it over again. But it wasn't the same speechless awe I felt after seeing the first film. The second movie had a lot more emotional scenes, which was fine, but it stretched out the pace and the part (SPOILER!) when Hiccup is trying to free Toothless from the control of the Alpha dragon just through virtue of their friendship. That part felt a little cliche to me since every time someone in a movie suffers from mind control, if someone loves them enough, you can always snap them out of it. (END SPOILER). In the first movie, the emotional ups and downs were woven tightly into scenes with a lot of natural, organic conflict. I didn't like the villain for the second movie. He was definitely scary, but in the first movie, Hiccup's defeat of the monstrous dragon healed his relationship with his father while showing the entire village that he was amazingly cool. Of course, you can never do an origin story twice, but the climax to the second movie wasn't as triumphant. Also, the tragedy in the middle was a little too much and so I wasn't able to cheer as much as the end. The second movie has a lot more sadness, and not enough joy to balance it out. The first movie had the perfect balance between the tragedy and the joy so that everyone could cheer for the happy ending. Hopefully the original audience has grow up enough to deal with it properly. We hope. Stay tuned next time for what writers mean when they say 'organic.' And don't worry, I'm not trying to trick you this time...no really! I'm not...

I Hate Writing

Writing. Stupidiest job on the planet. You notice that "stupidiest" isn't in the dictionary. I try to be expressive and all I see is the red, red, red of spell check. I'm trying to be creative here, people!! You sit there, staring at a blank screen, and everyone expects Shakespeare to flow out of your fingertips. You know the hardest part? There's an audience in your head. Yeah, you don't have to wait, it's already inside you, just waiting to laugh at all your grammar mistakes, to ridicule your idiotic attempts at figurative language and boo every single word you put on that page. Who would ever want a job as a writer? Yeah. Me. That's who. But I know a lot of people who don't want to be writers, so this blog is for you. All those things like 'sentence fluency' and 'word choice' that goes right over your head gets explained right here, right now so that you'll never have problems with your writing teacher again. Stay tuned for our next post on...Metaphors!!!! What are they? Why are they good writing? Find out next time on ihatebeingawriter.blogspot.com