Writer's Block
by Mark Evanier
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 6/13/97
Comics Buyer's Guide
About fifteen years ago, a very fine, very successful writer asked me to his home to discuss a project. He had created and/or produced a number of hit comedies in his day. We'd worked together on a show which, alas, did not fall into the "hit" category but I was still honored to see my name in the same credit-roll as his. He was bright, he was honest, and he was very respectful of the creative energies of others.
So when he said he had a show and wanted to involve me, I said yes. You would have too, if you'd known this man. He sat me down and, wasting little time on preliminaries, told me how his new venture had come about.
About a year earlier, he had heard that one of the networks had made a holding deal with that wonderful comic actor, Jack Weston. A "holding deal" meant that they were paying him not to go elsewhere while they tried to locate a project to star him. My friend had a semi-autobiographical idea for a show that was absolutely perfect for Weston so he called up the network and "took" (as they say) a meeting.
He described the idea at that point and I loved it. So did the network the day when he told it to them. They made a deal with this writer-producer to write-produce a pilot and he went off to tackle the first half of that task.
And that's when the trouble started.
My friend, the seasoned writer-producer, was blocked. He couldn't write it. He had the idea, he loved the idea, he'd lived the idea…but when he sat at the typewriter, nothing came out. On the rare occasions when he wrote a few pages, they'd be torn and trashed within hours.
Weeks passed. Months. His agent got him an extension from the network. Still, nothing was written.
It was maddening. Often when writers become blocked — and it happens to most of us, sooner or later, usually sooner — it's because they don't know where to go, don't know their own stories. But my friend knew his story. He could talk it out eloquently, tossing off funny dialogue and clever situations. He just couldn't put it on paper and, yes, he tried dictating it all into a tape recorder and having someone else transcribe it. Didn't work. Nothing worked.
There are some writers who aren't the least bit troubled when the muse deserts them. Usually, they are folks who write as but one of several things they do, so when the well goes dry, they can switch to Plan B until inspiration returns. Sadly, for some, it doesn't return — but at least, they have that other occupation. They aren't stuck, as some of us are, wracking our brains, smiting our foreheads and pacing the walls, feeling utterly and irrevocably useless.
When writing is all you do with any competence, not writing creates a massive hole in your life. It's easy to tumble into that hole and find yourself unable to climb out.
There are psychologists who treat blocks, usually by addressing the underlying troubles in ones' life. If you're depressed about your relationship with a loved one, or carrying around some massive amount of parent-induced guilt, it's probably real easy not to be able to put five words together.
That stuff, I can't begin to discuss here. But I have found, in the twenty-seven years I've been making a living doing this, that there are ways of beating back the simpler strains.
An important consideration is this: Are you blocked on everything or just on one project? I've known writers who get stopped on page 113 of a novel and they just stay there for weeks or months, writing nothing, staring at page 113 until it starts staring back. For me, getting stranded on page 113 usually means I took a wrong turn on 112 or 111 or even much earlier.
Go back and tear up some pages. Or if you're writing on a computer, move the last section to a separate file (just in case) and try it again.
If that doesn't work, then you might have the problem I mentioned earlier: You don't know where to go next because you really and truly don't know where you want to go.
You think you know what you're writing about. You possibly have fooled an editor or a producer…you certainly have fooled yourself. But really, deep down, a piece is absent from the puzzle. You need to stop and reassess what you're attempting to write. One of my heroes, playwright Alan Jay Lerner, once said that he sometimes got through five or six drafts before he figured out what he was really trying to say. Only then did the meaningful work begin.
In such times, it sometimes helps to be able to put the work aside and turn to something else, if only for a few hours. I usually have several projects in the works at any given time and, to the extent practical, I try to make them as divergent from one another as possible. That way, one can more easily serve as recess from another.
If you don't have another project, create one. The best cure I've ever found for fast, fast, fast relief of Temporary Writers' Block is what I call Evanier's Three-Page Self-Indulgent Diversion. What you do is to put the pressing composition on hold and write something for yourself and the waste basket. Three pages is usually more than sufficient, though it is sometimes so much fun that you'll want to go longer.
Pick out a subject that interests only you and write something childish and self-absorbed. Forget about grammar, forget about spelling, and for God's sake, forget about ever showing it to anyone else. Write the story of how someone you hate met an untimely but well-deserved death. Or select someone after whom you have secretly lusted and write the tale of how that unattainable person came to you one night, confessing to reciprocal lust and begging you to have your way with them. The more immature, the better.
Once you're done, you can throw it away. The idea is just to prime your pump by writing something, casting aside whatever inhibitions are freezing up your typing fingers lately.
(Relevant Aside: A glamour photographer once told me that a favorite trick he had, for when a model "froze" before his camera, was to get the subject to just make funny and grotesque faces for one roll of film. He pulled out an album of some of the world's most beautiful women, crossing their perfectly-mascara'ed eyes and pulling out the corners of their expertly-painted lips. "Once they've done that," he explained, "they stop worrying so much about how they come across in print, and they can start looking like human beings.")
A lot of writers get way too tense at the keyboard. It's like some immense disaster will befall them if they write a few pages that aren't up to some standard. They forget that paper is cheap and that there's no harm in wasting a little of it, now and then.
(Another Relevant Aside: First time I ever took an art class in college, the instructor said, "I don't watch to catch anyone here conserving on paper. Fill up as much of it as you can.")
Thanks to word processing, it isn't even environmentally unsound to write a lot of stuff you toss out. You just delete it from your hard disk.
(Yet Another Relevant Aside — last one, I promise: A friend of mine, a noted artist, told me that when he freezes up on an assignment, he'll just haul out his sketchbook and doodle. He has this old, shabby book of cheap drawing paper and he'll just mentally put aside the crucial project and sketch anything that comes to mind or into his line of sight. It's important, he says, that he do this in the dog-eared sketchbook; if he tries to draw the same thing on quality illustration board, it feels like it's Real Artwork and he tightens up.
Doing it in the book tells his drawing hand that this is not for keeps, that it will be held to no particular standard, and that it's okay to screw up. "It keeps me drawing," he explained. "And sometimes, something emerges on the page that inspires me to get back to the deadline job, or maybe gives me an idea for its design.")
I don't know which (if any) of these things might have helped my friend write his Jack Weston pilot. By the night he called me to his home, he had already given up on it. But that was okay with the network, because they'd already given up on both him and Jack Weston.
It seems that, while my friend was agonizing over his story, things "happened" at the network. When things "happen" at a network, it means only one thing: somebody got fired. In this case, many somebodies got fired.
New somebodies were brought in to run the Comedy Development division. It is a near-inviolate rule of Hollywood that when you're hired to replace someone, your first order of business is to kill all of your predecessor's projects. When my friend's agent inquired, he learned that the new honchos had no interest whatsoever in this or any show starring Jack Weston. They had, in fact, allowed their option on Weston to lapse. The agent tried to rouse some interest in the idea, with or without Mr. Weston attached, both at that network and all the others. There was none.
"It's never going to happen," he told my blocked comrade. "But they have to pay you for it if you hand it in. Just write anything that resembles a pilot script and send it to them so we can get your money."
My friend found the news curiously liberating but he still couldn't put anything on paper, which is where I came in. He needed someone else to write the pilot script — a script which had virtually no chance of ever seeing the light of a Sony Trinitron.
He was not asking me to ghost for him. He'd called up the network and asked, "Is it okay if I have this kid named Mark Evanier work on this with me?" They said sure. They didn't care. He could have brought in a rhesus monkey to do the job if it knew how to use an IBM Selectric. They may even have preferred he not tie up the time of a writer they respected.
He offered me a very fair deal to write the script and to put both our names on it. That was not an unfair credit line either, for we spent the rest of the evening with him talking through the story in very complete form. I scribbled it all down and, just as he was walking me to the door, I said I'd send a finished script over in a week or so.
"To the network, right?" he said.
I said, "No, I'll send it over to you so you can read it, see if you think it can be improved, maybe add a few — "
"No, no, I'm sure it'll be fine. Send it over to the network."
"But your name's going on this, along with mine," I responded. "Don't you want to even read it?"
"Why?" he asked. "No one else will."
I knew he was right, which is why the script became maybe the hardest thing I've ever had to write. His "block" was contagious — in my case because I simply could not get motivated to write something that would never be filmed.
All of us in TV and movies, or who want to be in TV and movies, write things that don't get made. Some of them are even less likely to happen than this one was; at least, this script would see the inside of a network office, which is more than most do. But all the time I wrote, it was right there in my face that no matter what I did, no matter how good or bad the words were, no actors would ever speak them, no audience would ever hear them.
Even with all he had given me, it still took forever. Finally, after much pain and suffering — and one or two of those self-indulgent diversions — I got it done. I called my friend and asked, "You sure you don't want to see it first?"
He answered, "No…just send it over so they'll send us our checks." I gathered from his tone that he never wanted to hear about this story again.
I called the messenger service to pick up the script and I put a copy into a manila envelope. But before someone came for it, I had an idea — probably my best of the whole project. I took the script out and removed page three.
I picked page three because, first of all, it was early enough in the script that, if anyone read any of it, they'd get at least that far. I also picked page three because its absence would be obvious. There was a huge jump in the continuity between the bottom of page two and the top of page four. I just wanted to see if anyone at the network would call up to request the missing page and, of course, no one ever did. My friend got his check, I got my check and that was the last I ever heard of the idea for Jack Weston.
Oddly enough, though I'm usually pretty good about keeping every draft of everything I write, my files seem to not have a copy of this script. I do, however, have page three.
Not a bad little page, really. If the rest of the script was this good, the network really missed out on something.
And if I'm ever writing a script that needs a page three, I'm set.