Stop the Insanity

Somewhere out there in the ether is an insane notion that afflicts a great percentage of beginning writers, developing writers, and wannabe writers.

I want to do everything I can to stop the insanity.

Let me explain.

As a working screenwriter, author, coach, and producer, I often get approached by people, most of them sincere, who have ideas. Nothing wrong with that -- you can’t be a writer without them.

But consider the mail I get from people who have ideas. Much of it is of this type:

I’ve got an idea for a really good movie, but I don’t know who to give my idea to. Can you please help me?

This correspondent’s question exemplifies the insanity I’m talking about. How could an idea that exists only in someone’s head be of any value?

The other type of mail I get is from people deluded into thinking that creativity is a process in which an idea forms completely in the mind, and only needs to be copied onto some medium or another to be finished – like the writer below.

Over the past months I have been thinking of a great story in my head, but, like all of my other screenplays, they never get completed. Not because of lack of story or structure, but because I become less interested and less motivated in writing them as time goes on.

Here’s my response: “Thinking of a story only in your head is the crux of the problem you're having. Swimming is not done on the shore, and writing is not done in the head. It's done on the computer screen, or on paper with a pen or pencil.

“It's a delusion to think that an idea in the head has story or structure. Story and structure is too large and complex to be formed and retained in the head, it has to be constructed by writing it down and working with it onscreen or in your notebook or journal. The story and structure will only evolve if the ideas you have in your mind interact with your effort to give those ideas life in some way.”

E. M. Forster, the accomplished British writer summed it up succinctly. “How can I know what I think till I see what I say,” he said.