Gotta go fast

Ready, set, write!

As I promised myself in last week’s newsletter, I did in fact manage to get through a draft of the project I’ve currently been rewriting. But, as I detailed in my post “On Rewriting On and On,” my process tends to be extremely iterative and so this week I’ve been doing another pass over the script to fix everything I didn’t fix (or broke) last time. And I always have one big idea at the last minute that sort of answers “Why I’m making the movie” and that’s usually something I then have to kind of use as a lens to look over the whole thing one last time.

As a result, this week’s newsletter was slept on. I told everyone I’d send them the rewrite by the end of the week! Cut me some slack! I’m on a (self-imposed) deadline.

So now I’m stuck cramming late at night to meet not one, but two, self-imposed deadlines. If that isn’t just classic “writer stuff,” I don’t know what is. When will we learn? Never self impose a deadline!

It’s a good reminder though, of one of the key skills that just about any and every writer should have in their arsenal, which is… speed!

Mister Gotta Go Fast himself, Sonic the Hedgehog

Pardon the digression, but, there’s a scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in which he tips his cap down on a noisy plane flying over Tibet with a noisy showgirl and simply… falls asleep. As someone who could never fall asleep when he was younger, I always thought it was very cool and very enviable that Indy could simply kick back and saw logs, even on a cargo flight with a goat nearby. He’s not precious about getting a comfy bed in a cozy room with the thermostat set. He’s an explorer. And treasure plunderer. And antifa scholar.

In many ways, this is just like being a writer. Okay, so writing is less cool, certainly. But, this lack of preciousness is one of the key skills a writer can develop. I would argue that is essential that as a writer you be able to do it anywhere, at any time, and to do it fast. When you’re on set and an actor is asking you “What is the other person on this phone call actually saying? Can someone feed me their lines so I can react?” you may have to take a pencil and paper and hunch over on an apple box and write that dialogue while the entire crew stare at you, waiting. Purely hypothetical thing that definitely hasn’t happened to me! You might get to the last scene in the movie and realize… this just isn’t working for some reason, and everyone will look over at you with a kind of… “What should we try?” in their eyes. And when that sort of thing happens, you need to solve the problem, and solve it fast.

If you want to be a professional writer, the key is to think of it like a profession. Sure we sometimes have our golden days, our days of great inspiration and passion, but, like a lot of jobs, you also sometimes show up to work hung over, or in a bad mood, or after you spilled coffee on the train there. And you don’t get to… wait until a day you’re feeling more inspired. You just have to do the job. Inspiration doesn’t strike. You have to grind your way through until inspiration happens to find you.

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” — Pablo Picasso

Did he really say that? I don’t know. Google says so. If you look it up and find out he didn’t, I apologize. But some of his sketches do look like he worked fast.

I took a class in college called “Late Night Comedy” (I went to NYU, okay? It’s all made up there) and that class perhaps more than any other I took felt like it was actually preparing me to be a working writer. Our teacher worked at one of the late night shows, and would come in after work to teach and take out the newspaper, assign each of us an article from the front page and say “Ok, write 20 jokes about that article. You have 20 mintues.” There is no better way to get 18 really bad jokes!

But, if you pushed through and busted your ass you’d usually get 1-2 decent ones. He’d of course then punch them up, he was a pro and we were 20, but still! You couldn’t wait to be inspired. And you certainly couldn’t count on having an interesting article! I was in college during the 2008-09 financial crisis. Most of the front page headlines were about subprime mortgages and fiscal bailouts. But that’s the work, whether it’s comedy or drama. Showing up and putting things down until something decent shows up. And at least within the realm of late night comedy, if you have an entire team of people doing their work (and fast) you can collect those 1-2 decent ones from each person and end up with an entire monologue for the host.

If you’re looking to improve your craft (and improve your career) one of the best things you can do for yourself is learn to go faster. Because there isn’t much we can control in the arts. All we really have control over is quality and quantity. Quality is elusive, and hard to teach, but quantity… that’s a muscle. And you can train a muscle.

It’s also useful to think about a career in the arts as not that different from a career as a salesperson. Not inspiring, I know, but hear me out. You are coming up with little ideas all the time, and then approaching people saying “hey would you like to buy this?” In sales, the number one way to make more sales is: approach more people. But… you can only approach so many people if you only have one idea. And besides, what if someone buys the idea and then decides they don’t really like it anymore, and are going to just delete it and never mention it again and write it off at a corporate level? Well, in that case, it pays to come up with as many ideas as you can, that way it’s unlikely that they would ALL be deleted by reckless CEOs. At least some will slip through the cracks, right?

Why go fast, you might ask? Better than being slow, I’d say.

So while I started this from a place of “oh shit, I’m jammed,” I hope this quick little diatribe is inspiring to you all out there to pick up the pace! Learning to overcome inertia is, as an artist, one of the greatest skills you can exercise.

What do you guys think? Any other benefits to going fast? Or do you like going slow? Remind me of the fable of the tortoise and the hare in the comments below.

After going fast, go to sleep.