Put yourself in turnaround

You are allowed to stop working on things

There's been this pattern in my own personal career where I work on an original idea for a screenplay for a long time, try my best to crack it, get 85% of the way there, and then... can no longer see the thing clearly and have to quit and move on to something else. Sometimes that's because I can tell I'm putting too much time into something that's not going to get me paid anytime soon, sometimes it’s because something more exciting or time sensitive comes my way, but what it usually boils down to is that I am sick and tired of banging my head against the wall with increasingly diminishing returns.

The first several times it felt like a real failing. Like I’d screwed up and used my time badly, and then like I was a quitter for not completing the thing.

But, it's happened enough times at this point with abandoned projects ranging from TV Pilots (several) to feature films (also several) to plays (you guessed it... several) that I no longer panic when I can feel it happening.

This type of thing happens at the film studios all the time -- or used to, when they developed original movies -- something that never quite gelled would be put into "turnaround." A polite word for... "let's just table that one, huh?" Sometimes it would happen because executives lost faith, sometimes because the project got too expensive, and sometimes (as was skewered on the premiere of Apple TV’s The Studio this week) simply to stop anyone else from ever making it.

This show is very funny, very true. Loved seeing Marty get a great storyline.

When it wasn’t happening as a spiteful power move, artists would be allowed to in theory try to get someone else to come in and save the movie by buying it out from the first studio, which did in fact happen... sometimes. There are plenty of very famous movies that were at one time put into turnaround because their original studios got cold feet: Home Alone, Star Wars, The Matrix. Movies that require a vision. [I'm pulling these examples from an interesting Scott Meyers article about the movie Draft Day coming out of turnaround]

In the case of working on something alone, on your computer, there isn't usually any cavalry coming from another studio to help save the project. So you are left instead with the tricky decision of... do I keep banging away at this one, or do I move on to the next thing?

I write all this in an attempt to demystify and destigmatize something that I haven’t really seen much writing about: you can and sometimes should quit.

There is a natural life-cycle to any creative endeavor, one I’ve seen become something of a meme that I’d never actually seen attributed to its original author.

This is a slide from Adam Grant’s Ted Talk which I have never actually watched.

It’s become a meme because it feels true! I’ve seen a bunch of people co-opt it and repost it over the years. I particularly like this a TIMELINE though, because I do think that more than anything else the thing that is primarily changing throughout is TIME.

And so over the years, I have found myself bailing at some point in the “this is crap” phase of the life cycle on things. And I have gotten better at shortening / skipping over the “I am crap” phase. I think this kind of friction is common. And the only solutions are… powering through, or… not.

What I would like to propose is this:

Creativity is not about forcing.

When you encounter the “I need to force my way through this phase…” perhaps there is an alternative. Perhaps, you can instead…

Do nothing.

That’s right. Do nothing. Stop pushing. Stop forcing. Stop trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. Don’t do it. Save the draft. Put it into a literal or metaphorical folder, and then… forget about it.

The longer you can forget about it, and the more wholly you can really genuinely forget, the more room you will be creating in your mind for literally anything else.

Scientific research has proven (over and over) that rats dream about running through mazes. Meaning the subconscious mind is always running, and always using dreams to try to synthesize and solve problems that the conscious mind encounters in waking life. This is the reason that great ideas tend to come to people in the shower, or while driving. The conscious mind is no longer engaged, and the subconscious is now actively doing its job instead — solving the problem by not thinking about it.

If you are falling out of love with something you are working on, if it’s starting to feel like pulling teeth to get more notes and make more edits and you are beginning to lose your ability to see forest for the trees… might I suggest, putting it in turnaround.

Let it go. Forcing creates friction and we don’t want friction. We want subconscious problem solving! Will the subconscious solve all your problems? No. Will it save all the projects you put into turnaround? Also no. But I promise you that some of those projects will later come back to you with a renewed, “you know, that one wasn’t that bad, maybe I know what to do with it now.”

I’m saying all this because this week I picked up one of those projects — a spec script that I started noodling on in May 2022 and have picked up and put down several times now over the last few years.

It’s a new genre for me, and a bit of a challenge to grow creatively.

I’ve gone through several drafts, and several wrong turns, but there was something about coming back to it after months away that allowed me to skip over some of the “I suck this sucks” and come back to it refreshed and perhaps with some new insights that I didn’t have to work on — my subsconscious got to work on them instead. So while I was hating it last fall when I last looked at it, right now I’m in “This is awesome” territory? Feels nice! I’ll keep you posted on how long that lasts.

Anyway, off to go effortlessly (and without any emotional turmoil whatsoever) go finish rewriting this movie.