Koala Man, Moon Girl, Grey's Anatomy

A new Writers Panel ep + Shane Black on process

In today’s new Writers Panel episode, Benji Samit & Dan Hernandez (creators, Koala Man, Ultra-Violet and Black Scorpion), Steve Loter (Marvel's Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur; Kim Possible), and Felicia Pride (Grey's Anatomy; Queen Sugar) discuss juggling multiple projects, conveying passion for material, training people how to treat you, and knowing your worth.

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Black Ops

Looking through Writers Panel transcripts for last week’s newsletter about finding your process, I came across part of a conversation I had with screenwriter Shane Black in 2016 that distilled or expanded upon a lot of the ideas I discussed.

Black is the writer behind the Lethal Weapon films, and writer/director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Nice Guys, and Iron Man 3, which I really like. You can hear the entire 90-minute conversation with Shane here, but below is the selection pertinent, and helpful, to finding your process:

Here’s what it comes down to, I think: everyone has their routine.

What I’ve found is effective, from a standpoint of process… is to block out a piece of time. Give yourself a week. You may waste the first two days, but you’ve got four more or five more left. That's the point.

Also, I find something really, powerfully effective about making every day the same. You get up, and you make your coffee, you eat the eggs, you sit down. You take last night’s pages and go through them again: the twenty-four hour test. You make some corrections, you set them aside. You take your outline and you start a scene. You stop, you walk the dog, you come back. You look at the corrections again, they make sense, now you type those in and make them neat. Now go back to the scene. Finish the scene; it’s rough, it's on a typewriter, transfer it to the computer. Now it’s lunch. Ok. “You know what? I wanna watch that show in the afternoon. This is my hour to watch the show.” Go outside now, pace around, smoke two cigarettes, go back in. Ok, now it’s six o’clock at night. Finish up, make your corrections, tidy the scene, stick it in the box; don’t look at it again. I’m gonna look at it in the morning because that’s my process.

Every day you get up and you do the same thing, the next day and every day. And what happens after two or three days is you get momentum. It becomes routine. I’m not flailing. I know what comes next. I’m not just swiping in the dark here. It’s a process that becomes problem-solving instead of fear. That, to me, is what writing is. Because I’m terrified when I look at the blank page. I’m so fearful.

And yet, every once in a while, in the middle of that I’ll say, “I can't do this. I’m a fraud, I’m a fraud, I’m a fraud. What if he says this here? I don’t even know... well, I guess he could say that. And this character says… wait a minute, that’d be good if he said that.” And what happens is you just do it until your mind is distracted, until it finds something in the moment that’s temporarily more interesting than your own fear.

You’re afraid, afraid, afraid and, then you get distracted and your mind will latch onto something. And now you get that wonderful place where, instead of fearful flailing, you’re in the land of problem-solving. Instead of “Can I do this?” it’s like, “Fuck, I got a problem to solve here. How do I do this?” And then you can’t stop doing it. You're pacing around figuring out how to solve your problem. And when fear becomes problem-solving that’s when writing, to me, begins.

This whole movie is about fear becoming problem-solving.