Walk the Walk

Hello my friends!!

Been diving back into my TV pilot script, and took some advice from writers and filmmakers I admire that I heard a while ago - that most of the "writing" isn't actually writing, and most certainly doesn't happen at a desk.

Creativity needs movement, and problem solving is best done on your feet. Which is how I found myself this week, walking home with groceries in hand (I forgot to bring my reusable bag), my fingers freezing from the cold (it's winter in Quebec City!), talking to myself out loud about the 7 point story structure of my script, and which points I could strengthen.

Now ~ as in all things I do, this was an extreme version. But I did find it so freeing to walk and talk to myself (you could do it in your head) about the script. I've always been a problem solver, and I think best on my feet.

In fact, at my office job, back when we had offices ~ I never kept a garbage can at my desk, because every time I had to get up to throw something out in the break room, my mind got to mull over a problem I was struggling with. And usually by the time I sat down again, the pieces had reorganized in my brain and I was seeing them in a new light.

So my invitation this week is to take your creativity on a walk with you. And if you're scrambling with a long holiday to do list, then grab the 5 minutes walking home with groceries, or wrapping gifts, or doing dishes. There are so many places where we can return our minds to the stories we're trying to tell, and tease out the next missing link.

Pssst.... now you can also watch the episode on YouTube !

Come check out the Hot Mess series on TikTok, and watch as I lose my mind - and find it again - writing, producing, and acting in a show!

#CreatingIsHealing🦋

Transcript

Hi my friends. I'm back tonight with what I think will be a short episode, mostly about techniques and structures for creativity. I've been thinking a lot about two different creative people who were talking about their process that like really snap something into place for me. One of them, and I wish I remembered his name. He's a TV writer and he is a podcast with another fellow TV writer, and they talk about their process. Having been in the industry for I think 20 years, so, so interesting. And what he said, which I thought was like, so visually I could just see it was that he most of his writing is him walking, talking to himself, sorting out his character, sorting out his plot points, sorting out what the story will be. And he doesn't sit at his desk until he's ready to transcribe as he thinks of it, until the story is pouring out of him and he's got dialogue, he's ready to say, and he knows what the scene. Theirs. And he's, you know, he's so full of this story, he is ready to sit down and literally just channel it onto paper and into words. Or words on the page and. It surprised me because I realize I have, you know, I've been getting back into writing and working on a TV pilot, actually, that I really love. And. And I'm editing. So I've written the first draft, and I have a sense of who the people are. And I'm working on the on, really pulling it apart, examining the pieces, seeing where it's could be stronger, seeing where there could be more interesting conflicts, seeing where I can dig into the relationships more, all that kind of stuff. And I tend to judge my amount of work done by how long I sit at my desk and like, scribble with my pen. And it's not the same way that I solve problems. Like I am a huge Walker. I love walking in the morning for like an hour. I love walking in the evening again for an hour. I I could just walk and talk to myself all day. Like this podcast 

sort of started as just an expression of what I'm talking to myself all day, just thinking about how to solve things in my life or in life in general and why people are the way they are and how is this thing happening. And I just love problem solving and there is research that shows that movement helps your brain. Um, sort of get out of a stuck pattern. And so even I find back when we worked in an office, like getting up and getting on a commute, just the fact of leaving the door and seeing something different, even if it wasn't like a nice pretty walk. It was just kind of the, you know, the drudgery, the mendacity of getting on a subway and heading into the city. But the minute I was out the door, it's like my brain remembered different perspectives and different ways of thinking about things. And, and part of it is visual, I'm sure that you're seeing. For things and part of it is movement which is connected to your brain and how your brain processes so. He was talking about that. And it made me realize that, you know, I solve problems also by moving. I don't solve them by sitting. I don't actually love journaling. It's really tough for me because the more I journal, the more I just work myself up into a frenzy. I think there's like I've discovered, there's like 1% of people who agree with me because everyone else loves journaling. I have found that if I journal with a prompt. So I'm directing my attention towards something like a gratitude list or how to solve a problem or what do I want in the future. You know that's positive. Then I can journal well or productively. But if I'm just doing like morning pages, which I know people love and is an incredible practice, but I just end up ruminating like if I give myself an outlet to just talk about what's wrong and frustrating, I usually just end up feeling worse at the end. So it's not a place where I solve stuff unless I'm trying to solve an actual problem. And so the other person who kind of said something similar that clicked together is. The Duplass brothers, Jay and Mark are filmmaking team who 

started up together, started out together, and then separated and started doing their own projects. And they wrote a book about growing up as brothers and film makers and starting out in Texas, I believe in Austin. And Mark talked about how usually his first draft and they're they're incredibly iterative. They're always making new stuff. They're always in different genres and different platforms. Some of it's on a streamer, some of it's on the big. I mean it's to me such a fascinating model for how to keep work going and keep challenging yourself and and also they work with mini budgets and larger budgets and studio films and independently financed. And so they're constantly just like what of the tools that we have available to us can we make into a story, which I think is a great role model. So. He said Mark Duplass that. Every first draft of a script is him walking with a dictaphone and telling the story of that script into a recorder. And he said, you know anyone, we've all grown up watching movies and TV shows. So we all have a natural sense of the pace of a show. And if you are telling the story, you know, you can tell where it's lagging, you can tell where it's exciting. You can tell where the energy is. You know, even if you think about when you walk out of the theater and you've just seen a movie and you can't wait to tell your friend you're describing it, you know how the energy of something that works comes across. And I thought that was such an amazing. Filtering system, you know, to let this first draft be, I guess, not so rigid and not so regimented, but really this walking practice of my brain has this idea and I'm gonna see it through and figure out what's there, and then I'm going to listen to it and then add to it. And it just really sunk in that there's so much freedom when art is not something that gets done at a desk, you know, or even at an easel if you're painting or whatever. The format is that 

so much of art is The Walking around niggling at a character. You know, people say they wrote their first novel. It took them ten years because those ten years they were thinking about the relationships and the story structure. And those are gestating, you know, those those are fermenting like fine wine in their brains. And when they come out, it's because they've really wrangled with all these great elements. They're writing back stories of characters and they're thinking about this thing that happened that you'll never see in the book or in the play or in the film script. And So what I came to is. I am discovering I'm traveling. I'm taking this year of travel where I left Brooklyn, sadly, but also amazingly. And I am trying out different cities because I'm not sure where I want to live next. And one thing I have learned about myself is I love walking, as I said, and Brooklyn is an amazing city to I didn't realize how special it was that Brooklyn is lit up at night with street lights and there's always people around. So at least in the neighborhood that I was in, which is, you know, Prospect Heights, Park Slope area there. It was just safe. You could wander and meander and I'm currently in Quebec City. The sun goes down at 4:00 o'clock. It is a walkable city. It's freezing cold though. It's degrees, maybe 30 some days, and it's not as fun to, you know, be done with work and then want to walk and like talk about to myself. So I'm finding that really hard because then I just end up staying on the couch and I don't get excitement or solving or creative when I'm just. On the couch, um. And So what I want to bring is that yesterday I went out to run errands and I always do this thing where I go out and I think I'm not going to buy anything and they end up buying all these groceries. And anyway, I'm walking home carrying all these groceries. They forgot to bring a bag. And you have to buy a bag because there's no plastic. And so I look ridiculous and I'm carrying all these groceries home. But as I'm doing it, I am talking myself through the seven point structure of my pilot and figuring 

out where could it be stronger and is that downturn. Strong enough. And I'm literally just talking to myself out loud, which maybe isn't your style. I totally get that. Again, something in New York you can do very easily. Like nobody cares if you talked yourself in New York. I'm sure here people have more opinions, but I'm just a New Yorker everywhere I go and I'm genuinely interested in this story. And so, and I find talking out loud helps me solve things. And walking. So I'm walking home carrying all these groceries in the freezing cold. My hands are so bitterly cold, but I'm really entertained by these ideas and this. And I solved the problem. I was like ohh, This is why it's not a strong enough, you know, downturn in the pilot because it only affects this little thing and it needs to be the entire company and business is at risk, you know her entire thing that she loves most and how do I align the plot points more with the development of the character and what the character needs of the plot points are so. The, you know, the conflicts are so personal and so tied to the existential crisis of the human that they can't help but act. They can't help but pursue the goal that they have. And so it was just a really cool thing feeling again. I've been uprooting myself and moving new places, and I'm discovering every time it takes like a couple of weeks to just figure out how the street signs work and where I am and when the sun goes down and where the groceries. And like, just things like my brain needs time to map stuff. I'm loving it, but it's, you know, it's, it's takes a lot. And so this idea that I'm going to sit and have an hour of creativity every day, which is always what I think I'm going to do and never how it is, it usually is walking home from groceries, figuring this stuff out. And I will say that morning, I think I had gone through or like a day before and written out my seven points of my script and I had like I had already done some groundwork of looking over my beach sheet and like thinking about things. So there was a problem, like I had it recently in front of me and had those questions. Kind of in the back of my mind, I just hadn't stopped to really, like, figure 

out so. I think I'm saying that there is times to like, sit and do analysis and review what you've written and have a concrete sense of like what's there on the page and what's useful. And then there's times to just walk and or whatever your exercise is. Maybe you're a bicyclist or, I don't know, swimmer or the shower. I know people have such great ideas in the shower all the time. But but whatever that thing is, you know, giving ourselves credit for how creativity comes to us and how it doesn't look maybe the way that we think it's supposed to look. You know that I always think if I'm not on set 12 hours a day every day, that I'm not a real actor. And that's not true. Most people will shoot a film once every two years, so maybe three months, or if you're luckier, luckier, weeks if you're doing it shorter. So you know these ideas of. Of being on quote, UN all the time of being. Um, you know, always producing, when in fact there's a lot of them. Masticating is a weird word, but like, right? Taking in ideas and content and rejiggering it and figuring out, you know, different ways that it could come together is. Is also so much of that. Um, again, I feel like sometimes I say stuff that you guys must be like, duh. And, you know, oftentimes I think. These are not huge revelations, but we all have things that were willing to hear or hear differently different times in our lives. So for me, incidents like I heard these two different people and it clicked together a while afterwards. And so I'm just here to say if you are feeling really stuck about something like maybe take a question from that process or you know, a whatever it is and get it out of the sitting in front of the computer, get it out of the natural space where you think, quote UN creativity is supposed to happen, where you are proving to yourself. That you are a writer or a painter or a dancer or whatever it is, and 

maybe it's wandering in a museum, you know, maybe it's. I don't know. This is where I feel like the Julia Cameron taking yourself on a date is so useful. Going to a concert, letting yourself be one of her favorites was or that I loved was going to a spice market and like smelling all the different scents, right? Like activating different senses and maybe you're used to or going to a concert when you're more of a writer. It just the brain works that way. It loves a jolts of novelty and it helps it rejigger the things that it's got sort of locked into place and find new answers. So here's to another reason to be walking. This holiday season when I think you know it can be hard when it's cold and dark out to go outside and. And and it's fun to find ways that feel really creative and also embodied like good in my body to spend time creating. Not just in my head, which I can do when I'm writing and kind of dislocated from my own body, but to be walking and thinking and and plotting and planning all the same time, so. I'm wishing you guys some really good creativity this season. Whether it's how you decorate your home or making holiday cards for loved ones, or the cooking that you might be making for the holidays, or it's finding time to squirrel away and write, or practice the guitar, or even read. I think creativity is just an innately human, incredibly necessary part of who we are, and I'm always looking for ways to add it into our lives in big and small. So here's wishing. More of that magic to you guys this season. Take care.