By Anita Reid
When the dogs wake up at 4am, you have to let them out and feed them. The next things to do is go straight to your writing desk and follow in the footsteps of Sean Robert Daniels, member of the elite band of Nicholl Fellows and incredibly successful writer for film and TV.
Most days, Sean is finished by about 8am, perhaps 11am if he’s rewriting.
Smell the coffee.
Embrace the Bad
Imagine the rest of your day with your writing work under your belt. Especially if it means you’ve taken on board Sean’s advice to Embrace the Bad.
Sean takes Pat Higgin’s ‘turn off your inner critic’ one step further and asks you to stop running away from your worst writing (including clichés). Get it done so you can move on to what really counts – the rewriting.
Replying to an attendee’s question, Sean has never abandoned a script because it was bad. It is hard to have so many awful ideas and not have something in there that you can rewrite. Once you step back, no matter how bad you might think your writing is, little speckles will show up which you can build into something better.
Sean proved his point by going through the worst loglines sent in by delegates and turning them into nuggets of gold.
Nothing kills creativity like fear.
Embracing the bad allows a writers’ room to be a safe space. All ideas become valuable; you don’t know where they will take you. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a good idea or not; it’s all about serving the story.
No one likes to admit an idea is wrong, but what is a bad idea when it comes to story-telling? What seems awful now can become amazing later. In the award-winning casino-based soap opera, ‘High Rollers’, the writers’ room got stuck writing the big season plot end of a wedding destroyed. The room shot down Sean’s question, “What if the wedding wasn’t destroyed?” but resurrected it overnight with a plausible reason. The bad idea produced story lines that went on for months because the wedding had gone ahead.
Ignore Act One
This maxim stopped Sean producing laboured first acts of 40, 50, even sometimes 60, 70 pages, when he’d still not worked out his premise. Poor pilots became a thing of the past (another cliché but that’s okay, I’m embracing my bad writing).
When you’re breaking the story, said Sean, the first act is a dead weight you don’t need. Don’t waste your creative energy (and time) debating act one because you’re still trying to work out how to set up act two. The least exciting part of the story will end up being the most rewritten and reworked section. And the dullest. It is a ‘time suck that kills momentum’, says Sean.
Dive straight into Act Two
Here’s where you put your creative energy and time. Trust that as you work through it you will uncover all you need to know to set up your story line. Your writing will be cleaner for pre-filtering out detail you didn’t need, but couldn’t know you didn’t, until you’d written act two and three.
PLUS big bonus: Arrive at Act Three with energy to spare
No more hitting the third act exhausted. Have the energy to do justice to the climax of the story – the part Sean loves the most.
If you’re going to be tired, be tired writing Act 1. This is the time to build in the personal touches for each character. Which takes us to Sean’s next point…
Don’t overdevelop your characters
Avoid overstuffing your character’s story before you’ve even started writing. Leave some space to allow your characters to evolve with the story.
Embrace the Bad, Create a Safe Space for Ideas, Ignore Act One, Dive into Act Two. Following this method can move your writing forward faster, with or without a writers’ room. And if you can’t get up at 4am to let the dogs out.
A medical writer and editor by trade, Anita has been scribbling creatively since her first made-up story about a giraffe and a leopard.
Anita Reid has happily inherited her Dad’s writing desk and tries every day to do him proud.
