A bad way to start your day

This morning was unpleasant.

That would be because I had my bimonthly IBS attack. Something about eating a bunch of greasy popcorn way too fast early in the morning did not agree with me, so I spent a while in the bathroom once I got to school. That’s never fun. I had to sit there while my body sorted things out, and moved the bad stuff out in waves.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not big deal. It happens now and then. That’s all.

Had my final Dialogue class this morning. We got unto what is a touchy subject for me : formulas.

All through my VFS education, I have been being taught certain ways to go about writing things. 7 Pillar Beats. Beat sheets. Outlines. And so on.

And all of these things are useful, I assume. But odds are that when I sit down to write something, I am going to just fucking write it. To me, most of this method I am learning is bullshit. It’s for people who need to learn things methodically, bit by bit, step by step.

But I am not that kind of writer. To me, method is crap. The story is what it is to me. It get told however it needs to be told. Method’s only job is to assist in the birth. To that end, method must remain as flexible and form-fitting as possible. Teaching people that there is one way to do it and this is it is, to me, far too restrictive. It’s trying to force the baby into a specific mold.

And I just won’t do that to my happy little brain babies.

It came up because today, my Dialogue prof was the first member of the faculty to admit that there are other ways of doing things. He told us that the important thing is to barf out the story however it occurs to us and only then worry about what form it takes and what needs to be done to clean in up and make it healthy.

And that’s basically what I have been saying, although not exactly in those worlds. [1] I am still working on that second part, but the basic idea that you have to get the story out however it comes, even if it comes out in ways that seem ridiculous, makes total sense to me.

I brought up the fact that when I wrote my novels, all I worried about was whether I knew what happened next. I didn’t have a plan, an outline, a beat sheet, or a treatment. I just set off on the journey, and that kept me motivated to keep on writing, because I never knew what was going to happen in the long term.

Now, seeing as very few people have read a single word of my four novels, I have no idea how successful I was in my novel writing endeavors. Maybe anyone in the publishing world would read the first chapters and say “Wow, you didn’t plan this out at all, did you? You should have. This is crap!”. But somehow I don’t think so.

I’m pretty good at the writing part of things.

So I am very glad to have confirmation from a VFS prof that the formulas we have been learning are not the be-all and end-all of Writing The Official Way. Sadly, he also mentioned that studios and such are often looking for things that fit the formula in order to give them some way of cutting through the tens of thousands of scripts they get every year.

He says they even have software that will check scripts for formula compliance now. I have no idea how a piece of software figures out where the second acts break is in a script, let alone whether it’s in the right place, but then again I am not a programmer. So I believe him.

Luckily I am not going into film. I’m a TV guy. I love movies but I have zero desire to write them. And the TV world is far less formulaic. It used to be the opposite, because TV scripts have to fit commercials into their structure and there should be a moment of suspense or drama before each commercial break to make people want to keep watching after they get back from the bathroom.

And that is still true if you are writing for the major networks. But the field is increasingly dominated by the commercial free subscription model services, whether that’s a big game changer like Netflix or the same old pay-TV channels like HBO that have had such success lately. And according to my prof (who works in film, so I am taking this with a grain of salt), what these new players are looking for is unique shows that make their service different from the others.

Music to my ears, if it’s true. I am a unique kind of guy and I deplore the idea of just doing what everyone else is doing. I would love to create a truly fresh and original show some day.

Call me, Netflix!

I am looking forward to being able to fully dedicate myself and my time to TV after the next term. The way it works at VFS is that the first three terms are more general, and the other three are specialized into writing for either TV or film.

TV all the way for me. It’s why I went to VFS in the first place!

Speaking of terms, got some bad news this week : apparently I am getting ten days off between terms.

Total bummer. I don’t want ten days with nothing to do and no focus to my life. I want what we had last time, the Thursday and Friday of the last week off, then back on the horse next Monday. And hell, even then I ended up getting depressed.

But I have no choice, so I will have to figure out some ways to keep from losing my marbles over the break.

Maybe I should keep them in a bag or something….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. I called it ’emotional emesis’, but that’s just me being all classy.

Dealing with the damage

Had one of those moments when I realize just how deeply damaged I am today.

It was during class – TV spec, not that that’s important. I was sitting there feeling like I suck and I am terrible and nobody is listening to me and so on – the usual. But then I had a moment when I realized just how tragic the whole thing was.

After all, I doubt anyone else in the classroom thought I sucked. I was sitting there feeling terrible because I was, in some very ill defined way, not doing well enough at…. something. But to any objective observer, I was sitting there contributing to the other student’s TV outlines. Some of my suggestions landed and others did not. That’s true for everybody, I imagine.

And yet, there I was, in a morass of self-doubt verging on self-loathing, and without a single shred of logical justification for it.

Looking back now, I can see that at the center of it my desperate need for attention and validation. One of the most treacherous ways in which depression destroys from within is when it treats all lack of success as failure. So there is no in between – either you achieve (at minimum) exactly what you intended to achieve, or you have failed completely and should be ashamed of yourself.

This does not exactly breed persistence. And that’s exactly what depression wants : for you to give up and return to the kind of flat, lifeless, low stimulus existence depression desires.

And I was facing the depression and feeling the vast difference between my feelings and reality, I started pondering all the social damage I have suffered and how badly malnourished and atrophied my social machinery is as a result.

I am grateful that at least the desire to connect with others persists. I will say that from the outset. It leads to a lot of pain when I strain against the vast accumulation of psychological scar tissue that is getting in the way of said connection, but as long as the desire persists, I know I will overcome the barriers sooner or later.

But sometimes the layers upon impacted layers of paranoia, fear, and hostility towards others that I can feel lining that vast gulf between me and others drive me to despair. I have so much negative input to overcome, and it’s easy for my therapist to say I need to overwrite it with positive input, but the input has to be able to penetrate first.

And the thing is, I know I should be striving to be more social. Show business is all about making connections, and I’m not making any. Sure, my teachers know me, and that means a lot because they all have lots of connections in the biz. But I am not going to get that far on that alone. It would be far better if I made a deeper connection with my fellow students.

Problem is, I freeze up inside with fear when I even think about it.

The best I can hope for is to kick myself out of the door to attend the next social-type event I see advertised about. Assuming there will be more of them. I could try to invite myself into something I overhear them talking about doing, like going to a movie or whatever, but I don’t want to impose.

But if it’s the only way to add myself to the social scene at this late date, I may not have any choice in the matter.

Anyhow, back to me in the morass. I know that my overweening need for attention and validation puts me in a highly vulnerable and unstable position. It’s a classic case of wanting something so bad that it actually interferes with your ability to get it. I am sure the neediness comes across and that’s never good, but that’s not the major problem.

The major problem is that, metaphorically speaking, a starving person takes failure to get food a lot harder than a full one.

If I could just tone it down a little and hold back, and mostly important, relax already, I would probably get more of what I want out of social interaction. But to get that, I would need to feel more confident and less vulnerable in social situations – and that’s not going to happen without more of that positive social input I was talking about.

It’s not quite a Catch-22, because there’s always the slow an inexorable process of recovery grinding away, but it is certainly Catch-22-ish.

And the thing is, part of what makes it so hard for that positive social input to get through is that depression lies in wait for that exact kind of thing and invalidates it as fast as it can. And what it can’t logically invalidate it simply scrubs from the tapes. Any kind of positive input fades away faster than an afterimage, and of course, the negative stuff persists ad infinitum.

That’s not the sort of thing that be changed cognitively. It’s not simply an illogical thought pattern. It’s something far deeper and darker. It’s that fundamental table of values that I have talked about before, and that dictates much of how we feel. And it is the sort of thing that cannot be changed by thought alone, or by any direct method for that matter.

Only a long journey into that dark and twisted forest that is the subconscious mind can do it. As I have said before, I am well aware that my deepest problems lie outside the world of reason, logic, analysis, and all the rest of that left brained shit. I know that the view that somehow that brightly lit laboratory of the mind is all that there is (or all that matters) is false, and the product of a cowardly instinct to pretend that which one cannot handle does not exist.

But it’s still incredibly hard for me to imagine going out into that dark and twisted forest. It’s my total lack of faith that does me in. It leaves me uniquely unsuited for tackling that which cannot be known in a rational sense.

Still trying to learn to explore after all these years.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.