the old drawing board

had a great meeting with a group of filmmakers yesterday--we're getting together every other week to work on scripts. this time we went through Sky, titled Twice Removed for this round, but i'm still obviously shopping for titles.

after more than two hours of great feedback from the group (thank you, julie, ria, and milena!) i took the train home, kind of daunted by how much more work obviously needs to be done but psyched to realize i have an idea of what all that work could entail. in a moment of gtd clarity i found myself scribbling next actions into my notebook.

gtd? you ask.

anybody who knows me can tell you i'm a list maker. big time. (well, i think i'm obvious about this stuff, but as i typed that i wonder if i don't hide it some. a few years back i wrote a play about a list-making woman (Hit the Muscle), and some of the comments about her organizational habits--i'm guessing they would have been phrased differently had the commenters realized i do something like that myself.)

so when i heard that an organizational guru had based a whole get-it-together plan on crazy detailed to-do lists, i had to check it out. the basic idea is that if you've got everything you want to do, listed in the form of actionable items, on paper then you won't wake up in the middle of the night worrying if you've forgotten something. there's a zen to it. an excuse to indulge my love of checklists? i'm there.

that was about a year ago. since then i've tried different methods of listing--paper to-do lists, plug-ins on my google homepage, an excel spreadsheet. now i'm using kinkless gtd, scripts that run in omni outliner pro that divide tasks by where they can be done, track when things are overdue, and manage recurring tasks.

in all it's been going well. i'm knocking tasks off the list--getting things done. i still have a hard time remembering to look through my in boxes (physical and virtual), but a process that needs a little fine tuning is better than no process, i suspect. also, i've had a few days this week when i worked on the windows side of my dual-boot computer (omni outliner is mac-only)--not sure what to do about these windows-fests, apart from getting in the habit of booting into os x before getting to work for a check-in.

nothing like tinkering with tools instead of tackling the to-dos.

that reminds me, i should copy those next actions from my notebook to my official list.

you're not in your body, honey

i've been watching a lot of actors' training lately, sitting in on a class taught by jean shelton. she's an amazing teacher, with a finely tuned b.s. detector and a fantastic sense of how to debug performance issues her students are having.

one issue that comes up over and over is the problem of being "in your head" when you're trying to act, which results in, well, trying to act (which usually reads as false and strange to an audience).

the trick, it would seem, is to get out of your head and "in your body," and just act. sort of like throwing yourself at the ground and missing. or, to quote yoda:

do! or do not. there is no try.

now i've been resisting the idea of "method" writing for a solid 10 years, maybe 15. i really don't like the idea that i should have to experience or feel something to write about it (um, ouch). plus, there's the problem of glossing over the left-brain work--without being able to work "in your head," you're going to churn out pages of mush, emotive but incoherent, and probably self-indulgent to boot. but there are obvious parallels between what works for me as a writer and strasberg's method.

it's more in what doesn't work. the head space that's death to an actor (i remember it all too well the few times i've been pushed onto a stage) is the worst possible place to be if you're trying to write even a decent sentence.

so what do you do when you're stuck in the wrong part of your head and you've got to get to work? actors have all sorts of exercises to get back into their bodies, but apart from a few "writing coaches" out there who aren't giving away any secrets, there doesn't seem to be many people trying to use stanislavsky to write. why?

NaNoWriMo tackles screenplays

since the writing world is too small to completely self-segregate by genre, chances are you know someone who's tried national novel writing month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo), a 30-day marathon in which writers commit to writing 50,000 words of whatever each november. if you're particularly into deadlines yourself, chances are you've wished they'd do an equivalent challenge for scripts. (50,000 words? what does that even mean to us?)

happily, the good folks at NaNoWriMo are making that wish come true this june:

script frenzy

no details are on the site yet, but i'm interested in hearing more. (by june Sky had better be on draft 2, so maybe i'll be ready to crank out another.)