Like a gray blanket of what-ifs
Shane Nickerson — the man who brought us the immortal hawesome – often disturbs me with his posts, both at his own site and at Metroblogging Los Angeles. In a good way. In a way which forces me to look inward, to think, to assess, to pursue. I don’t often like what I see when I look inward, but the experience is nearly always cathartic in some way, thought-provoking.
He just posted a piece called “still” which painfully reminded me of my own stalled, nearly-forgotten screenwriting career, and my sense of loss at slowly losing the hope which had once nourished me so powerfully, hope of attaining goals that now seem dim and senseless. What I once thought of as optimism I have begun to feel is absurdity, foolhardiness.
From where I sit, I gaze out on the Los Angeles sky, overcast but impotent, a cloud cover without the energy and life-bringing qualities of rain, but more than capable of robbing us of light, the sun, the energy of scope and color.
And underneath that same sky reside tens of thousands of screenwriters. Some of them have made hundreds of thousands of dollars from their written words, others are starving. Many are worse writers than I, many more are far greater. Such is Los Angeles.
On days like this, when the clouds wrap you in an unwelcome insularity, I feel like anything which I had thought made me original, or my work worthwhile, has vanished like mist, a spectre of falsely confident assumption. It’s been done a million times before. It’s been done better a million times before. Why bother?
This inescapable sense of purposelessness robs me of the energy I need to press on, to prove that my work really has value, to imbue it with value.
In the last year I’ve found more and more reasons to let my writing go. I’ve got this remodeling project to take care of, I’ve got my web design work to do, writing is a long shot, you’re better off taking your chances on the lottery, no agents want you, Los Angeles is overcrowded with screenwriters and their toilet paper-grade scripts as it is, fuck off. As a result, my output has trickled to a minimum. I averaged five pages a day in January. In April, I didn’t write a single page. The less I wrote, the harder it became to write more, and like a vicious cycle the wheels of the machine ground to a halt. Now, I look at my unfinished scripts and I’m paralyzed with a sense of inability, incapable of continuing on with them. So I turn away, without writing a word.
But this is all in my mind. This is all self-inflicted doubt, self-produced negativity. Can we blame anyone for our lack of initiative but ourselves? I can bitch and gripe about how shitty the last five years have been, my crappy health problems, financial hardship, family stresses. But there’s always time to write, always. Bitching and griping aside, who is to blame but myself for not seizing upon that time that is always there and producing?
And then something happens. The hopelessness courses through me, settles, and then I sit back and I analyze it. And I find, to my surprise, that melded with that hopelessness, like the polarity of a yin-yang symbol, lies hope. The two are one, shadow images of themselves, like those half-black, half-white guys in that episode of Star Trek, each despising the other, unable to see the mirror image of themselves. I realize that the emotions inside me which produce hopelessness are the same emotions which can produce hope; they’re consuming the same energy, energy which, if I had the balls to grab it, I could harness for positive use rather than negative.
All I have to do is fire up Final Draft, pick up the proverbial pen. And write. Is that really so hard? And can I not trust to my instincts and my craft to guide me later, to edit and revise if what I write now is not up to caliber? Should I allow the lack-of-self-worth paralysis to rob me of my chance of even trying to write somethig worthwhile, something good? Of persisting in chasing those dreams which of late seem more and more unreachable?
The truth of the matter is that I know I’m capable of writing good stuff. It’s just that, like the cloud cover over the city, self-doubt covers that confidence, obscures it from conscious view. If the cloud cover lingers too long, I begin to forget about that confidence.
I let that cloud cover drown April under a downpour of self-doubt. Time to let the sun shine on May, and make something of it.
Time to fire up Final Draft again. I’ve got dreams to chase.
Well said. There must be something in the air…gloom mixed with hope.
May 3rd, 2006 at 3:00 pm