The Shed

The Shed

Today’s podcast is an excerpt from a recent Thursday Night Writes in which we discussed some of the causes of writer’s block, how to overcome procrastination as a writer, and how to keep your writing flowing through the chaos of the holiday season, so when you’re setting your New Year’s resolutions, they can be about how to take your writing to the next level, rather than how to get the engine started again. 

I realized I’ve been doing this wrong for 17 years. 

For 17 years, I’ve been talking about how the holidays are hell for screenwriters. And for 17 years, on January 1st, I have reached out to our community with a Screenwriting Challenge, to help you get your engine started again. 

And that’s completely backwards. 

 

I need to talk about how to stop procrastination and writer’s block before it starts: how to keep your screenwriting going during the holidays! It is 100 times harder to get your screenwriting engine going again than it is to just keep it running. 

When I was a kid, we had this shed in our backyard. I was 13 years old. It was 1987. But nobody had been in that shed since 1980. 

The truth was, I was afraid to go into that shed. In fact, my whole family was afraid to go in there. My mom was afraid to go into that shed. My sister was afraid to go into that shed. 

All that was really in that shed was some old bicycles, a lawnmower, and some rakes… normal shed stuff like that. But the shed was scary because we hadn’t been in there for so long. 

And that’s exactly what happens to writers when they let that engine for their writing come to a stop. When you stop going into the shed, the shed gets scarier and scarier. 

There are many reasons it gets scarier. 

The cycle of procrastination and writer’s block means that writing gets scarier when you stop doing it! Part of this is simply the way your mind processes the unknown. 

Hey, can I even get in that shed again? If I do get brave enough to go in there, am I going to find anything good? Or is everything going to be ruined? Do I even have the courage to open the door to the shed? 

One of the reasons you get afraid is just that you haven’t been in there for a while. You don’t know what’s in there. And when you don’t know what’s in there, it’s a little scary. 

The second thing that makes it so hard to go back into the shed is that, on some level, you know that whatever is in there isn’t in as good shape as when you shut the door a couple of months ago!

If you’re writing on a consistent basis, it’s like having well-oiled sharp tools. But if you leave them in the shed unattended, pretty soon they’ve got cobwebs all over them, and the blades are dull, and things squeak that didn’t used to squeak. 

 

The same thing that happens to your tools in the shed is what happens to your skills as a writer when you stop using them.

When you’re using them every day, it’s easy to keep using them. It’s like if you run every day, taking a jog is easy. If you haven’t run for six months, you finally take a jog and you think you’re going to die!

The most important thing to remember is you’ve got to keep going into the shed. 

You’ve got to keep going into the shed, no matter what is going on in your life. 

And if you haven’t been in the shed, then you’ve got to summon up the courage. Because every single day that you wait to go into that shed, the shed gets scarier. 

The shed may never stop being scary. But it will get scarier the longer you stay out of it. Your imagination will simply be able to imagine more horror there. 

Just like Jaws, when you can’t see the shark, it’s a lot scarier than when you can. We are terrified of what we can’t see. That’s where our imagination runs wild. 

 

If you’ve been ducking writing, if you’ve been procrastinating, if you’ve telling yourself you can do this later, you are probably making your writer’s block harder to overcome, rather than easier.

We like to imagine that we’ll pursue our dreams when the “right” time comes:

“Next year… when I set my New Year’s resolutions… when I have time… when my kids are grown up… when I retire… when I have more money… when I have less responsibility… when I hit this next step in my career…”

Most writers have very good reasons not to write. They have completely rational reasons not to write. 

It’s not rational to be a writer. If you were a rational person, you would be an accountant. Being a writer is crazy. 

The reason you’re doing it is because if you don’t do it, you are not fully you. And you know it. 

The reason you’re doing it is because there’s something in you that needs to do it, needs to do it badly enough that while a bunch of people are zoning out to reality shows right now, you’re here with me on a Thursday Night asking “How do I do this?”

You showed up. There’s something driving you. There’s something about this that matters. 

All the rational reasons to wait are rational. They’re not bullshit excuses. They’re rational. But we can’t come from that rational place, because the action that we’re taking is not a rational act. It’s not based on rationality; it’s based on need.

It’s based on I need to do this. 

And by the way, if you don’t need to do this, don’t. 

If you don’t need to be a writer, go find something that you need that badly. Because everybody deserves to have that kind of purpose in their lives. Everybody deserves to have that kind of meaning. 

If you don’t need to be a writer, go find something you need that badly.

But if you do need it, then you’re going to have to find a way to do it, whether that’s rational or not, whether you have time or not, whether it’s the right time or not.

You’re going to have to find a way to do it. 

Step one is finding a way to open the door to that shed.

We’ve got to find a way to open the door, and we’ve got to find a way to step inside. 

We’re not going to decide to go through that door tomorrow. We’re not going to decide to go through that door when it’s convenient. We’re going to decide to go through that door now. 

Which means we have to find a way to make it safe enough to go through that door.

If we don’t make it safe enough, we’re not going to do it! Not because we’re bad people, not because we’re wimps, not because we lack discipline. All these negative things that writers tell themselves are not true. 

If it’s not safe, we’re not going to do it because we all have a self-preservation instinct. We have a part of our brain that feels under threat. That part of the brain is programmed to protect you. And that part of the brain doesn’t actually know that there’s not a freaking tiger in that shed.

We need to make going into the shed safe enough that you enter it. 

 

The main reason we procrastinate, the main reason we have writer’s block, and the main reason we don’t feel safe enough going into the shed is because of the cruel part that exists in us!

We don’t feel safe enough going into the shed, because we know if we do go inside, the cruel part of us might say something like:

You fucked that up! You’re not very good at this! You suck! You don’t have what it takes! Look how bad your writing is!

If you don’t have that voice in your head, you’re very lucky. But most of us have that cruel voice to different degrees. 

For some of us, it is an incessant groan: you suck, you suck.

Some of us mostly feel good about ourselves, but every once in a while that little doubt gets in the way.

And what’s really beautiful and sad is that that part saying those cruel things is trying to protect you!

It’s trying to protect you from losing your vision of yourself as an artist. And it is trying to protect you from putting something out there that gets you hurt. It’s trying to protect you. It has good intentions. But it has a really negative way of going about it. 

If we’re going to go into that shed, we need to make it safe from ourselves. 

How do you make your writing safe from yourself so you can overcome your own fear and procrastination? First: you’ve got to make a promise to yourself to withhold your judgment. 

Because when you go into that shed, if you haven’t been in there for a while, your tools are going to be rusty. You’re not going to be as good of a writer as you were when you were writing every day. 

We’ve got to make an agreement with ourselves. It’s a very simple agreement:

We’re only going to look for the beauty. 

We’re going to accept that our tools are going to be rusty. A lot of our writing is going to suck. There’s going to be struggle. Things that used to be easy are going to be a little hard.

But we’re going to make an agreement with ourselves, we’re only going to look for the beauty. 

We don’t have to only look for the beauty forever. Eventually, we can start to look for what’s broken too.

But until we feel safe going into that shed on a consistent basis, we have to make an agreement with ourselves to look for the beauty. 

Does anybody feel like you’re not willing? Or not able? Is anyone questioning if it’s even a good idea to only look for the beauty? Does anyone have any fears or resistance to that?

(A student, Gerry, raises his hand)

Thank you, Gerry, Would you mind sharing with us what the fear is around that?

Gerry: It’s so old. The original impulse is over 40 years old. It was at a creative writing class. And it frightened me so much digging into that, that I stuck it away for years and years, I became an advertising copywriter, just so I could write, but I was hiding from the scary things. The scars.

Jake: Thanks for sharing that, Gerry. 

I had a similar experience. I’m not even going to talk about the real trauma. But I’ll tell you about it. I was at Dartmouth College, and I applied to a creative writing class for four semesters in a row. And I did not get in. 

I finally asked for a meeting with the teacher. And I sat down with her and I said, “I need to know what you don’t like about my writing so that I can fix it, because I want to be a writer and I can’t get into your class.” And she just responded, “apply again.” And I applied again, and I got in. 

Throughout the class, she was always very nice, but I knew she didn’t like my writing. I knew she didn’t believe in me, I knew I was only there because she felt bad, because I had asked. And that had a real effect on my confidence. The same way it did on yours, Gerry. 

 

What I realized now is, that the writing teacher had no idea how to teach!

She was a wonderful writer. She was a successful novelist. But she had no idea how to teach. She didn’t know how to bring out the talent of somebody whose writing wasn’t in her taste.  But we all know, I did okay as a writer. 

It’s easy to allow other people’s judgments to get in our way, especially if they resonate with some existing beliefs about ourselves.

There’s a technique that you can use, that I wish somebody had taught me because I went through such a crisis of confidence. 

When I teach you guys how to defeat writer’s block, I am not preaching from a pedestal. I almost destroyed my career because of writer’s block. I was so blocked for such a long time. 

Everything that I’m sharing with you, I had to learn in order to help myself. And in order to help myself recover as an artist. 

Part of it, Gerry, and anybody who struggles with looking for the beauty, is to recognize that those intrusive thoughts are going to come up. 

The negative thoughts are going to come up when you start writing. You’re going to hear that voice come up. 

 

One of the mistakes we make is trying to fight these negative voices connected to writer’s block. We tell ourselves, “No, no, no!”  But fighting the voice actually makes the voice stronger.

What you want to do instead, when you hear that voice, is remember, even if it sounds like your own voice, it’s not actually your own voice. It’s just a voice you internalized.

When you hear a voice saying something shitty to you in your own head, what you actually want to do is just notice the voice. 

Hmm, isn’t that interesting? Hmm, that voice again. 

What we’re doing is becoming the observer of the voice, instead of being connected to the voice.

The second thing you can do is to allow the negative voice to become a positive trigger. 

 

Allow every negative thing that voice brings to your attention to become a trigger that you need to find two beautiful things in your writing.

Every time that voice gives you one negative, you have to find two genuinely beautiful things. Do that, and the voice stops having such a negative connotation. It stops having so much power of you. 

Instead of feeling like an internal voice tearing you down and keeping you blocked, it starts to feel like a gentle reminder, “Oh, yeah, remember, you’ve got to find two beautiful things.”

Now, it’s also possible, if this feeling is very old for you, that the word “beautiful” might be problematic. 

We want to get you to a point where it’s easy. But it might be that, right now, actually looking at anything you wrote and saying “that’s beautiful,” might be too hard. Because it might just be too hard to see yourself as beautiful. 

And if that’s where you are, that’s okay. You don’t have to stay there. You can be there for right now. And if you simply do these techniques, it will change.

If it’s too hard to label anything beautiful, you can ask yourself, “what feels true?”

If it’s too hard to say that something feels true, you can ask yourself, “what feels specific.”

If it’s too hard to label something specific, you can ask yourself, “what could be built on? What could easily become something more specific, or more true.” 

All these questions lead to the same place.

What we’re trying to do, what we’re going to do, is take your eyes, which right now, if you’re like most people in the universe, are focused on all the things that are broken in your writing, and divert them and retrain them to find what can be built upon.

Every time they find that negative thing, you’re going to gently shift them over and look even harder for the positive thing. 

And doesn’t have to be hugely positive, it can be mildly positive. 

But this one simple act is going to change your life, and it’s going to help you eliminate writers block and procrastination forever, by making it safe enough to go into that shed.

When you show a writer who is super confident something broken in their writing, they thing, “Oh, cool! That’s broken. I’ll fix it.”  But when you show a writer who’s not super confident (which is 98% of writers) something broken in their writing, they’ll crumble. 

Whereas if you show a writer, “Hey, this can be built upon. This is specific. That is specific.  This is true. That is true,” pretty soon, they will naturally start to link those things together and realize, “Oh, let me do more of that!”

In dog training, they call this positive reinforcement training. It also works for children. And it also works with every human being in the world. 

If you show people what is good about themselves, if you show people what is good about their writing, they will figure the rest out. 

If you show people what is wrong about themselves, they will either fight or they will get caught in a rut. They’re either going to fight themselves, or they’re going to fight you. 

We want to practice that reorientation. To review, every time you hear a negative thought, you’re going to follow the step below:

 

Step #1: Two for one 

Every time you have a negative thought about your writing, look carefully for two positive ones. 

And by the way, you can’t bullshit yourself. If you feel ugly, you can’t look in the mirror and say, “I’m beautiful.” It’s not going to work, even if you’re gorgeous unless you actually believe it.

But you can say, “I like my left nostril. It’s a cool nostril… I guess. And also, I got reasonable eyebrows.”

You can say that and believe it.

You can’t bullshit. This is not a mantra. Mantras don’t really work. Because we can feel the gap between what we’re saying and what the truth is that we believe, even if it’s not true. 

You have to get good at looking for the positive, even if it’s the equivalent of noticing your left nostril. Even if it’s a little tiny thing that you’re looking at. 

 

The next thing that we’re going to do to make it safe enough to overcome writer’s block and procrastination is to limit how long we have to spend in the shed.

Notice, when I was talking about keeping your tools sharp, I did not say “It’s important to write every day.” I can’t write every day! And neither can anybody else who wants a reasonable life.

Do you know anybody who has a reasonable life who does any job every day? It’s overwhelming to think of doing anything every day. 

If you’re like most people, I’m guessing that you don’t have limitless money and all the time in the world.

You probably actually have a day job. Maybe a family. Other things on top of your writing. 

 

What many writers do is punish themselves for having lives and other demands on their time, and this only feeds the writer’s block and procrastination.

Often this happens because we come from unsupportive families. Or families that are supportive in the wrong way. 

Not all of us. I was very lucky. I have the only Jewish mother in the history of Jewish mothers who found out her daughter was going to be a doctor and said, “but you could have been an opera singer!”

I was very lucky. Not all of us have that.

I still ended up with writer’s block. 

Many of us come from families that tried to “protect” us from the arts. Or were just downright unsupportive of the fact that we were artists. They saw it as a “dangerous” or “unrealistic” desire. They didn’t understand the fact that this is who we are. 

Often what happens is, we end up internalizing that lack of support, that misunderstanding.

We say to ourselves, “well, if you really wanted to be a writer, I guess you would be able to work your 80-hour-a-week job, and write every day, and raise your children, and have a social life! 

We internalize that negative thinking.

But these two steps will reverse that process, and end your writer’s block and procrastination, so long as you keep doing them every time you feel that negative trigger:

STEP #1: TWO FOR ONE

Allow every negative thought about your writing to become a gentle trigger to seek out two positive things about your writing that you also believe.

STEP #2:  SEVEN MINUTES

To make sure that entering the shed becomes so totally safe that you can enter it every time you want, we’re going to limit how much time you have to spend in the shed.

If you’re scared of the shed, we’re going to give you seven minutes, and only seven minutes to stay in the shed. 

And you don’t have to stay in the shed every day. You can decide, I’m going to go to that shed three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Or, I’m going to go to that shed Tuesday afternoon and Saturday afternoon. 

 

What we’re looking for is a consistent schedule, the more consistent it is, the faster the fear of writing will go away. If it’s sporadic, the fear of writing will still go away, but it will happen more slowly

I paint once a week. I paint every Thursday. That’s not as much as I would like to paint. And it’s still a little scary every Thursday. Because I’m not doing it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And I’m not doing it Friday, Saturday, Sunday. It’s scary. But it’s less scary than if I didn’t have a specific day. I know every Thursday, I’m showing up. 

If your fear is strong, It’s actually better to show up in seven-minute increments four/five days a week than it is to show up for two hours one day a week, because the consistency makes it easier more quickly.

If seven minutes is too much for you, make it five minutes. If five minutes is too much for you make it three minutes. Seven minutes is a number that works for me. 

 

To review:

STEP #1: TWO FOR ONE

Allow every negative thought about your writing to become a gentle trigger to seek out two positive things about your writing that you also believe.

STEP #2:  SEVEN MINUTES

Limit each writing sprint to only 7 minutes. You can keep going if you want, but you can also close your laptop and leave, and still be a writer! Make a vow to yourself that you’re not going to force it. Once you write for 7 minutes, you don’t have to endure the fear anymore. You can go, and know that you were totally successful.

STEP #3:  HALF A PAGE

The next thing that we’re going to do is set a specific number of pages you have to write in your seven minutes. Today we’re going to do the short version of how to achieve this. If you take my Write Your Screenplay Class, we do a much more detailed version of this. 

For right now, for all of you. The number is half a page! 

I don’t care if it’s a big page, a small page, screenplay format, not screenplay format. 

Half a page. 

You don’t get to leave the shed until you’ve written half a page. 

It can be a bad page. It can be an awful page. It can be the worst page you’ve ever written. It can be word vomit. But you don’t get to leave the shed until you’ve written that half a page. 

If you’re rewriting, you can rewrite your half a page from yesterday if you want. But you’re going to rewrite it from a blank page, so that you know you wrote another half a page, even if all you’re doing is retyping it. 

You’re not going to use the seven minutes to think. You’re going to use the seven minutes to write. 

These seven minutes are about your first instincts.

If you don’t have a writing practice right now, then it doesn’t matter what you’re working on as you write your half a page. You can work on 1 project every day or 82 projects on 82 different days. I don’t care if you come up with a different idea. I don’t care if you never rewrite. 

Right now we just want to make the shed a safe place to hang out. And then eventually, it’ll actually become a nice place to hang out. And then it’ll become a place you don’t ever want to leave. 

But before that can happen, we’ve got to make it safe.

That’s what all three of these steps are about. We’re making it safe. We’re protecting ourselves from ourselves. 

If you have a negative thought, you don’t get to beat yourself up for having a negative thought. Don’t fall into that trap!

When you have a negative thought, you don’t get to tell yourself, “I can’t believe you just tore yourself down like that… wow, you suck for being so mean to yourself!”

No, you don’t get to play that game. You get to notice, “Hmm, isn’t that interesting? There’s that negative thought, Oh, that’s right. That’s a clue that I have to look for two things that work: Seven minutes, half a page.”

 

To review:

STEP #1: TWO FOR ONE.

STEP #2:  SEVEN MINUTES

STEP #3:  HALF A PAGE

Which brings us to the last step:

STEP #4: CHOOSE TO STAY OR GO

Finally, when you have completed your half a page, and your seven minutes, you can choose to stay or go. You can hang out in the shed, or you can leave the shed.

But either staying or going has the exact same value. 

If you wrote your half a page, you’re done. You did your job. 

If you feel like hanging out, hang out! Write more. But anything you do beyond that seven minutes is gravy. 

And it’s really important that you be tough with yourself on this. Not tough with yourself on staying in the shed, tough with yourself on going when you need to go. 

Remember, the goal is to make the shed safe. 

Earlier, we were talking about dog training. Anybody else do this? You call your dog in to give him a treat, and then one day you realize he doesn’t want to come in for the treat? 

He doesn’t want to come in for the treat because he realizes every time you bring him in for a treat, you also leave him! So suddenly the treat starts to have a negative connotation.

You don’t want to play that game with yourself in the shed. 

STEP #1: TWO FOR ONE.

STEP #2:  SEVEN MINUTES

STEP #3:  HALF A PAGE

STEP #4: CHOOSE TO STAY OR GO

I promise you if you do these four things, it will change your writing life.

If you take my Write Your Screenplay Class, you’ll get even more techniques, that will help you overcome writer’s block and procrastination, and develop the structure you need, not just to show up and write, but to build an entire screenplay.

You’ll learn techniques by which seven minutes turns into fourteen minutes and fourteen minutes turn into an hour. 

Eventually, an hour turns into half a day. And it happens naturally. But you have to keep doing the process. You have to keep doing it this way, or it doesn’t work. 

 

We’re going to end with a writing exercise today. 

We’ve got the holidays coming up. If you ever had a fear of going into the shed, you know the holidays make that resistance even worse. 

If there was ever a time that you needed to keep the engine going, it’s now. 

It’s Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa. Whatever you celebrate. It’s family coming in. It’s all the beauty and all the old triggers of being around your family. It’s holiday shopping. It’s holiday parties. It’s way too many hangovers. It’s beautiful times with your family. It’s the nostalgia of childhood. It’s your crazy uncle. And it’s football on Thursday afternoon. It’s all this stuff wrapped up and coming together all at the same time.

 

You need to keep yourself writing over the holidays. And that begins by really getting specific with your calendar and setting specific goals that you actually know you can do.

It might mean being realistic with yourself.

As I mentioned, I usually paint on Thursdays. I might not choose to paint on the Thursday of Thanksgiving, because it’s not going to happen!

Rather than fail, I might just decide, ”you know, this week I’m painting on Friday,” or “I’m painting on Wednesday.”

But you want to make sure, at the minimum, that you have one touchstone a week where you’re writing, so that you don’t have to restart the engine in the New Year. 

Because restarting the engine and going back into the shed is harder than just keeping on going in! You want to keep to tools fresh and the spiders out.

Here is what we’re going to do. I want you each to set a goal for your writing. I’m not talking about a New Year’s resolution. 

I want you to set a goal for what you going to achieve by January 1.

Write it down. 

Student Example: Attack a third draft. 

Jake: This seems like an attainable goal. But how will you know when you properly attacked it? I want you to turn that into a tangible goal. Are you going to rewrite the whole thing? 75 pages? 10 pages? I want you to set a goal that you know is enough.

If you have an unreasonable goal (and by unreasonable, I don’t mean it’s impossible. I mean, it’s not 100% guaranteed you’re going to achieve it), I want you to break it down into smaller goals. 

I want you to look at your goal. Think about how much time you have between now and January 1st. Think about all the holiday stuff that’s going to happen.

Ask yourself, “do I know 100% I can achieve it?” 

Which brings us to the next step.

I want you to write down the five biggest obstacles that are likely to get in the way of you achieving this goal? 

What are the five big obstacles? Write them down for yourself.

 

Finally:

What support or infrastructure do you need to build for yourself to assure that you achieve these goals by January 1? 

The obstacles are not going to go away. The obstacles are there. That is part of life. 

In fact, not only the obstacles you’re planning are going to be there. There are also going to be obstacles you didn’t even see coming! 

What support or infrastructure do you need for yourself to make sure you achieve these goals by January 1?

Student Example: Ignore social media. 

This seems like a simple way of supporting yourself. But how will you actually achieve it? How much time will you spend ignoring social media? Which days? When are you going to ignore your phone? Nobody ignores their phone 24/7. And we can’t expect ourselves to do that. Get really specific, how are you going to make this actionable? 

I want to get really specific and make sure that your plan is going to work. 

What we’re trying to do here is to build a support system for ourselves that allows us to achieve the goals we set. 

Sometimes that’s about realizing that our priority right now needs to be something other than writing. 

That doesn’t mean you don’t write. You still need to keep going into the shed. But it might mean that right now you don’t get to live in the shed as much as you’d like to.  

It might mean that right now there’s another piece of infrastructure you need to build in your life that’s more important. 

How can you go into the shed just enough to keep the spiders out to keep the machinery sharp? 

If you do keep that commitment to yourself, what you’ll find is that you’ll actually have more energy to devote to your kids, your friend, and your job. 

Because when you fill that piece in yourself that needs to be filled in you, when you show up and do the thing you want to be, it fills you.

When you are full, you have so much more to give to everybody else! 

And when you are not full, when you are not fully yourself, it doesn’t just affect you. It affects everything that resonates out from you and everyone you touch. 

I want you to make sure you’re achieving your goals. I want you to start this process now before Thanksgiving. 

Make sure you’ve got that infrastructure for yourself, that rhythm for yourself. 

And make sure you keep it going through the holidays, and that you give yourself the support that you need to keep those tools sharp and keep yourself going into the shed.

If you’re interested in building a stronger infrastructure for yourself in our screenwriting, TV writing, playwriting, or comics writing programs come join us in 2023! You can attend any class online from anywhere in the world!

And remember, PITCH FESTIVUS, our annual Online Holiday Party and Pitch Fest happens on Dec 8th! RSVP for free, learn pitching from me and the entire JKS faculty, and even get a chance to pitch your script and compete for awesome prizes, including a 1:1 Pitch Consultation with me worth $1500 bucks!

 

*Edited for length and clarity.