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Thankfully, I am someone who can sit for hours at a time and focus. One thing though that has helped me in ways to help being patient or forcing myself to do something I don't want to do that I think could work for some people when it comes to writing is to trick your mind. I do this by saying, I don't want my future self to be pissed at me or to laugh at me. I don't want to give him the satisfaction, so fuck him, I 'm going to do it. Then after I have done it when I am that future self, I will say wow goodjob past self. I'm proud of you. Hopefully, that might help someone and makes sense.

I found for me that the "just do it" approach is what works. Unfortunately, I only started it this past January. I take my non-Internet capable laptop and go to my work corner -- yes, I have a work corner -- and I just do it. For at least 4 hours. Every day. I've written 2 scripts in 2014 -- that was my total for all of 2013. I'm hammering out a third. Really, give "just do it" a try for a few weeks. See what happens.

Nifty trick, Michael. Having grown up a Southern Baptist, I sometimes am forced to use a variation on that: Guilt and shame!

Zach, congratulations on being so prolific. You've got three components there, each of which is noteworthy: * An attitude: Just do it! * A place: Work corner. * And perhaps most important... NO ACCESS TO THE INTERNET! There are programs which FORCE you off the Internet for set periods of time like Freedom ($10). And here is an article with 6 programs. Keep up the good work, Zach. Writing pages, so critical, not only to create content, but learn the craft.

Wow, I still struggle with this one - because I am the easily distracted sort, love the browsing, the emails. But IMHO, the biggest distraction is the internet and I also keep telling myself, 'this is my job, this is my job, this is my job. I want this job. There's no other job I love more. I don't want to get fired. I will die if my scripts never get finished!' so even though I have my good days and bad days with distractions, I use the freedom app on my mac (love it by the way) to turn it off for two hours at a time and then give myself five-ten minute breaks to browse and do whatever before I charge it back on again... and if I am too distracted, cut off the net completely for the full 480 minute max. The internet is a MASSIVE TIME SUCKER. However, channeling that inner demon has finally gotten me to drafts of four scripts, hopefully finishing a few later this year.

I wrote a blog post last year on this exact sentiment. I looked up "beginning screenwriting" in Jan '13 and stumbled on the GITS blog (and many others) and all I wanted to do was soak in as much information as I could and then when it came time to actually write........ nothing. Sure the ideas came flowing forth, but I couldn't even pretend to want to attack an actual formatted page. For me the "block" was 1) the format (writing actual pages - it was foreign to me and scared me and I didn't have software for it) and 2) a huge fear of sucking at this journey I felt so passionately about. I've since conquered #1 and all it took was DOING IT. I was so scared of the format I'd write everything down in prose or outline or waste time researching (time sucker!) and after so many months I still hadn't accomplished anything remotely close to what I'd set out to do - write a screenplay. I had to cut myself off and focus - no more getting sucked into blogs or talking/reading about writing... I needed to actually write. You just have to do it. Write crap. Make it cringe-worthy and horrid because who cares!? Try starting with a pattern: Slug, action, dialogue, slug, action dialogue... even if it's a mere sentence or two, just do something. This, for me, was my answer to that. I went from avoiding the page at all costs to starting on it and liking it. Now I go straight to format and merrily type away not caring if my first run stinks to high heaven. WHEEEEEEE! One key thing that helped release some of the fear of the page was to not strive for perfection right from the start. Don't think your first attempt will be Oscar worthy... let yourself know it's gonna suck balls and then just roll with it ;) It gets better and much easier, I PROMISE!!

Or go into your network settings and disable the connection. I've also read somewhere you should just sit down and write anything. It doesn't matter what. It can be garbage. Just the act of writing will get you into the swing of it.

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