[…] One month later: You’re still into it, but the prep work has become something of a slog. Once you’ve dug into the heart of the story, there are some difficult choices to make in terms of the narrative and characters. You’ve tested out a bunch of them. Some of them work… maybe. Others, not so sure. But you’ll lick this problem! It’s a million dollar …read more […]

It's the #SQUIRREL... bane of my writer existence. I need blinders or something. I had to stop reading stuff online for a solid 6 months to get any actual page writing done. And even now that I have some completed drafts I'm constantly #SQUIRREL... thinking of new projects instead of editing and rewriting. Story ideas come so easy to me, focus does not. Where's Yoda when you need him?

I think it's a classic case of idea vs. execution. Anyone can come up with an idea, but only a writer can sit down and execute it. If you want to be a writer, remember that you earn your stripes by executing. Not by idea generating. Sure, the latter is hugely important. But once you start going out for studio assignments, it's your execution of their ideas that you'll be hired for.

Curse you SOS!!! This is something I've struggled with but never new it had a name until now! I'm always excited by new ideas, and often times when I was writing short fiction before, I'd get a couple months in to a project and boom, a new idea would hit, and the current project got scrapped in favour of the brand new shiny one. I think it's a very natural feeling with new ideas. A new idea really is something shiny and glimmering you only see off in the distance and it looks so brilliant you can't help but feel pulled to go towards it. And inevitably, the closer you get, the more details you can make out, and that sparkly diamond on the mountaintop slowly starts to morph into a used candy bar wrapper :p And then you notice something much shinier on the hilltop just past this one, and it all starts again. For myself, I realized this was an issue, so in my screenwriting I originally tried to resist the new ideas I would have, but that only seemed to make me think about them even more. And as writers, we all know that every idea might be that diamond, and you don't want to let any go. What works for me is giving myself a few days to go down the rabbit hole, explore this wonderful new idea, poke holes in it, imagine the characters that belong in this world... but always to come back to my current project. By giving yourself some time to play around with the idea, you may realize it's not as good as you first thought. And if it's good, you've captured the idea and started laying a foundation for a future project that you can easily come back to later, and you have that peace of mind that you can let that new idea go, but that you've put in somewhere safe to come back to. And if you're really lucky, and you can be objective, that new idea might prove to have so much potential, commercial viability, and hits a chord deep within you that it is worth scrapping your current project and moving into this new idea. So my whole-hhearted recommendation in order to get the best of both worlds, is to allow yourself some time for recess to explore new ideas when they come up, but set a timer and when the bell rings, it's back to work.

As a past sufferer of SOS, I've remarked before on this site about how I go about choosing which project I'll work on next. It has to *bother* me. Not just for a day or a week but for months. Nowadays, I'll try to come up with every excuse *not* to expand on a premise or concept; but the concept haunts me like the ghost of Hamlet, Sr. then I feel compelled -- as if called by a higher power, a burning bush of sorts, to do this work. I have a private blog where I generate ideas as they come to me. 99.9% don't excite me past the month in which I put them down. It's that .1% that I can't ignore. *Those* are my concepts, my future scripts-in-waiting. So in conclusion, my advice is, don't go for the low-hanging fruit, or the sci-fi film you want to make because you just watched "Gravity." Make sure your concepts -- and they should truly be concepts, should truly scream "THIS IS A MOVIE AND NOTHING ELSE!!!" -- haunt you. They'll have to. You're going to be together for a *very* long time.

[…] Today, kiddies, we’re going to discuss Shiny Object Syndrome. If you don’t know what that is, read this. […]

This has derailed a few writing projects. I've got a folder on my computer of those 'great' ideas that were started, but never completed because something else would come along. This current one is the farthest I've ever gotten and even though I had one or two shiny objects pop up, I scribbled a few sentences on 3x5 cards and set them aside. I made a commitment to this script and to myself that I will finish this until it is the best it can possibly be. I committed myself to it and I'm seeing to the end. It's worked well because I've gotten pretty far with it and the results have surprised me. Not sure if I've beaten SOS for good or not, but it's helped for now.

I keep a log of ideas. If I have an SOS attack, I write it down and give myself permission to think about it later. It his me hardest during writing. "Oh, I just need to fix that." "I need to introduce this earlier." "This needs to be in a different story." "Oh, this would be a great story." I started keeping rewrite lists. Once I begin a rewrite, I keep another list. It just keeps me focused.