Writers’ Tip #3

This always happens to me.  I start a new manuscript and for the first week my words come out like they’re being fired out of a shotgun.  Then one day I wake up and can’t write.  I’m filled with doubt.  And self-loathing.  I look at what I’ve written and want to puke.  It’s boring.  It’s one-dimensional.  It’s so weird that it’s unmarketable.  I hold the pen over the paper and fill the pages with All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  (Okay okay, I don’t go quite that far.)

That’s when I remember Louis Garfinkle.  You probably don’t recognize his name.  Lou was a Hollywood heavyweight back in the day.  He wrote the movie The Deerhunter.  Lou had Parkinson’s Disease.  By the time I was introduced to him, he’d had it several years and the disease was taking it’s toll.  He’d gone from trembling to shaking to absolutely no control over his limbs.  He couldn’t get out of bed.  He couldn’t feed himself.  He couldn’t dress himself.  He didn’t even sleep.  But he wrote.  Lou hired me - paid me ten bucks an hour - to sit in a chair near his bed while he told me what to write down.  He flailed across the bed wearing only his underwear, flopping every which way, bathed in his own sweat, and said, “Cut To:  establishing shot of a low, one-story brick building.  Jimmy says…”

He spent his time in his own head, writing, and when I arrived he would tell me the pages he had in his head.  I just wrote them down for him.

The man never stopped writing.  He had too much to say.  He didn’t worry about boring.  He didn’t worry about his own talent.  He didn’t worry about whether his characters were one-dimensional or if someone would think he was weird.  He wrote. 

He didn’t know how not to write.  Even when his body was giving out. 

I think about Lou and I pick up my pen.  And I write.