fulfilling new year’s resolutions step one: writer’s workshops
After the shit storm that was 2011, I am hell-bent on making 2012 a stellar year.
My list of New Year’s resolutions:
-exercising more than once a week
-staying single until May (seems arbitrary, I know)
-finishing at least one of the screenplays I’ve started.
My first step to achieving this was to sign myself up for several random, FREE writing workshops all over the city. I decided to do this after two different people recommended I try them out in the same week - seemed fortuitous and a good motivator. I’ve got like 3 or 4 to attend and had my first one last night. It was great!
Ela Thier’s Independent Film School was 3 hours long, quirky, entertaining, neurotically Jewish, and very helpful. She got us to talk to strangers about our writing and gave us lots of helpful exercises to aid in free writing and defeating writer’s block. Some of the things she suggested, although mildly eccentric, I think might really help - don’t bother with outlines and write long-hand for the first draft. Her reasoning was that we get too tripped up over thinking about structure and self-editing on a computer because of how pristine it looks; in my case she is TOTALLY RIGHT. I have a genius writer friend who writes long-hand and I always thought he was a tool for doing so, but now I get it.
The most encouraging thing she said was an anecdote she got from a former Olympic-training roommate of hers, and I like this because it applies to TWO of my New Year’s goals. ”The difference between an Olympic athlete and someone who walks 10 minutes every day is very small. The difference between someone who walks 10 minutes every day and someone who does nothing is huge.”
