Film Courage: Do you have a writing routine?
David Wappel, Screenwriter: I have two answers for if I have a writing routine that I follow and one is yes I have a writing routine. Two is I don’t always follow that writing routine. The best work I’ve ever done is when I followed that routine but for some reason I don’t follow it all of the time. It’s tough and sometimes it’s because of whatever else I’ve got going on in my life, that routine that I liked and really worked for me didn’t, it’s no longer sort of the option for what I have going on right now.
Other times it’s just tough to sit down at a desk and write even though I know I already have a plan to do that. It’s just tough when you don’t want to and so sometimes I don’t, I fail at sitting down and writing. But when I was following it, it was great. When I do follow it, it’s great because it forces me to write and the routine was basically I would get up, two hours in the morning I would write and then that was it for the rest of the day.
As far as official writing time I would pull out a notebook or if I was really inspired I might open up the computer and write some more but those 2 hours I would set the timer and I would write. At the end of those two hours I would stop no matter where I was, no matter if I felt like I could keep going for another two or if I was like Thank God I just barely made those two hours that felt like a slog.
But having it be time-based told me that it doesn’t matter what I’ve written as long as I’ve shown up and I’ve written and so some days those two hours would produce ten pages, other days it would produce one. But I was measuring wether or not I was doing my job by the time I was spending doing it and not necessarily page count or word count…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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