HOLDING MYSELF ACCOUNTABLE PT. 3

Confession: I'm starting every post in this series with a confession so today I'll admit that my creative struggles are of my own design.

Yesterday marked the end of week two in both the BFS accountability group and the Filmshop group. Filmshop is thankfully less rigorous, so this post is really an update on the BFS group and how I've been feeling waking up to write from 7-9 am Monday to Friday. You can read more about what the group entails by checking out part 1.

I'll start by saying joining the group is probably the best decision I've made in a while when it comes to forcing better habits on myself. While I didn't get through fully what I wanted to by the end of week two, I did get through as short as mentioned in part 2 and the cold open of my pilot. I'd been STRUGGLING with how to inject a specific device I plan on using throughout the episode (and series) that needed to be introduced up top and FINALLY think I've figured it out. Yes, those two and a half/three pages are very clunky and yes, I had to block in some stuff using info from Wikipedia because I still need to study a bit to get the speaking pattern down but the essence of what I'm going for is finally there and makes sense. How this character will function is a lot clearer in the cold open than I'd previously had so I'm just excited and happy about that.

One of the biggest things I've noticed about writing before work vs late in the evening after work hours is that I'm giving myself my mind at its freshest. I'm giving myself my peak self before I give the rest of my daily energy to a job. This isn't to say I dislike my job. I love the work that I do, the industry I'm fortunate to be in, and the projects that continue to come my way. At the same time though, I've spent a long time placing my personal creative pursuits further down on the list. Exhaustion is real and I often found myself angry and frustrated because I couldn't get something done, or fell asleep at my computer, or read something I wrote and it was just perpetually bad but at the same time struggled to come up with a fix and because I was just tired. While I'm both a perpetual night owl and morning person (literally the worst combination), I realize that writing late at night was actually the worst thing for me creatively. I already feel like slowly, I'm getting back to feeling like I at least kind of know what I'm doing. I'm starting to criticize what I'm writing less as I power through first drafts and allowing myself to discover. Less editing while in progress and more about pushing through to get the draft done because as they say, writing is rewriting but you can't fully rewrite something that's incomplete.

All of that aside, week two for me felt like a success. Now, I have the weekend to fully get my ducks in a row and prep for week three. Hopefully, my thoughts on how the new schedule is going will be the same at the end of next week.