I sometimes feel like I'm not writing material. Sure, I could tell a story, but can I write it well enough?
I currently have two projects on the go:
1) A spec script for Dexter.
2) The first act of an original feature film.
I am pretty confident in my Dexter episode, but then again, it's easy to take characters and relationships that someone else thought up and put them in different situations. Especially in Dexter's case where I have seen almost four seasons of it and am well acquainted with the characters and their habits and behaviors.
Dexter, now a baby daddy, is in his fourth season of television on Showtime.
No, I have no problem writing for Dexter. What gives me that uncomfortable feeling that I am perhaps not good enough for what I want to do is when I settle into something that was born in my own head. An idea. It always starts with an idea. The idea is not the problem, it's the development of that idea that I have trouble with.
So, in an eleventh hour plea for inspiration, I popped in The Devil's Advocate, since my story has to do with the Devil.
Problem: this did not cure my writer's block.
My main issue here is how to draw inspiration from other films but not plagiarize them. I feel that all of the ideas that came after watching The Devil's Advocate were a direct consequence of me watching the film. I felt that even though the ideas were unique to my own premise, they were still too much like the film.
Al Pacino is one terrifying Devil.
And this put questions in my head:
Are the two ideas actually similar or does it just seem like it to me because I just watched the film?
How do I draw inspiration from a film, novel, or television show without using their ideas?
In the end, I decided not to drastically change my story idea therefore making my watching of The Devil's Advocate was rendered useless*.
I found the best cure of writer's block to be talking to someone else about my ideas. Scratch that, not talking to someone, talking at someone. Once I talked through my ideas with a friend, my story practically wrote itself!
How do you handle writer's block? Can you give me advice on better ways to handle it?
*When I say useless, I only mean useless to my own writing. I had never seen the movie and I'm really glad I did because it was a different take on the Devil and how he works. Plus, it was a great film!
Leonardo DaVinci used to say - a great artist takes what he needs. The greater the artist, the more he takes.
ReplyDeleteDon't be too afraid of taking inspiration from other sources.
When I think really hard about it, most of the cooler ideas I've come up with are strains of other stories from long ago, or even more recently. It's almost impossible to come up with something wholey original - even Star Wars is a retelling of something else...
When I focus on being "original" I drive myself nuts (look up "simpsons did it" episode of south park) so instead, I just try and let my work flow naturally. If I stole something from somewhere else, it's okay so long as my version says something true about ME, you know? If my work is a reflection of who I am, then it has no choice to but to be original.
Once I've let go of my attachment to what's original and what's not, ideas come so much more easily.
I agree with Kenzie, every idea came from another idea, so trying to create some original pure idea doesn't really exist, as long as you expand and change and grow from what you've borrowed. I was going to just write a comment but you inspired me to write a post on my blog about this very topic (The Selfish Artist).
ReplyDelete