Every Place Can Be a Safe Place

February 3rd, 2010Blog0 comments

I was told something recently that makes a lot of sense: You’ve got to find your “safe place” for writing. This is the place where you aren’t thinking about whether something is going to sell or not, or whether you need to do your laundry. This is the place where the TV and Internet aren’t trying to sell you anything — the place where you don’t have to worry about your kids (for those folks that are a little further along than I am) because you know that they’re being well cared for somewhere else.

This is the safe place where you can write. It is essential to define the boundaries of this place so that you can go in, get your work done, and then re-emerge into the rest of the world feeling accomplished.

I’m trying to define my version of such a place using 21st century thinking: That such a place doesn’t have to be a set physical location, but can be any place where I have my National Brand No. 43-571 notebook* open and I’m holding a pen. For me, the safe place is the page itself because I can write anything there: Try anything out, experiment, think out loud on paper — and anything I write there can never be wrong because it’s not supposed to be absolute or final. It’s a place to just write without second-guessing myself or attempting to attain perfect results right away.

For me, safety is the ability to experiment and play; it’s the ability to ask questions and explore thoughts. Structure, organization — those can happen later. In fact, if I do have a structure present it’s OK to use these notebook pages to go ahead and write stuff there that’s the real deal — but it’s always okay to use the space to doodle.

And when I’m done, I close the notebook. I can go do something else. But if I get an idea or something strikes me, I can open the notebook and I’m in my safe writing place again.

* Probably the most perfect writing notebook I’ve ever encountered. They have a hard cover so you can open them and write without placing them on a solid surface; their pages are numbered for easy indexing, and they’re made in Canada by good, honest, hard-working people who love hockey and neighborliness.

I read a lot of scripts. Often it’s extremely helpful to read the scripts of movies that I’ve seen so that I can see the film’s blueprint. It’s also interesting to examine the structure of the story and of its scenes — and it’s extremely interesting to see how the film’s action’s are described by the screenwriter on paper. For instance: “His lips are shaking, rain spilling down his face like tears” — from A Beautiful Mind by Akiva Goldsman.

Vice versa, when I’m watching a movie or TV show I often think about how I would describe on paper the action that I’m seeing on screen. I try to do this using phrases that are as kinetic, descriptive, and brief as possible, sounding out the beats in my head between action and dialogue. These days it’s pretty much automatic. I remember my old high school videography teacher telling us that his constant automatic analysis of film/tv ruined his enjoyment for such things, but for me the analyzing-while-viewing tends to add to the fun.

Anyway, I’m reading Up in the Air right now. I liked the movie, although at the end as the protagonist Ryan Bingham stared up at the destination board, totally lost, I kept thinking, “But… You’re a very handsome man! You look like George Clooney!.. You could totally get any lady in that airport and live happily ever after!” So that sorta killed the angst for me.

But if they had cast Paul Giamatti or Philip Seymour Hoffman in that role I woulda been like, “Yup. You’re gonna die alone.”