I’m a big fan of the Behind the Curtain YouTube channel. They have a lot of well-curated videos that talk about a lot of the movie making process, and the insights are often fascinating.
One in particular that I have been returning to again and again these past weeks is a compilation of screenwriters talking about writer’s block.
This is especially important in my personal journey, because after my mother passed away in 2009, I succumbed to a creative blockage that lasted more than seven years. That’s a story for another time, but suffice to say that learning to write again was one of the great struggles (and successes) of my adult life.
So this video is full of treasures, but in particular I’ve been thinking about the words of Jordan Peele, the screenwriter of the blockbuster horror film Get Out. I have his remarks queued up here:
Peele had five projects he was working on, and whenever he would get blocked, he would pivot to a different project.
“Follow the fun,” he says.
Now, of course, everybody is going to have to find their own rhythms and work styles. But for me, Peele’s advice makes a lot of sense. I find that I work best when I have multiple projects going at once.
I get stuck all the time. I get huge anxiety spikes. I get blockages. My momentum peters out. To take another insight from the video above, like Aaron Sorkin, I feel a constant state of creative blockage.
What I have learned, however, is a stuck place on one project can actually give me a solid leverage point to get progress done on a different project.
So, for example - I’ll be working on an audio edit for a client. Most of the time, that is repetitive, tedious work. I have to find a rhythm to get good work done, and sometimes the rhythm just isn’t there.
So I build in an escape hatch. I’ll open up a different project (maybe writing, maybe storyboarding) and “steal” moments from the edit to work on the other thing.
It’s a pure trick. To some deep part of my mind, it feels like I’m playing hooky from what I “should” be doing (the tedious edit) by doing something that I find more “fun” at that given moment (the writing, the storyboarding).
It’s mental jiu jitsu. I’m definitely being productive, it’s just that the productivity is not linear. Moreover, there are a lot of times when the tedious editing job becomes my escape from the anxiety of a blank page, so it goes both ways.
I’m not sure that I would describe this process the way Peele does. He calls it “follow the fun,” and there is some deep part of me that doesn’t resonate with that phrasing. In my family, we have a different phrase. We refer to it as needing to “keep flying speed.”
That is to say, creativity demands a certain forward momentum, and pivoting from one task to the next can help you maintain that. The one thing that you don’t want to happen is to stop dead. If you do that, the glider (my metaphor here for the creative process) falls out of the sky.
So if you’re feeling stuck, the answer might be to start up a couple more projects, and to feel free to turn your attention to whatever is pulling you. At the very least, some interesting work will get done, and you’ll keep moving forward.
Courage.
For productivity strategy, I believe this is golden. So, in a crunch deadline situation, one may not have this “turn-to-something-else” option. But in such tight situations in the past, I’ve found myself self-querying, “How did this deadline become such a crunch?” Sometimes, for me, it’s just plain self-induced. In that regard, perhaps this creative tool that provides leverage in the process—as a valuable asset in and of itself—could become strong motivation to prevent sheer non-productive procrastination (to maintain what author calls creative “flying speed” so as not to crash). Perhaps having the option to pivot toward another creative task mid-project becomes so valuable—perhaps even cherished—that one even pads it into the project timeline.