Marijuana and inspiration

Obvious question, what's he sold so far? That could be a useful yardstick in all discussions.

FYI (if you haven't heard a variant of this story before) actor Brian Cox, currently appearing in Deadwood, was interviewed on a Brit TV evening chat show last week and mentioned that Deadwood's main writer allegedly has a history of, er, um, and his "writing" consists of his lying on the floor with his eyes shut and dictating the script to a stenographer. Sounds too daft to be true but it's coming live from someone who knows the writer.

Even if it is true, of course, that doesn't prove anything re creativity stimulus.

-Derek
My Web Page - naked women, bestial sex, and whopping big lies.
Take the critiques you get with a grain of salt. Invariably, some of the critics will be kooks, bitter curmudgeons, or complete fools. ~odocoileus

Sounds like he opens the flood gates with the cannabis and just lets it flow. Maybe his real life is very constricted and this allows him to pass beyond his perceived boundaries into another self.

Not so different from certain "spiritual walks" of other cultures.

ShawnW said:

Anyway I... know a guy... who gets his inpiration from copious amounts of cannabis, writes pages and pages of notes, then sobers up and types pages and pages of his story.
?

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I'm sorry, Shawn. You'll have to come with me. The mods insist you pee in this cup.

ShawnW said:

Only a few things. But he's only 26, and he's been working on the same story for three years.

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Case closed.

Next?

ShawnW said:

Anyway I... know a guy... who gets his inpiration from copious amounts of cannabis, writes pages and pages of notes, then sobers up and types pages and pages of his story.

His fear, naturally, is that his ideas aren't nearly as good as he thinks they are.

Thoughts?

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What does... eh, this guy... think about what he wrote when he's not high? Does he still think it was brilliant?

I think inspiration is good. Everything else can be reworked.

Sassenach said:

Case closed.

Next?

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Someone .....told me that the reams of dazzling pages written under the influence are usually swiftly followed by the delete button on sobering up.

ShawnW said:

He's plagued by self doubt.

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Tell him welcome to the club. Which writer isn't??

Sassenach said:

Case closed.

Next?

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Not so fast there, hold on a minute!

How many of us haven't worked three years on a script?

I know I have.

Although, my usual running time is six months or so.

A cannabis high is often a good place to be when creating in your head, imagining things, running scenarios, testing ideas, playing with a plotline, deciding how a character ought to react to a given situation, and the like. But when it comes time to actually sit at the machine and go plunkety-plunk on the keyboard and fashion some text, I think I prefer to be straight. I can really fall apart when I try to pound away on the keyboard and produce meaningful pages when I'm whacked, transposing letters or even words, leaving words out, going off on tangents sometimes huge long ones, and otherwise just not being very productive.

But if I'm sitting out on the deck staring at the mountains trying to solve a story problem or figure a way to turn the damned thing without sending it off the tracks then yes, I'll do for a little boo, no problemo, and thank you very much. Loosens up my wiring, let's the juices flow as they will and take me where I may need to go, see what I need to see.

For me, it's the difference between use and abuse. I do not wish to abuse anything, my kids, my old lady, myself, my friends and neighbors, my countrymen, my dog, my cat, my environment ... food, drink, medications, or ... smoke.

Sometimes, a walk along the river for a couple of hours will do the trick, or perhaps a good night's sleep. Other times, a "J" will serve.

I'd never knock a guy for being three years into a script and not quite done with it yet. I would knock a guy who had three years in and nothing but a pile of nonsensical pages three feet tall to show for it, however.

To each his own, and whatever works. But in the end, ya gotta produce some usable pages, there's just no way around that, ya gotta finish and have something decent to show for your time and effort. Otherwise, you may just be kidding yourself.

Write on!

But he's only 26, and he's been working on the same story for three years.
...
He's only been writing for two months, and he's finished 14 drafts in that time.

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No, wait, confused. Do you mean he's been writing for 2 months when he's high but he's been writing for 3 years or longer?

Have you looked at any of his material? Unless he gets someone else's opinion he's not going to know whether what he's writing is good or... less than good.

-Derek
My Web Page - naked women, bestial sex, and whopping big lies.
Take the critiques you get with a grain of salt. Invariably, some of the critics will be kooks, bitter curmudgeons, or complete fools. ~odocoileus

ShawnW said:

I'm not sure that's fair. He's only been writing for two months, and he's finished 14 drafts in that time.

I suppose it's good to doubt your own work. It keeps you driven to improve it. Driven with a religious zeal that prevents your from eating or sleeping which infects your every dream and waking thought and alienates your friends and coworkers because they're tired of hearing about it. Or... not.

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Fourteen drafts in 60 days works out to about one every four days. All I can say is I hope he's not writing in screenplay!

I'll tell ya, I'm feeling real good when I produce 15 or 20 usable pages of script in four days, hell, even 10 or 12 pages.

I think your friend is churning at much too high a rate to do himself much good. And let me guess, he did not develop his story in outline form or in a treatment ... or is this what he's doing? Kinda sounds like it must be. And if that's the case, I'd say he was still churning at too high a rate. He oughta consider slowing down a little and thinking as much as he's writing, and perhaps he might have done a lot more thinking (mental story crafting) before he took to the keyboard and started beating himself up like this.

If I can't get an outline or a treatment done in three or four drafts, I'm not happening, or I'm happening in all the wrong ways. Your friend is just spinning his wheels, he must start a new draft every time he gets to about page six or something. No, no, no ... sit down and think it through, then write it, work it out in your head, that's what heads are for. Don't try to craft on the fly, you'll crash and burn every time, and probably end up with 14 drafts. Don't be so hard on yourself, hell, it's hard enough as it is.

And yes it is a good thing to not be overconfident of your work. I wouldn't say we should "doubt" our work particularly, just be circumspect about it until you can get a competent soul to review it for you and tell you what they think. No screenplay is ever "perfect" and few are ever actually done-done-done. But they can be brought to a level of finish that's good enough to fly by all but the most critical and skilled eyes, and that's good enough.

Getting feedback on our work is as important as almost anything else we do. We're quite dead without it, and that's no damned fun.

Shawn...your friend...you sure know a lot about the innder workings of his mind.

Wait, wait...I'm going out on limb here, but is your friend you?

ShawnW said:

If 'my friend' were being totally honest, 'he' would tell you the reason he writes is the same reason he smokes: Escapism, pure and simple.

He retreats into a cloud of smoke into a world he's invented for himself. That's a bit dramatic I know, but it's accurate, again, if he were to be totally honest.

Now maybe the real question is weather or not that's a bad thing. Does it compromise his writing ability? Yes. Does it compromise his social life? Yes. Does it make him happy? Yes. In the short term.

So here is the rub. What about the furture? Success? Appreciation? Sharing his story?

In the end it's all really very selfish. An old boss once told me "You can't tell a story for you. You have to tell it for your audiance." He's right. So what 'my friend' needs to find now is balance.

If anyone has any ideas how to find 'balance', I'll gladly pass them on to 'my friend'.

Thanks.

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Writing to ''escape'' or ''drugging up'' to escape comes to the same thing. Nothing.

Writing to be a productive and enlightening member of society takes a certain amount of discipline. Writing screenplays takes ten times that. A drugged up career is a short career.

My advice to whoever your friend may be.

To your friend:

1. Smash the bong. It will lead only to disaster as seen in countless lives both rich and poor, famous and insignificant (history wise).

2. Stop and evaluate your life. What are you running from, what are you escaping from? You need to answer and face these or your life will only get worse.

3. Post your story on the share your work forum, get a sweep of opinions, go from there.

4. If you develop a habit and continue to use the crutch of writing only when high, you risk severely cripling if not paralyzing your ability to write anything for the rest of your life.

5. Stop writing drafts, finish one, get it critiqued from someone who is not your friend and will be duely harsh and fair to your work to give you a clean and crisp picture.

6. I have heard the argument a thousand times that drugs help creativity and make someone more creative. I personally find it to be a crock of sh*t! Throw out that belief, give your full mind a chance to show you want it can do. It won't happen right away, you have already forced it to believe you are best when you are only half there. You will probably need some music and some peace, but if you give it enough time it will come out.

7. It takes time. Write one script, then write another, then write another, then go back to the first one and take a look, chances are you will have a better perspective and will have gained some experience and skill by writing the others.

Well that's my opinion.

Where will "your friend" be when somebody figures out screenwriting is an athletic event and they start drug testing?

Actually, I bet some of the television production companies already do that.

Do you - oops, I mean, does your friend write off his drug purchases on his income tax? You/he could, couldn't you/he?

Mind altering drugs rewire your brain. Enough booze, weed, meth, oxy, absinthe, and you get a new brain to write with.

In the short term.

In the long term, you damage your brain. You're operating out of spec, overclocking it. You're gambling that the experiences you're having and the work you're doing will be worth the mental capacity that you can't get back.

My own observation, take it for what it's worth, is that most people sorely miss the brains they lose. But not everybody feels that way. A lot of great stuff has been written by writers who laid themselves to waste with desperate enthusiasm.

I would never say, Do drugs, or Don't do drugs. You make your own choices. They could make your work better, they could make your work worse.

Just be aware that you are in fact damaging your brain by regular, intense cannabis use, and you won't get all your capacity back even when you stop.

ShawnW said:

He's known the overall story arc for three years, and experimented with it in a couple different mediums.

It's the details that get him, now that he's working on the screenplay, and he's had to cut ALOT to get it all to fit, yet it all has to flow naturally.

The interesting aspects of the story are almost all drug induced. It's weaving them together in a final form that required sobriety. Maybe that's his problem.

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No maybe's about it, that is his problem.

It's fine to create when whacked, contrary to what some have said here this is a pretty well established notion, I've seen Huichol's do it in the mountains of Mexico (peyote) and the art they create is world class; examples of this are legion, remember Hunter S. Thompson anyone? Ken Kesey? Frank Zappa? I don't think there's any doubt at all about how a consciousnes expanding drug can assist one when in the mental process of story origination and invention. Can this be done without the drug? Of course it can. Does one forever "need" the drug to create in these modes? No. Not on your life.

Be all that as it may, there's simply no question that when it comes time to work on things with the aim of producing a saleable product, ya gotta put the bong away and break out the OJ or coffee or tea or water or something and get down to the hard work of wordsmithing and detailing your piece out in the 20,000 or so words we are alotted for the task. Sobriety is an absolute must.

ShawnW said:

He loves the gonge maybe a little too much, and thinks he can't be creative without it. More than that he loves how into the story, the characters, the locations he becomes when high. But to share what he's seen he has to come down, and it's fruesterating, because it's like looking through steamy glass.

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He'll never know if he can "be creative without it" until he makes an effort to be creative without it. He'll never know just how "into" his story and its characters and their interactions and dynamics he can be when straight until he works on his piece with a straight brain.

We can probably assume he will learn these things as time passes. A year from now when he's on his 46th draft and it's still wonkier than snow in July he may finally realize what most of us have been saying here and get with the program. His present modus will not serve him well and hence at some point we can expect this will dawn on him. And when this happens he'll either throw in the towel altogether and go do something else, or he will buckle down, get to work, and bring the discipline to his efforts they need for him to succeed. Impossible to predict which way this will go.

We can hope. And we can wish him well. I do.