Sick Man Writing

As I try and keep busy I've unfortunately caught a bit of that flu that's been going around like mad. Even now as I type my finger joints hurt a little with each key I hit, but I can't help it because I love to get down a sense of what I'm feeling when I'm sick because, especially if it's really bad, your mind goes a little bit crazy. You mix a very painful illness with some NyQuil and you start fading in and out and it's almost like a drugged out experience. I personally have never done drugs before but that is about as close as I've ever felt to being drugged.

And it's frustrating at the same time because I'm trying to continue moving forward on this film that I'll be starting production on in a few weeks. I have a lot more to do and while I'm certain I'll have no problem getting it all done, you feel rushed when you're a creative mind and you're energized about a project but then forced to sit here and be still because if you try and work through a sickness like this it often prolongs it cause you're body's having to work harder. The first night I had this I was waking up ever like five minutes and great lines of movie dialogue, not for any specific movie, were coming into my head. But I was so out of balance and so dazed I couldn't find the strength of mind to write any of it out and by the time I finally woke up I couldn't remember any of the dialogue I had come up with. It's that level of craziness that I love because it reminded me of something that's easy to forget, not just for filmmakers, but also artists of any kind. That is the fact of how inspiration for great work comes to you, and it never comes on schedule. It never comes when you want it to or when you're bored trying to come up with something. If you sit down and say, "I have a free day and I'm going to do my next great piece of work," it's not going to come.

You don't decide at the drop of a hat when to come up with your next great idea. It has to come naturally. It has to be inspired. Hell, many times I can't think of something or have a work practically finished but still with some holes to be filled. I fall asleep and have some vivid dream, a dream that bears no connection to my work, and it changes something in my story. I was working on a script wherein the climactic scene just didn't have enough strength to serve as that climax. It needed something more. I then stepped into a theatre where I work and the last five minutes or so of the film "Gravity" was playing. And it's this big conclusion as Sandra Bullock's character is cascading towards earth and there's this very dramatic music playing and there was just something about the structure of this brief sequence that put the answers as to how to fix that scene into my head. And the genre's of the films were completely different, no connection at all.

The fact of the matter is your best ideas and your greatest creations are not going to happen on your schedule or when you have time to come up with them. They are going to happen when you're busy or when you're doing something potentially bland that is still a part of your everyday activities and that's when the next great idea is going to come to you. That is something that it takes a great deal of patience and discipline to understand because it forces you to adjust yourself and maybe you'll have to sit for a couple of days with nothing really creative to do because the thought isn't there yet. You don't tell your mind when to create something great, your mind tells you. And I don't buy into that whole notion that well, if you can't seem to come up with something, just begin writing and the answers will come. That format can work, it can, but if you go into it with the expectation that just writing something at random is magically going to create something for you then you're in for disappointment. A process like that only works if you go into it without expectations that it's going to solve your problem,  because then you're not thinking about your ideas and what you're writing but instead are being distracted by what is preventing you from solving that problem. In essence, your mind is not fully focused on the creation but rather the fear that the creation might not come. And that doesn't get you anywhere productive. In fact, it can often just make the problems worse.

So that's my correlation for the day. Things that might seem to mean nothing, even when you're dizzily sick, can often inspire something that seems to be completely unrelated. It's one of the miracles of how our mind works. And on that note I'm going to stop for the day because my fingers are really starting to hurt and I need some serious rest. Good day to you all and hopefully I'll be back on my feet in the next day or two.