The process and when it blows.

Here’s the thing about me, I don’t tend to work well at home. The silence kills. The stillness paralyzes. If I have too much uninterrupted time with my mind I tend to get restless.

This may sound strange, because I am a writer and how the hell am I going to get the words out if I can’t concentrate long enough to focus on them. And maybe I’m being a little overly dramatic, but it feels like torture sometimes when I have to work from home.

All that said, there’s a worldwide pandemic raging around us and I’m not one to shirk my responsibilities as a decent human being and do what I want against all better judgement and advice. And what I want, more than anything, is the ability to go back to my old writing stomping grounds — bars. Good old loud, bustling bars. Smelly, music blaring, happy hour special bars. People all around me while I’m alone in the crowd bars.

I’ve talked to a lot of writers who are confounded by my office of choice. And I understand that, to some, a bar may not be the most productive spot to write. But for me, there’s a very real force of inspiration when I’m surrounded by strangers. Being in a spot where people are the protagonist of their own lives and listening to the way they speak when they think no one is listening, well, it’s a real character study. Maybe it sounds like I’m being a creep, eavesdropping and all, but it doesn’t hurt anyone and contributes greatly to my understanding of how to create characters who are unique and sound different from one another.

I have a long held belief — not an original idea or anything — that there are no secondary characters in a script, because there are no secondary characters in life. While the way we feel may seem like the most important thing in the world because our world revolves around us, the person next to us feels the same way because they’re the main character in their story, and the person next to them, an on. It’s a consideration that writers should think about because how many times do you read a script or watch a movie where an ancillary character seems to be one dimensional as they are given nothing better to do than focus on the main? Of course, there has to be a focus of the story, but that doesn’t mean that everyone surrounding that focus should be paper dolls; they should be fully developed and just as intriguing.

When I write in bars, specific bars around Portland, I fade into the background, sitting alone in a booth with my laptop, one headphone in and playing a good horror score while my other ear focuses on random conversations. I get concept ideas, visions of intense conversations with believable dialogue, backstories of characters, and from there I can really start to delve into my story, my script, whatever I’m working on. My focus is at its best. My creativity blossoms.

Since the pandemic began, I’ve been working from home. For eight months I’ve struggled to unleash that same motivation and feeling into my laptop or notebook as I sit on the couch by myself. For the first few months, I was a fucking wreck. The combination of intense anxiety about Covid, depression over the state of our country, and the loneliness inherent in social distancing, I also felt like I’d screwed myself creatively by constantly needing another factor (location) to make the words flow. It was brutal. I began to feel like a fraud, total imposter syndrome. I went from preferring to work elsewhere to needing to, and that made me feel weak.

It took time, painful time of forcing myself to free-write, journal (which I hate doing), reading and re-reading script writing books and produced screenplays, watching a shit ton of reality TV. But slowly things began to change. I began looking forward to sitting down after a cup of tea in the morning, after the husband left for work, after the cat finally chilled out, and plotting out my writing day. It helped to get some freelance gigs and some structure in that period. And also to start putting together work for my upcoming book release. Once I started allowing myself the room to breathe I realized how awesome my house is. I have an incredible vinyl collection and well-lit rooms. What more could I ask for?

Sometimes the darkness looms. Sometimes the feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness is overwhelming, and we look for things to blame and pinpoint so that the onus rests outside of ourselves. For me, that worked for a while, but as we continue on through this fucking pandemic, with no clear end in sight, I understand that the days of spending hours writing in a bar is a memory. It’ll come back, to be sure, but not yet and not for a while. And I can’t just stop doing what I do. We can’t stop. Even when the process blows.