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The Screenwriter in Cyberspace
By Charles Deemer

Mr. Deemer is an award-winning playwright, a screenwriter, an editor and writer. He teaches screenwriting at Portland State University, is the author of the book Screenwright: the Craft of Screenwriting, and Seven Come Eleven: Stories and Plays 1969-1999, and is the webmaster of The Screenwriters & Playwrights Home Page. For more information on Mr. Deemer and his work, please click here. This column is a guide to using the Internet to a writer's advantage in matters of craft and marketing.

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Column #25: In Defense of Brooding

Writers, including screenwriters, can be hard to understand by friends and family, strangers and mates. Often screenwriters are working when they seem to be doing nothing. People who don't themselves write don't understand how much interior work happens when a screenwriter appears to be doing nothing more than staring into space or at the TV.

This was brought home to me recently when the wife of a writer friend asked me to lunch. "John has writer's block," she said.

How did she know? "Because he's not writing. He spends hours staring at the computer screen or playing solitaire, but he's not writing."

John is a very prolific and successful screenwriter, so I had a hard time picturing him with writer's block. But I assured his worried wife that I'd look into the matter.

I broached the subject of writer's block the next time John and I met for coffee and shop talk. "Never had it," he said, "so I wouldn't know a thing about it."

I'd never had it either.

When the wife learned that John had been with me, she called the first chance she got.

"Did he admit it?" she wanted to know. I told her he said he'd never had writer's block. "But he's not writing!"

>That's when I tried to explain to her how writers sometimes work. They brood, often a lot. They brood about story lines and characters, about dialogue and settings. Often this brooding isn't very conscious or rational. A screenwriter couldn't answer the question, What are you brooding about?

In my case, brooding enters my dream world: I begin dreaming about my work, my stories. This can be very helpful.

The next time I saw John, I asked, Do you brood a lot about your work? "All the time for about a month," he said. "Something's not right but I can't put my finger on it. He's got me stopped in mid-stream."

Brooding, we agreed, was the unconscious mind's way of solving story problems. Sometimes things just had to sit for a spell, get surrounded by random and irrelevant thoughts, in order to come out in some sort of workable and alternative story strategy. Sometimes you just have to hang in and have faith in the process of writing.

"Whatever you told him, it worked," John's wife told me that night. "He's writing up a storm!"

Brooding had ended, the break-through discovered, and the juices were flowing again. Of course, I'd had nothing to do with getting him writing again. Time, and time alone, kicks brooding in the butt.

Trust your writing process. Don't be too hard on yourself. But also don't abandon your routine.

John sat at his computer every day. Brooding didn't stop the professional routine he'd established. He still went to work, even if he didn't perform the way he would have liked to. He sat, brooding, for several weeks before he got fresh insight into his story and was able to get back to writing.

Brooding is a little like Greek mythology: out of the God's forehead, born full-armed, a revamped story springs, ready to kick butt. Zeus would be pleased.

--Charles Deemer



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Originally appeared at the Hollywood Network.