How to Get Past Writer's Block

All of my life people have told me I should be a writer. My sixth grade teacher Ms. Andreaci, who died this past March, let me write our class Halloween play. This was back in 1989 and I wrote it on a typewriter. Remember those?

I dreamt of some day being a screenwriter and then eventually a director kind of like John Hughes, Barry Levinson and Oliver Stone did. (Yes, at age 12, I was watching such family-friendly films as Scarface and Platoon.) But my parents kept a tight budget and there was little chance of me getting a camcorder and making short films like a young Spielberg. Besides he made his early works on Super 8 and I didn't want to make mine on video anyway.

Instead I became a student journalist and then the adult version. There was always the annual summer movie preview or one of my friends gettting another award for a science project. While I somehow squeezed through high school, my newspaper advisor recommended me to a junior college newspaper advisor and....well, you know the rest. Fast forward ten-plus years I'm living in L.A., have a nine-to-five job just outside "the industry," and for some time now, have had a bit of writer's block. The reasons vary.

An actor-turned-paralegal friend told me recently that writer's block was the result of one of two things: fear of being judged or simply perfectionism. Each produced the same result: blank pages. You get to tell people you're a writer and then tell them you work as a data entry clerk or you wait tables. Then again this is still the case after completing something or even after the money runs out from some brief success.

But is there a cure? I have spent a lot of time looking for one. I have read countless articles where writers give advice. I read even more books on writing often written by people who well, let's just say they don't have any pages on IMDb, Amazon or even Associated Content. I have looked so far outside for what I guess comes from the inside. More than once I have considered that if I were a true writer, I would be f-in' writing. I don't spend so much time trying to make myself surf the net for movie trivia. (Did you know Franklin Delano Roosevelt once tried his hand at screenwriting? His treatment for a movie about John Paul Jones was uh, shelved.)

So the solution I see is the same as the solution to a lot of things in life: Just Do It. Like a writer/musician friend told me: "We must practice the ancient Chinese art of tai pin."

I liked what Joe Eszterhas, the highest paid screenwriter ever, said about writing. He wrote Basic Instinct in less than a month and sold that bad boy for $3 million, and reportedly spent some quality time with Sharon Stone, too. He said the key to being a screenwriter (or maybe any kind of scribe) was a German word "sitzfleisch." It means something like "the ability to sit on your ass for long periods of time." Most writers have it but they use it more when they are looking for photos of Jessica Biel's bumper online or downing a pitcher of Samuel Adams at a sports bar. And like Steve Martin said: "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol."

So with that, let me see if I can put my money where my mouth is. According to Eszterhas, there is a very, very prominent writing instructor who despite his pricey courses and quite successful pupils has few credits of his own. Writing is hard, man, and whoever says it isn't, is just really good at "pitching."