Cut to the Monkey by Roger Nygard;

Author:Roger Nygard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Published: 2021-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

Talent Is Discipline

While working on Starship Troopers, Edward Neumeier once commiserated to director Paul Verhoeven, “I wish I was more talented.”

Verhoeven replied, “Yeah, we all do.”

Neumeier came to realize that talent is discipline. “You cannot not write. It’s easy to not write. You have to make yourself sit down and write. That’s talent.” Dedicate time to writing. When I’m on an editing job, I set aside one day on the weekend to deal with various disasters, and the other day is for writing. I have to get in my hours, usually two before lunch, and four after. Thinking of a whole project is overwhelming, so I set an achievable goal, like a draft of a first-act outline, or five pages. Many writers talk about achieving a certain number of words per day. Stephen King puts his goal at two thousand words.2 Sometimes when I finish only one decent paragraph, it’s a celebration. The point is to keep chipping away.

If you are still protesting, “I can’t write!” what about the hundreds of texts, e-mails, and social media posts you wrote today? For a few hours, shift your focus away from those time-wasters. Open a document. Think about a character, or a person you have known. Now ask, what is their fatal flaw? Maybe: “My father can’t let go of the past; he tries to control me with threats to stop paying my dorm rent.” Or, “My sister acts like a jerk; she’s in pain because she’s been jealous since we were toddlers.” Or maybe think of yourself: “I can’t say ‘I love you’ to anybody because my emotions have been crushed so many times.” Now describe that person’s most embarrassing moment they’ve ever experienced. Sit there until you write at least one paragraph. It’s okay to write it badly at first. Just get something on the page. Later you can revise it. That first paragraph, a description of a character with a problem, that is the beginning of a story. And an embarrassing incident comes with a built-in punch line, an automatic ending, just like when you would tell the anecdote to your friends.

When Edward Neumeier analyzed hundreds of scripts, he realized stories are all about survival: “We are pattern-seeking primates who came from the African savanna. We’ve been here a long time, but there have been a lot of people before us. And all they were trying to do was not get killed. Social survival is love stories. Physical survival is action adventure. Stories are an educational process for the audience: Here is how you survive this situation.”

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