As a child I read… a lot. Sometimes I read a book a day. I always knew I would be a writer when I grew up. I love words and language, and love to both write and talk.
Loving words made the eight years it took to write my first movie script even more torturous in some ways. On top of that, it was horribly painful to have a dream, a goal and vision or heartfelt desire, coming from within and be blocked in achieving that dream. Essentially, writer’s block is a lot like having something stuck in your throat. I was creatively gagging on my block, well really a series of blocks, and it was painful to experience. Being stuck for me was really frustrating emotionally and energetically tiring. In some ways, I felt like a failure, incompetent and like I was weak or a bad person. My word was so important to me. Many people knew I had been working on a screenplay. A few years earlier I’d had a column in a La Jolla, California, monthly newspaper, and my byline mentioned the fact that I was working on a screenplay. It became personally embarrassing to me that I hadn’t finished my movie script. I felt like a liar, a fraud and a cheat. It became spiritually vital, a matter of ethics, that I complete that screenplay yet I had no clue how to break through my writer’s block and do so.
I also had, and have, a love of self-development and transformation work. What happened was that I would go a certain way down the writing path, whether in writing plays, part of a memoir or that first script, would run into a block and then would “decide” that my inability to write meant I wasn’t a writer. I would run into a block, not recognize it as a block, and stop writing. Then I would switch my focus to psychology and transformation work. I actually got a number of different training and certifications, which were useful. I coached others but noticed was that the desire to write, the passion, the draw, the raw, fantastic, orgasmic energetic energy drive to create a body of word work, never left. It couldn’t leave because it was emanating from my heart and soul. I would eventually notice the drive and return to writing.
To finish that first script I had to become conscious of my writing process and apply tools, techniques and strategies from self-development, including coaching, to achieve the goal. The year I finished my first script was the year I trained and was certified as a Covey Coach. In that training we peer coached around a long-held dream or goal. My goal was to complete my first script. Using the Covey Model, we looked at and reframed my limiting beliefs around my ability to complete a feature film script. From Field Training, a course in how consciousness creates reality created by Philip Golabuk, I had learned and knew that I somehow had to align with a reality in which I was capable of writing a screenplay. I used the NLP concept of modeling, which I had learned in various transformation experiences with Anthony Robbins, to analyze and take apart a previous experience where I had an ambitious writing goal and had achieved it.
I knew that I needed to model, copy, the steps involved in my previous experience of setting and achieving a goal in order to duplicate that same success. I realized that to finish this script I needed to create a physical space in which to write, block off enough time on my calendar to do so, bring together all of the resources I would need and then focus solely on this project until it was completed. When I analyzed my previous experiences in accomplishing goals, I realized that I was most successful when I narrowed my focus and concentrated almost solely on the goal at hand. It was then that I could align with the reality of completing a large writing project. Together my coach and I established what I would do and my deadline for doing it.
The resources I needed were my laptop, typed/scribbled script notes and ideas, partial rough draft, pens, paper, printed produced scripts, a TV/VCR combination and videos of the films produced from those printed scripts and a few of screenwriting how-to books. At that time I hadn’t finished my undergraduate degree in screenwriting and so I needed reference books on screenwriting to understand how to write a proper movie script. I put all of those resources, including the e-mail from my sister asking if I’d finished my script, on my California king-size bed. The bed became my office, my physical writing space.
My children were on vacation with their dad and I cleared my calendar to make the energetic (time or physical energy resources) space I needed to accomplish my goal. Creating energetic space is really vital for me, even if I have all of the other resources for creating and writing in place, it’s not possible for me to write or create if I don’t make the energetic space to do so.
My coach, Sue, was an important support for me. I had a deadline and accountability. She expected me to let her know that I had accomplished my goal by the agreed upon date. Accountability is one of the most important parts of coaching others and being coached. Being held accountable for an action, by another human being, is a vital part of getting things done. Many people don’t accomplish as much as they might because there is no outside accountability.
Then I devoted myself to writing until I completed the script. In thinking back I know it took several weeks. I really didn’t do anything else except write or watch videos or read produced scripts that inspired me. Every action I took was related to achieving my goal. I had little contact with other people, including friends and choosing to stay home and write instead of going to parties. I’m not sure my friends understood why I wouldn’t come out of my house. I really dropped out of sight because that was what it took for me to accomplish my goal.
I had learned about the concept of WEIT, again from Tony Robbins… one of my greatest teachers, which is doing “What Ever it Takes” to accomplish something. For me, WEIT meant that I needed to forgo everything that was not part of accomplishing this screenwriting goal. At that and this point in my life I will sometimes make those hard choices, taking a short-term loss of something, whether a bit of fun or whatever, in order to accomplish an important long-term goal.
After several weeks I finished the script. It was a monumental moment for me. I had so much energy, excitement, passion and enthusiasm. I felt so good about this. Because it was a heart and soul’s desire I felt a tremendous sense of gratitude, peace and joy in completing the script. It was like coming home to the self that I knew that I truly was… I had now written a screenplay. In completing that first script I learned that I could complete a 120-page map for a movie. That accomplishment point of reference led me to know that I could do it again and again.
I e-mailed a sibling of a friend, one of the Blair Witch boys, as I thought of them. He was already in Los Angeles, and working in feature film. I asked him, “What I should do next?” He recommended I read The Script is Finished, Now what Do I Do? By K. Callan. I skimmed it and the primary concept that jumped out at me was that I needed to create a body of work.
The book made me realize I probably wasn’t going to become a working screenwriter, by writing and pitching the one screenplay. So, by the Fall of 2001 I had closed my coaching practice, moved to a different city and, except for parenting my children and teaching a few workshops, focused solely on two things 1) finishing my undergraduate degree in Screenwriting in a unique self-designed creative degree program at Lesley University, in Cambridge, MA and 2) completing a CJEA (Creative Journal Expressive Arts) training and certification, with world-renowned art therapist Lucia Capacchione, PhD, ATR, REAT.
Two years earlier, before opening my coaching practice, I did a great deal of two and three-dimensional outsider art and some video journaling. I wrote words and did dialogues with a child part of myself in both the two and three-dimensional art. I also had Inner Child breakthrough on the video journaling. At that time I had learned no theories, or model, to understand my experience. While teaching workshops in Orlando, I was fortunate enough to stumble onto Dr. Capacchione’s book on Visioning™ and teach a workshop based on it and then learn about her other work and books, including Recovery of Your Inner Child. After beginning her Creative Journal Expressive Arts training program, I began putting theory to, and understanding, my personal experiences.
In my undergrad degree program, I wrote three more feature film scripts, and multiple short film scripts, papers, articles, and stage plays. Along the way I continued to use tools from transformation, coaching, psychology and spirituality to break through Writer’s Block. To complete my degree I needed to write a thesis while simultaneously writing a new feature film script (my fourth) and analyzing some aspect of my writing process.
I was interested in learning why my writing flowed at some times and didn’t at others. I still struggled with Writer’s Block. I remembered the writing flow experience I had doing Cameron’s “morning pages,” two or so years earlier, and had more writing flow experiences doing non-dominant hand journaling, a CJEA method. This method, created by Dr. Capacchione, taught in my CJEA training, evolved from the Voice Dialogue methods of Hal and Sidra Stone, two PhDs in Psychology. I determined to examine writing flow as part of my thesis research.
The focus of my thesis was to examine traditional and alternative story development techniques for screenwriters in the context of creativity and hemispheres of the brain. My hypothesis was that screenplay and story development techniques drawn from expressive arts, spirituality and psychology would be superior to traditional techniques such as bio-writing, outlining, story mapping and the like. I thought I could write faster and enjoy the process more, solely by using alternative or Right hemisphere stimulating story development techniques.
I was looking for Word FLOW based on two criteria a) “flow” of the experience; and b) the maximum number of pages generated daily. “Flow” is a general state described in Mihályi Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience. There he defines flow as “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable… that people will do it… for the sheer sake of doing it.” When I wrote my thesis I called in Writing Flow, which I defined as a highly enjoyable state in which writing flows, with little or no effort, until such time as the writer should decide to stop writing. Flow is the opposite of blocked. A primary focus was to see what techniques would help a writer have a highly enjoyable experience of writing more than they ever had previously. I created a daily writing regimen and set about using the traditional and alternative techniques and recording the impact on my page output.
KAPOW! What I discovered blew my mind…
I discovered I was wrong. I learned that techniques to stimulate both hemispheres of the brain, or neocortex, are required to enter the state I term Word FLOW. I became convinced of the power of using both alternative and traditional, or Right and Left Hemisphere, stimulating tools and techniques. I learned about so many different things including the power of alternative story development techniques, how to write from both sides of the brain, and how to break through writer’s block and access Word FLOW.
I also managed to easily write twenty or more pages daily and complete my fourth feature in less than six weeks, though, it took longer to write, rewrite and edit my 70+ page thesis. In 2003, after completing my degree requirements, I moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 2003. I flew back to Massachusetts to deliver my thesis presentation in November. That same fall, I began a M.A. degree program in Spiritual Psychology at the University of Santa Monica. There I studied further in NLP and learned Gestalt, Reality, Person-Centered (Rogerian), Psychosynthesis and various other facilitation techniques. With other teachers I studied meditation and shamanism. I began to better understand the complexity of creativity, flow and energy, and that although Writing Blocks could be considered primarily emotional or mental, they often also affect a person’s energy level and may be accompanied by negative physical/kinesthetic experience.
I taught workshops based on this work, here in Los Angeles, at the Creative Screenwriting Expo in 2003 and 2004 (writing a draft of thisbook that same year in Evergreen, Colorado). In 2005, I taught four workshops on this, and related material, for the Expo. In 2006 I was, for the second time, awarded Star Speaker status (thanks to my wonderful students). Teaching workshops is a great way to see how the information affects other writers. It became obvious that the first book draft was too academic and that certain concepts, related to energy therapies, a newly emerging field in transpersonal psychology and body-oriented process work, are too complex for your average writer. I also needed to research and make certain I wasn’t wasting my, or your, time by putting out yet another book on the topic of Writer’s Block.
After researching the many in and out-of-print books on the topic, I knew I had to write this book. There is no other book like this. I’ve created this with the minimum amount of theory necessary for understanding and the maximum opportunity for practice and transformation. Within these pages are variations every coaching, expressive arts, self-development, spiritual, psychology and personal transformation tool and technique that I know and seem applicable.
I love teaching and I love sharing this work with others. Look for my upcoming books and products related to Word FLOW, Whole-Brain Writing and Screenwriting, the Whole-Brain Screenwriting Workshop, Alternative Story Development Techniques and Sacred Screenwriting: Using Spiritual Ritual to Create a Screenplay of Entertainment, Financial & Spiritual Value.
Thank you for reading. I love feedback, please e-mail me with your stories about how the processes, tools, techniques, exercises and activities work for you.
And now, on to your Word FLOW!
