Deadlines

Like sands through the hourglass..

Students often don’t hand in assignments when they’re supposed to. Its seldom cavalier. It’s got to do with fear of being bad in the guise of being “blocked. “ Or being overwhelmed with other things that have a higher priority and forgetting. But it’s usually not done out of spite or as a tactical maneuver to get something else in return (usually). Those qualities are mostly learned in the outside world as we move into adulthood and are utilized even more as the years go on. This common recognition was a big reason for the current sequestration debacle we’re seeing in Washington, DC. Note: In case you don’t quite know what this timely term on the recent news means (I certainly wasn’t sure), it’s simply this – across the board arbitrary federal spending cuts that were mandated into law in 2011 by a bipartisan Congressional committee in the event that the White House and Congress could not agree on a plan to reduce the deficit. Think of it like your parents grounding you for a week if you don’t complete your chores, then for a month plus no TV if you continue to fail to do so, and then for another six months plus no TV, and no computer or video games if the behavior continues. In other words – escalating penalties for not meeting your mutually agreed upon responsibilities by a deadline.

A huge part of going to school or growing up is learning how to be a good kind of adult. Keeping to set goals and being responsible in the work place and in life, as well as navigating both. This means both a good work ethic and a capacity for human decency. Particularly in the case of school, I see this as a 50-50 split of learning through academics and experiences. Sometimes it goes to 80-20. Sometimes the best you can hope for with a student that semester is 20-80 but perhaps in that particular moment in the latter someone’s life experiential learning will be far more important than a mathematical equation or building a marketing plan or structuring out a sentence or first act of a piece of writing.

Anybody home?

The societal construct might see it otherwise but in my years as both a student and a teacher I can categorically state this: A lot of what you learn when you go to college (or any school, including the school of life) is not what’s in a book or article you read for class but what you learn by actually BEING in class. The interaction. And the observation.

From there, some make the leap that since you can “be” and “experience” this same thing in the outside world, college (or any kind of advanced schooling) has little value or is overvalued. Wrong. There are immeasurable benefits to learning in a learning environment where, if run properly, mistakes are assumed and even respected. (Note: The best families are like this too). This is the opposite of, for example, a workplace, where time is money and usually mistakes are to be avoided at all costs. You want the experience of missing a deadline or not doing your best work in college so that in real life you have learned that it is better to keep your promises and give it your all. Because once you’ve had the experience of the former with all the consequences (both long and short term), you realize that the latter is always the better option in the long run.

It is admittedly difficult to keep this straight in a world where sometimes cheating and not keeping commitments seems to work in the favor of some. One needs only to go back to the Washington DC example to see this. Sequestration. The debt ceiling. The GW Bush tax cuts enacted by default. Every month it feels like some deadline has been or will be broken with the threat of Armageddon occurring – an event that never happens, at least so far, unless what Armageddon will be is a slow unraveling of trust in our social and political systems. In that case, and given the undeniable rise in the Earth’s temperatures, Armageddon may be well under way. Time, as they say, will inevitably tell. Which brings us back to deadlines.

Jacob Bernstein – son of writer-director Nora Ephron and Watergate famed reporter Carl Bernstein – wrote a great piece about the last days of his witty and prolific mother for this week’s Sunday NY Times Magazine.

Lady Nora. Click here to read the full piece

In many ways it was about the ultimate and very personal deadline we all face – Death. To put it more bluntly, we all have our own expiration date – not unlike a carton of milk. But unfortunately, an extension of this deadline is not really possible unless one believes that modern medicine and sheer will creates an extension of what you see as your own predetermined end. I like to think of it as a deadline that is open but will occur whether you cooperate or not. Sure, perhaps some cooperation will change the work you’re doing and thus cause your higher power (nee boss) to extend your life deadline, but we all know (or should know) this – that deadline will come and you will expire. The same way a container of milk will go bad even if you extend its life a little by keeping it cold or boiling it within an inch of its life. Note: This kind of talk used to frighten me – for decades. It now is less scary and more of a free-floating anxiety of an assignment I know I will one day finish and also know I have the power to make really good if I just buckle down a little bit and not worry so much.

The glib Ms. Ephron chose not to so much make friends with death but rather to ignore the ominous tenor of it and live her life with a renewed practical edge towards professional and personal productivity. She directed a movie (Julia and Julia), wrote a play, created 200 blog essays, cooked, saw friends, traveled and did many other things in between medical treatments and who knows what else. Perhaps she would have done all of these had she not known she was ill, since she always seemed to be busy. But it is more likely, at least according to her son’s piece and her own writings (I Feel Bad About My Neck), that she recognized the impending deadline of her life, it influenced her and she wrote about it in ways of her own choosing – not letting it dictate the work she was doing but also using it as both material and motivating factor to complete, as much as possible, her ultimate project – herself.

To let a deadline freak you out or to totally ignore it is to deny the table, or framed photo or spot on the wall in front of you as you write this. What’s the old joke: “I took a philosophy class in college – now I can prove the chair across the room isn’t there?” (This is not unlike the Woody Allen joke in Annie Hall: “I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final…I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me”).

It is not good to deny reality too much in the same way it is not good to pretend that the amount of time you have to do something is infinite or endless (choose the world depending on your religious affiliation). Because eventually, the axe will fall and you will find that your time is not only being used unwisely but actually has been squandered on things that, in the end, don’t really have much meaning to you. No one really WANTS to live in this kind of fear but sometimes this fear just happens and it feels far beyond our control.

I only know this because I used to live this way on and off. Luckily, after years of self-examination and the inevitability of my own eventual deadline (hopefully many decades away) I realize that to deny that something is due – an assignment, a piece of writing I want to accomplish, a returned phone call, the book I’ve been meaning to read or the home office I have to get in order (2013 is the year, I promise!) or even my own deadline of my life (help! And to whom is it due – Satan? The Grim Reaper? The God Of Too Many Pizza Slices?) – is to drive myself further down into the abyss. Not to get all Zen, new-agey or 12 step-py, but the first task is to at least acknowledge your avoidance so you can see it out in the open and then begin to deal with it. The second step? Well, that depends on what you like. Here’s what I prefer:

1. Make lists (like this one!). Partly because I like to forget stuff I don’t want to remember. And because – I have no memory.

A good start

2. Break large assignments down – This helps A LOT. It’s too daunting to write a whole book, article, or explain everything to your spouse, friend or parent that you need to. What section of it do you deal with first? Second? How many parts are there to the whole? Take it in sections that are guaranteed to get you to the finish line because unlike human beings (yourself included), math doesn’t lie and you will one day be guaranteed to complete the task, or write/say “The End”

leave the 8 ball for last!

3. Reward yourself – also in increments. This includes small rewards and bigger rewards, especially when you finish. It’s the finishing of something (a section or the whole thing) to reward, by the way. Not how good or bad you think it turns out. The truth is – you don’t ever really and truly know the quality except that it feels good to you. We all want approval but the victory is in completion. Some of my best work has not been recognized and some of my only merely good work has. Some of the just okay or occasionally bad work – I’ve been told is good. Which was and was not true, depending on the work and who said it. If you try to separate any of this it’ll drive you crazy anyway. Even more reason to recognize the real reward in doing what you set out to do.BTW, tangible rewards can be – clothing, a cookie, a car, sex, alcohol, mindless television, a trip, sleeping all day, the beach, ignoring your overbearing family or friends for a few days, a spa treatment (real or emotional spa), or a walk in the park or more time than you had planned with your dog or cat or pet snake. It’s mostly about whatever floats your boat.

4. Make a schedule. With a script this helps immensely. How long will the outline take? How many pages a day to the first draft. I used to schedule this way: five days a week work – at least 3 pages per day, five days a week. That was a MINIMUM. Meaning, at the very, very, very least – I’d do 15 pages per week, 60 pages in a month and 120 in two months. Often, I’d go faster. Some days I’d go slower. But it NEVER took longer than that. Ever. Don’t set the deadlines too punitively or you’ll find a way out of it. Better to be disciplined but not school-marmish with yourself. You don’t get karmic points for the amount of self-deprivation that contributed to your accomplishment level

(Note on scheduling: I have been more ambitious on skeds when I had an inevitable deadline from the outside. I can remember sitting down to write the first draft of one script on a vacation from a full time job. A one-week vacation. I knew that technically I had only 9 days to write. I planned out for a month the amount of pages on those ten days, cancelled everything else and had a first draft in 10 days. Twelve pages a day – four hours in the afternoon, two to three at night. It’s intense but not that hard. Also, it helps to be single. Requirements include that you don’t engage with the outside world, including your television set and the web. Don’t worry. They will still be there. You’ll be missed too – but not that much or as much as you think. And Everyone will survive. Especially you)

It’s about Adult Beverage time..

5. Accept you can be brilliant, as well as bad, as well as limited, as well as unlimited. Not every day is great. Sometimes they just suck. But not every day will suck. Unless you determinedly decide they will. Some of my best days of accomplishment started out as my worst days of procrastination and self abuse (literally) until I got so disgusted with myself I just didn’t care and decided to dive in. Meaning – it helps sticking it out no matter how painful or a waste of time it might seem. Even if it’s just for a day or a few hours.

Sometimes you can wing it and get lucky and meet the deadline anyway. Or you can miss it and leave it to the fates to work it out and it does. In these cases, I think it’s because people have a vague plan but their experience, creativity and relaxation just allows them to do their best. That’s what I love about blog writing and generally working for yourself, especially when the financial wolf is not knocking at your door and you’re doing your project because you WANT to – not because you HAVE TO. I try to think of every paid project like this too – literally trick my mind into it, pretending it won’t count for anything really or the person I’m reporting to won’t pay much attention even though they say they will. You might be shocked at how easily I can trick my crazy little mind in that moment but we all can easily talk ourselves into all kinds of things. Just go over the myriad of lies you told yourself about one or several former boyfriends, girlfriends or spouses in your life that you convinced yourself were true at the time but turned out to be as false as Nixon’s initial denial of the Watergate break-in and you’ll get the idea.

Of course, there are the moments where you’re so anxious about what you have to do that it’s just a total freak out where your lack of preparation shines through and causes you to be basically – well, fucked.

Yet even then there is solution if you don’t look too hard or too far away. And that is to – own up and be 100% totally yourself. Yeah – just embrace your total lack of prep, your brain freeze, your lack of focus and irresponsibility. This is what happened recently to a young British journalist from BBC radio in the absolute best six and a half minutes I’ve seen in months. Interviewing Mila Kunis during a Disney press junket for Oz, The Great and Powerful, he was clearly unprepared and admitted to being hopelessly nervous. If you have ever seen Notting Hill, imagine the bumbling journalist played by Hugh Grant had a child with the huge movie star he was interviewing played by Julia Roberts and that their son is now in his twenties and interviewing another huge movie star much like his father had many years before. (In fact, the kid looks a bit like a young Hugh Grant). And this is what happened:

NO – This was not rehearsed. This is real. But if the kid is an operator and you can prove that – please don’t tell me. Spend that time meeting some other of the many deadlines you have looming.

Besides, right or wrong it won’t matter. Mila’s Oz made $80 million in 3 days despite what any one critic or audience member like you thinks of it, or its stars or the journalists covering its debut. Plus, this kid is a viral video sensation clearly destined for far bigger things than you and I.

Despite everything, this sometimes happens in life. So be prepared.

02.10.13

by notesfromachair

Pass/Fail

Life is a continuous process of give and take. Take and give. A process in which you make mistakes, lots of them, in addition to the many things that you get right. In fact, one of the ways you can measure if you’re living a life really worth living – meaning doing it well – is by the amount of mistakes you make. Chances are if the total number that month or year is zero, you are doing the very thing you have been trying so hard not to do – failing. Perhaps I’ve been teaching college students too long and that’s the reason I think in terms of pass/fail. But I don’t think so.

Human beings are not computer programs whose excellence can be programmed. We are a species who do the lion’s share of our learning the good old fashioned way – through practice and trial and error. I don’t know about you but when I practice anything – my writing, my cooking, my teaching or my making non-neurotic choices even though the neurotic, crazy choice is far more appealing – I screw up. I find the more I practice the less I screw up, which if anything is a reason for us all to incessantly practice at anything we care about. We don’t usually because we are either tired or know that if things are going so well we don’t want to rock the boat since it’s only a matter of time before we – that’s right, you guessed it – screw up.

Sometimes things just don’t come out exactly as you had hoped….

A lot of times we plateau in what we do well and in an effort not to make a mistake we don’t force ourselves to do enough new stuff. This, too, is a mistake because nothing stays the same ever – even if you stop and decide it’s going to. At some point something will change in the equation so why not be the one to take the initiative and shake it up a bit to keep things interesting or perhaps even improve? It’s because we have this idea that if we hold on to the same tried and true method of doing some task or interest or job the result will always be the same. Hmmm, it might for a while – as long as we can do it – which won’t be forever. But it will also ensure we get a bit lazy, or complacent or fail (there’s that word again) to open a door we might have enjoyed going down or benefited from immensely just because we didn’t want to…. Well, you know.

Though, I’m not sure I will ever crave a Vegan Burger

I find this complacency/fear in me sometimes when I teach the same classes, do my gym routine (when I go), or cook the same six meals for dinner several times a month (the rest of the time I eat out or order in). For example, let’s take teaching – where I keep requiring students to watch the same five movies every semester to illustrate various screenwriting principles. In the latter, it’s not that these examples don’t work – in fact they do work quite well. Juno, Adaptation, Harold and Maude, Chinatown, North by Northwest – they’re all excellent films that young people can learn a lot from and, more importantly, I never get tired of teaching or talking about with them. It’s that, well – I am already quite certain how well how well they work. Perhaps there is something that could work even better (and make me better)? Of course, there is. There is always something that can work better. But you have to search for it. That’s why I also have students every other week go out to a newly released movie (at a movie theatre) that we can analyze – so as new screenwriters they can be exposed to all types of films – even if it’s in a genre they or I don’t like.

This week for instance, I insisted on Identity Thief – not because I was dying to see it but because I knew it had a quintessential Hollywood formula you could summarize in a one sheet (industry parlance for, uh, poster) and it is important to see at least one of those a semester if one plans to work in the real world movie business and know how either a. you make one of those or b. what you’re up against.

Definitely the sucker for paying full price admission to this…

So what if it’s #1 at the box-office and as god-awful a movie as you can almost imagine (well, certainly according to Salon). And who cares if I will never get back those two hours and my artsy colleagues condemn me for it. (Note: I actually enjoy the fact of the latter. Remind me sometime to tell you the full story of how my very positive review of 9 to 5 in the eighties caused one of my fellow Variety film critics to fling his reporter’s notebooks halfway across the newsroom in unmitigated rage). But at least in the case of Identity Thief it was an attempt on my part (if not the filmmakers’) to do something different.

Okay — I will admit that given the sheer nonsensically incoherent script choices made in Identity Thief I might have made the wrong choice here. Okay, let me be more blunt – I might have (might have?!) screwed up. This choice didn’t work at all as a film so perhaps it might have been better to have students watch a much more blatantly commercial film of that type that I knew did work brilliantly (e.g. Forty Year Old Virgin). There’s only one problem — this is not the 2005 Virgin world of Hollywood. It’s a different 2013 world a student needs to make their identity in. So part of their education should be in knowing what to do and not to do. To which this film illustrates the ultimate challenge. Universally panned by the critics, probably the future winner of any number of Razzies and yet….it is the #1 film at the box-office this weekend with $36,500,000 taken in domestically in 3 days. Screw up/Failure or Cleverness/Success? Ponder that for a while and then consider your final answer to the question, rather than the film itself (which I don’t want anyone to run out and see), as your teachable moment.

Or listen to the philosophy of Homer

Mistakes came up a bunch of times at a recent WGA panel of Oscar and guild nominated screenwriters I took my students to attend. It always does when writers talk among themselves – as well as other similar themes such as failing, honesty, creativity and discipline. I suspect this is the case when you gather a group of any creative types – actors, directors, designers or visual artists. Or maybe even plumbers or insurance salesman or accountants. Who is to say that there are not these fears (or creativity) among them? The medical plan that should never have been recommended; the copper pipe system that was not needed or too good to be true; the balance sheet that someone concocted to save their own asses instead of their clients. Obviously – there is a theme here.

But I can’t speak to those nor would you probably want to read about them since we all know that for some reason, show business is EVERYONE’S second, if not first business. What I can speak to is a few moments at the panel this week:

Writer’s Guild president Chris Keyser noting that like many professions, writing is a solitary one but that “we write alone – together.” That we are listening to nominated screenwriters on a panel who no doubt at one time listened to or read about Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine) and Callie Khouri (Thelma and Louise), who in turn also learned from Robert Towne (Chinatown) or Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People), who each probably heard or watched work by Paddy Chayefsky (Network) and Joseph Mankeiwicz (All About Eve), who took advice from Carl Foreman (High Noon) and Daniel Taradash (From Here to Eternity). Look up any of these esteemed writers and you’ll also find they all share something else — ALL have written at least one really bad movie, not to mention some of the other scripts you don’t know about. In other words, all have screwed up – big time.
Screenwriters Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty) and John Gatins (Flight) correcting moderator-screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) on his assumption that all writers search for absolute truth in their films. Both agreed that absolute truth does not truly exist and even if it did, would be deadly dull if played out in real time. Instead, what both require of themselves is honesty and authenticity amid many days, months and years of frustrating roadblocks and missteps along the way.
Stephen Chbosky, novelist and screenwriter/director of Perks of Being A Wallflower, who freely admitted to a 200 page first draft screenplay, much of which had to be junked because of all of the unnecessary subplots he had included – a method of working he recommended to nobody else but one that he sheepishly admitted finally did work for him.
Roman Coppola, who co-wrote Moonrise Kingdom with director Wes Anderson, speaking to an audience question about the best piece of writing advice he had ever gotten. I f you closed your eyes and just listened, Mr. Coppola sounded exactly like the vocal incarnation of his father, master writer-director Francis Coppola, so it was particularly jarring to hear him pass on these words of wisdom from Coppola, Sr. (a symbolic writing father to many) which RC said were ones from centuries ago taken from novelist Alexander Dumas: “First act – clear. Third Act – short. Interest – everywhere.”

So inspired was I by these words that I went home and looked it up to find out more. But instead what I found was that Roman, or perhaps his father, was mistaken and these words were apparently the advice of not Dumas but another esteemed, centuries old novelist – Honore de Balzac.

But who really cares (except maybe Balzac and he’s dead)? Because despite the mistake of whomever – Francis or Roman or perhaps me in telling the story – the message was no less truthful or worthy. This is important to remember not only in the subject of writing but also in an attempt to say or do anything meaningful. Mistakes will be made but it’s what is really being said that counts – whether it’s from a director’s chair on a stage in Beverly Hills, in your house or apartment in a private conversation, or, most importantly, even only in your own mind – to yourself.

notes from a chair

Category Archives: Hey Teach!

Deadlines

Pass/Fail