Force Multiplier

For the past few weeks, I've been slogging through the first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I can't say I'm particularly enjoying it (although the quality of the show is growing exponentially with each episode). And I have at least thirty more episodes to go.

So why am I watching it?

Because, like laser-guided bombs and aerial drones, Buffy is a force multiplier.

Let me explain. Force multiplier is a buzzword from Donald Rumsfeld's controversial transformation of the United States military; it refers to something that dramatically increases a unit's combat effectiveness. The idea is that if you have the aforementioned bombs and drones, you don't need as many boots on the ground. Note how quickly Iraq was occupied, despite the relatively small invading force.

As a screenwriter, I am - like the military - faced with an extremely large and difficult task that can only be attacked directly. I'm either going to write 120 pages of a script or I'm not. No way around that. There is no model in which I do not spend a lot of time banging my head against the keyboard like Don Music from Sesame Street.

But there are many ways to increase my combat effectiveness as a writer. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the difficult heavy-lifting of writing only occupies a few hours of my day. The rest are activities that are only tangentially related to my work.

1. Yoga
2. Reading
3. Watching DVDs
4. Meditation
5. Weight Training
6. Playing Video Games
7. Blogging (in theory)
   

A corporate middle manager might point out that an obvious way of optimizing my productivity would be to limit these extracurricular activities and devote more man-hours to the actual task of writing. And many writers that I know would agree - there is no substitute for chaining yourself to the desk, especially when the deadline rolls around.

But I have a slightly different approach. It's true that many writing problems are solved at the desk. But just as many are solved away from it. And in order to facilitate the problem-solving, it's important that the mind be constantly refreshed. People, colors, stories, silence. All of these comprise the raw material for my work, and I must never stop collecting them. After all, the best solutions in my line of work often appear when I'm doing something else.

For a writer, reading books and watching movies isn't a form of leisure, it's a way of attacking my work obliquely, as opposed to directly. That's why I'm watching Buffy - because there's much overlap between my field of inquiry and Whedon's vampire slayer. And the more extracurricular activities I participate in, the more possible routes I have to outflank my opponent: the unsolvable writing problem of the moment. My strategy is to create as much surface area as possible; to attack from every conceivable angle at once. Writing at my desk is a powerful weapon, but it's also the bluntest and most enervating. Watching movies and reading books and going to yoga are slower to yield their payloads, but no less powerful and rejuvenating to boot. And when I combine all of the above, it's almost as if the problems solve themselves.

I tend to get a little anxious when I stop reading books, or playing video games, and it's because I know I've stopped collecting some raw material. I've closed an avenue of attack. I've lost surface area.

It's not just play. It's force multiplication.

So It Begins

I had forgotten how difficult planning these things could be. I'm not only coordinating my own travels, but those of various party members, all of whom are arriving and departing on different dates. But somehow, we've managed to cobble together a plan.

LEG ONE: JAPAN


Tokyo: May 17 - May 20

Kyoto: May 20 - May 24


LEG TWO: SOUTHERN CHINA


Shanghai: May 24 - May 26

Guilin and surrounding towns: May 27 - June 3


LEG THREE: SHANGHAI


Shanghai: June 4 - June 18th

It's Time To Put On Some Pants

When I stopped punching the clock, one of the first declarations of my new independence was the total abandonment of my pre-work routine: performing morning ablutions, getting dressed for work, commuting. It's not as if my office had a very strict dress code, but I considered the hour it took to get ready for the job a tremendous pain.

So I stopped doing it. I went unshaven, wore my pajamas for most of the day until yoga, and generally got my slovenly on.

Then I discovered something - I just couldn't get as much work done in my pajamas. My pajamas are my official uniform for laziness, and while I'm wearing them, my mind expects to laze. Years of school and employment have trained my brain for a distinct cognitive shift from lounging around the house to laboring at my place of employment, and this shift is triggered by getting dressed.

So now I find myself again performing morning ablutions and getting dressed for work. My work clothes are just a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, but the clothes make all the difference in the world.

When it's time to go to work, it's time to put on some pants.

I Think I'm Gonna Bomb A Town

Lately, I've been encountering a fair amount of synchronicity. But when you're a writer working on a story you're excited about, a little morphic resonance is perfectly normal.

A couple nights ago, I was walking into the local bookstore, when I noticed a sign trumpeting the announcement that LL Cool J was signing books on the third floor. Gone was the obligatory muzak - instead, the store was bumping some classic LL joints. Softly, of course; there's something very incongruous about spinning thug beats at cocktail party volume.

Ignoring the fact that the man who was at one time the toughest man in hip-hop was now signing copies of an exercise book in Barnes and Noble, I took the escalators up, and there he was. This was my very first LL sighting, and just a little underwhelming, especially considering how ardent a fan I was when I was, say, twelve.

But I couldn't help but find the event just a little auspicious, as I've been thinking about Mr. Todd Smith. A lot.

As a screenwriter, I have to endure a fair amount of slights and rejections. So many that lately, I've often hoped that my next script makes as large a splash as LL's early forays into hip-hop. In fact, I've had the recurring thought hoping that this next script hits like Mama Said Knock You Out, one of the finest examples of the classic braggadocio form in all of hip-hop.

Ordinarily, I'd dismiss this event as just another sighting of a b-lister in a city filled with them. But it's my very first LL sighting ever, and it comes at a moment when I happen to be invoking his spirit often.

I'll take what I can get.

Download: Sly & The Family Stone - Trip To Your Heart (MP3)

The Secret Lesson of High School

The novelist Douglas Coupland appears in a new magazine ad for Blackberry phones. He is casually posed in what appear to be stylish old-man pajamas, looking pensive as he takes a call from the zeitgeist. The ad states that Coupland writes "two hours a day."

What?

Aside from the revelation that Coupland actually uses a Blackberry, I find the claim that this prolific novelist - whose last tome weighed in at five hundred pages - writes only a couple hours a day to be astonishing. The ad goes on to assert that that Coupland spends the rest of his day engaged in design and art projects.

As someone who now dictates the entirety of his own hours, I think about workflow effiency a lot. When you're cashflow negative, and you're on a deadline, the question of how productive you are often rears its head.

The most efficient period of my life - the time when I felt like I was accomplishing the most - was high school. I have never felt quite as productive as I was then - felt being a very telling word. After all, how productive could doing menial Spanish translation exercises and simple chemistry problems be? Even this humble blog post requires more mental resources than much of my high school curriculum.

But even if I wasn't solving the world's problems in high school, I still felt like a very productive person. And that feeling is one of the most elusive and valuable ones for anyone who works, especially those of us who sit for large amounts of time in front of a monitor. How did high school, of all endeavors, achieve that effect?

My belief is that the great implicit lesson of high school is this:

Your first 45 minutes engaged in any endeavor are always more productive than your next.

Your entire day is engineered to conform to this axiom. You are always switching modes - subject to subject, mental to phyiscal activity, time for lunch - after three quarters of an hour. Very few things in high school require more than 45 minutes of your attention. It demands smaller bursts of concentration, as opposed to long grinds. Now ponder the fact that a job will often require you to focus on the same problem for the entire day.

And so, I've tried to structure my day the same way that Douglas Coupland does: as if I were still in school. (In his Blackberry ad, Coupland even goes so far as to say, "I've basically turned my life into art school.") I obviously don't have the same curricular breadth that I did in high school, but I attempt to break my work into 45-minute problems, and rotate among different "disciplines" within screenwriting. I'll work on a character's emotional story for an hour, and then switch to action sequence design, and then on to villain character design. I also switch modes of activity by going to PE (read: yoga) everyday. And I always take time out to feed myself well - another manner of switching modes.

The result of this high school-like regimen is a significant increase in my output without a corresponding dramatic increase in the actual amount of time I spend writing. Like Coupland, I really only spend a few hours each day engaged in the head-against-desk-banging that constitutes the activity of writing. But as they were in school, those hours are easy(er) and fast(er), and the only demand upon my time is that I solve a handful of manageable problems.

2007: Let's Do This

I'm supposed to be back in town today. Due to some unforeseen delays in the manufacture of a nightguard for my teeth, I'm out for another week.

It's been a good vacation, involving lots of sushi, gambling, and movies. A couple of our holiday traditions: 1) my mom and I like to hit the after Christmas sales at the department stores and compete to see who can receive the greatest percetage off a sale item. (I came in at fifty off a wool coat, and my mom came in at seventy-two off a pair of shoes.) 2) Marathon video game sessions among my brothers and my cousins. Previously, the game of choice was Starcraft. This year, it was Wii Sports. Both my brother and I can semi-consistently throw turkeys, which is inexplicable and thrilling. I'm highly anticipating the next iterations of Mario Golf and Madden, and I don't give a shit about golf or football, which can only mean that Nintendo's mojo is surely working its magic.

But now that January is here, I've got to go back to work, especially if I want to hit my next milestone, which is the first draft of my new script. Working from Dallas is difficult but possible; I competed much of my outline while my mom was in the hospital recovering from surgery. But Dallas requires a superhuman kind of discipline, since my brain is hard-wired to shut down when I'm in Collin County. And given how this county voted in the last several elections, mine isn't the only one.

Here's the plan for the week:

• coordinate with travel partners on our forthcoming sojourn to Japan and China
• daily meditation
• spend at least a few hours every day kicking the outline around
• go running every day
• visit the dollar theater (why don't they have these in LA?!) at least two times
• get my dry cleaning done