Pressure, Resistance

Have you noticed how when you are getting closer to achieving a specific goal, you feel more Resistance?

Like when you put a mobile phone too close to your speaker system. The closer the phone, the more noise, interference and squelch.

This Resistance can be used as a guiding sign of the fact that what you are about to achieve, is very important to your true purpose.

The more resistance, the more noise inside your head, the more that little voice of sabotage and doubt tries to get in on the action.

When you are writing for example, a Feature Film Screenplay, you feel this resistance very strongly and in the most unlikely ways.

Regardless of how you actually approach writing scripts, and the methods are as varied as are the writers, your overiding goal is to complete The Script and end up with approximately 90-120 pages of properly formatted A4 paper in 12 point courier.

As well as all the correct typing, you would more importantly appreciate having the initial basis for a a good story well told, that you can go back to at sometime in the future and rewrite into a much better script.

As everybody's first draft is usually godawful, with the occassional glimmer of excellence in amongst the pigswill, then it's almost obvious that at some stage of the creative process you will find one of your inner voices (the Dr. Evil one), trying to communicate with you.

Firstly when you've written X amount of pages, that voice of doom will tell you that 'there's no point continuing with it, because it's rubbish anyway and you should give up. No-one's going to want to read it/ make it etc'.

This is the tosspot that tells you to 'be realistic' (as reality is often very boring, I suggest you tell it to 'fuck off and shut up').

Then later in the process that same voice, clever little bugger that it is, will say 'Ah it's not bad, but it's not good enough and therefore you should abandon it now and do something else'.

The perfectionist voice is a horrible little turd floating on the vat of your creative juice.

Unfortunately it's also very clever and can keep manifesting itself in various formats over and over again.

It has a more subtle version of itself such as 'It's pretty good in places, but stop now and put it to one side and then have a go in a bit'.

That last one is a combination of Procrastination and Perfectionism and is a real bastard to kick, because it seems so plausible.

After all, the script isn't good enough (at this point) and if you allow yourself to be convinced that it will never be good enough, then you will quit before you've finished the script (avoid 'all or nothing' thinking like 'never' and 'I always' etc).

Even better is that one day you'll think what you're writing is absolutely brilliant and the next that what you are writing is absolute shite. And you will be wrong in both cases.

Regardless of these swings doors marked 'in and out of depair', I've completed Ten Feature Film Scripts now and there wasn't a day of writing where I didn't experience these very same emotions, inner statements and snakepits.

But regardless, I have kept going, I have completed each script and endless rewrites of these scripts and I march on, because all forms of writing make me happy.

My point to you is that if I can do it, then so can you in whatever it is that you want to achieve. You might not be interested in writing Feature Film Scripts, Copywriting, How To Ebooks etc but you might want to climb ever mountain over three thousand feet in the British Isles or eat at every Little Chef restaurant on the A1 duel carriagway.

Whatever your goal is please remember that it is 'Difficult, but not impossible'.