In the Shooting People screenwriters network bulletin, Andy Conway refers to an interview he read with the Florian Henkel von Donnsersmark, writer-director of “The Lives of Others.” A teacher of von Donnersmark had his students write 14 treatments in eight weeks. The students didn’t know it at the time, but the teacher didn’t even read them, he threw them away. The point was to build up their writing muscles.
This reminded me of something similar I did when I was starting out. Frustrated that I seemed to be blocked from writing more than a couple of pages a day even when I had time to do more, I decided that I would set myself the challenge of writing an entire screenplay in one long weekend (actually, four days). I was house-sitting for my brother at the time and had no distractions. To make it a bit easier, I decided to use a Rider Haggard novel as my model. The result? A full-length, pretty bad screenplay and one writing block conquered.
If there is an aspect of writing that you’d like to improve, consider using the ‘overload’ method. For example, if you feel your descriptions aren’t very good, spend a day writing nothing but descriptions of things in your house, making them as vivid as possible. If dialogue is your weakness, focus on that. The point is not the quality of this material but overcoming your resistance or fear. It works!
