How to Open Up the Channel & Write

Try this.

The only way I write anything worth anything is by cooking.

If I sit down at the computer and try to think my way through an idea, I'm like a toddler playing Pac-Man. Just repeatedly driving myself headfirst into a dead end as a hungry ghost prepares to eat me alive.

This is what writing is like when my Thinking, Logical Brain is thinking too hard.

My Brain has taken in too much info.

It has seen Screenwriting Twitter go crazy over the use of ‘We see’.

It's read trade reports which imply the only way to get paid is to make a genre film.

It's scrolled James Gunn's threads which sound so hopeful, helpful, and simple, and then my Brain wonders how It will apply all this hopeful, helpful, simple advice like “Motivation is irrelevant. A writer writes.” when the Brain has two young children under five who have yet-to-be-cleaned dirt under their nails, and require various amounts of liquid wiped from their faces in rhythmic rotation.

What I'm saying is, my Logical Brain has all sorts of guides telling It to write this way. Or that way. Or, not at all.

So many rules. Many of them insufferable.

So when I actually want to write something,

I cook.

I put on a podcast, or don't, and I cook.

It's how I came up with the meat (!) of Kinsley Vs. Episode 6.

The dialogue came to me while I was stirring my family's favorite meal — shakshuka.

So this week when I was once again hitting my head against the pixelated brick wall of re-write exhaustion and unclear why my silly little brain decided writing should be the silly little endeavor on which I break my silly little back,

I started chopping avocado.

I sautéed an onion.

I boiled an egg.

As I did, I half-listened to a podcast about Greek myths.

When the onions started snapping against the hot oil, I didn't even turn up the volume.

Because the pod was mere ambience. I wasn't really listening. I was attempting to float away.

And then I heard one random sentence that drew me back in…

It told the story of a myth I had never heard before.

Instantly I thought (cue: Catherine O'Hara's vocal work in Home Alone): 

THAT'S MY SCRIPT.

Not like… “oh that could be my script one day!”

Not like… “oh wow I can see how some elements of my script are slightly similar!”

Like… that's exactly the story I've already written on the page.

I didn't previously know this myth…

I mean… maybe it was stuck in my gray matter from high school? Maybe?

Or maybe the collective unconscious is a thing, like Carl Jung said?

Or maybe ideas are waiting for us to open up the channel so they can drop in, like Elizabeth Gilbert said:

“Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”

All I know is I then reported to my husband about this crazy myth match up, and he told me about an obscure 90s TV show which told the same myth story with a modern twist which….

you guessed it!….

was the same modern twist I had written into my 65-page first pass.

When I realized I had unknowingly written a myth practically verbatim, it illuminated an underlying structure I didn't even realize was there.

When I realized this obscure 90s TV show put the same twist on the myth I had put on it, it showed me where I could double down on the story.

From the onion ethers sprung forth a path.

Now I had the story's raw materials to take apart and rearrange.

I could push against the myth, or lean into it.

The plot went click.

So after I finished cooking and wiping the various amounts of liquids from my children's faces, I wrote.

Gilbert goes on:

"But sometimes – rarely, but magnificently – there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defenses might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration (the chills up the arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts, that feeling of falling into love or obsession). The idea will organize coincidences and portents to tumble across your path, to keep your interest keen. You will start to notice all sorts of signs pointing you towards the idea."

I suppose I could interpret these two coincidences as evidence that I did not have an original idea and should burn my screenplay. 

Or: It's already been done! You're not original!

Or, my personal fave: Hack!

Totally viable interpretations I suppose.

But I believe when our ideas chase us, they're not threatening us. 

I think ideas flirt. They instigate. They lovingly nudge.

They play a little hard to get, but they desperately want to be gotten.

Sometimes an idea will see an opening in the channel — a momentary slackening of our defenses as Gilbert says — and will wedge its foot in the door jamb before it closes.

Look, I'm not saying every time I fry an egg I'm having a transcendent creative revelation.

I guess what I'm saying is staying loose keeps the channel open (for me).

And staying loose is about showing up in the here and now (for me).

Staying loose / showing up / staying loose / showing up.

(Ad infinitum.)

For me, the channel won't open in my own spin-prone head, or in James Gunn's threads, or the latest “Hollywood is over!” headline.

It opens with the neutral, third path.

The material of the here and now.

Chop an onion.

Grate a lemon.

Boil the penne.

Write the words.