Getting lit (not like that)
Oh, hi friends!
What lights you up?
Interesting question, right?
Different from What’s your passion? or What do you love? or What should I quit my job and pursue to the detriment of my health and resources and sanity? Those are…trickier.
Lighting up is something you feel. It’s physical. Chemical? Whatever it is, it’s powerful.
I got the idea for this question listening to this podcast with Tony Robbins and Ray Dalio.
And I think it can manifest in so many ways. I feel “lit up” reading plays and scripts, watching theater, filming my infamous Porg videos, and talking to people about their creative projects.
My light feels, um, dimmed by…well, lots of things.
Paying attention to that difference might help all of us see…
When am I living in the dark?
And how can I spend more time in the light?
Dear Everyone Working on Something That’s Not Quite Working,
Here is some advice from screenwriter Damon Lindelof that I have returned to many times.
"The biggest challenge is pushing through this idea of getting it right the first time. Especially when you’re adapting something that already exists, or rewriting another writer, or even writing something your own. I think that people call this writer’s block; it’s not, there is no writer’s block in television, because the deadlines are—when you feel the heat under your feet and the spear in your back, those are great things for a writer ’cause there has to be something to shoot.
But I do feel a mistake that I made early in my career was that I was very precious about my writing and so I wanted the first thing that flowed through my fingers onto the page to be the thing, versus basically doing what I do now, which is saying, ‘This thing that is coming out of my mind and my fingers right now is not what they’re going to make. I’m nine iterations away from that. Nine drafts away from writing the thing that’s good. This is going to be shit. And three or four drafts from now, it’s going to start to be less bad, and four drafts after that, it actually might be good.’
And that really relaxes me in terms of my process, because I think that a lot of us hold ourselves to a very high standard—that’s great, but the first thing that comes is very rarely going to be great, and in fact for me, it’s never the first thing, [that] has never been great. This is a very longwinded answer to a very simple question, but that challenge still exists for me, which is I want everything to be great, and it’s frustrating when it’s not. But it very rarely is. The path to making something great is drafts."
Oh look, it’s Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ben Platt singing a beautiful song, together. *head and heart explodes in unison*
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara