I’m beginning to see a pattern
1. The snowflake method of writing a novel, by Randy Ingermanson, step 8:
“Make a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your four-page plot outline. Make just one line for each scene. In one column, list the POV character. In another (wide) column, tell what happens. If you want to get fancy, add more columns that tell you how many pages you expect to write for the scene. A spreadsheet is ideal, because you can see the whole storyline at a glance, and it’s easy to move scenes around to reorder things.”
—
2. David Berman of Silver Jews in American Songwriter, July 2008:
“There is almost no artistry to touring and live playing. I looked at rock history and saw how all the greats lost their writing talents so early on. I’m sure it has to do with the touring. Musicians experience success before they have gained control of their craft. When it stops happening naturally, they are lost. They have no writing skills as they never had to develop them. When you are young, songs flow out without much prompting. After that, only with work.
I wrote the songs last summer, starting with a system of colored note cards, matching like with like until I had built the foundations of 10 or so songs. From that point the songs were written side by side.”
—
3. Charlie Kaufman on writing “Synecdoche, New York” in Creative Screenwriting, November 2008
“I go back and forth a lot. I discover something on page 70 and then I go back and set it up on page 30. It’s not like I’m just writing. I take a very, very long time before I actually start writing the script. I spend a lot of time taking notes about ideas and characters and themes. Months and months and months — so I have something in my head that’s pretty precise and concrete by the time I start working. I think that there’s some writing going on in some form even when I’m not writing. I feel like a few times, I’ve just tried ‘OK, I’ll just start to write,’ without knowing what I’m doing — it doesn’t really pay off for me, so I don’t do it that way.”
—-
4. New York Times article (by Ari Posner) about Mitchell Hurwitz, creator of “Arrested Development,” August 2004:
“This year’s work may be even more difficult. Creatively, Mr. Hurwitz and his staff must prove the brilliant first season was not a fluke… And so the writers’ room on the Fox lot is already decorated with multicolored cards listing ideas for the coming season.”
