Guest Post: Memo to a Successful Writer by Dennis Palumbo

Hollywood on the Couch

The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.

by Dennis Palumbo

How to keep making it after you've made it





I’ve heard from a number of my Hollywood writing patients who are new to the business, as well as some successful veterans, ask me to write a column about them. People who are doing well, having their TV scripts and screenplays produced, being offered good deals.
 

So here goes.

It doesn’t suck. When they option your work, when your film is opening or your pilot is picked up, it can be very sweet indeed.

There are still challenges, of course. Like keeping your focus on the writing, and not getting caught up in just having meetings and developing pitches. Not to mention the effort it takes, in the midst of all the business concerns, to remember why you wanted to write in the first place.

Success in the industry can be as terrifying as it is exciting, as complicated as it is gratifying. But it’s worth it. Seeing your words transformed into feature films and TV episodes, getting to communicate what’s in your mind and heart to countless others, is a profound joy.

That said, here are some things to remember to help keep you grounded...and keep you writing.


YOU ARE ENOUGH. You have everything you need—right now—to be the writer you want to be. As Emerson said, “To know that what is true for you in your private heart is true for everyone—that is genius.” Which means each writer has within him or her the entire range of human experience. If you feel it and think it, pretty much everyone else does, too. So keep mining your own particular thoughts and feelings, what excites or worries or intrigues you, and you’ll have an inexhaustible supply of things to write about.

STAY CURIOUS. One of the great gifts that creative people tend to share is a sense of wonder. The best way to keep your writing fresh and your ideas unique is to be open to new experiences, concepts and situations. Moreover, smart writers are always reading new things, discovering new films or innovative TV programs—in other words, keeping their eyes and ears open to what else is going on around them creatively.

BE IN THE WORLD. I don’t mean you have to watch CNN 24/7, but an understanding of the issues and stresses confronting the people around you is crucial to keeping your writing relevant. Whether you write the broadest of comedies or the most sober of dramas, the best writing is informed by the context in which it is created. Our own culture—political, social, economic—is and has always been the well-spring for the most creative story-telling. It’s what makes a narrative or a collection of characters—and their concerns—relatable to the audience.

DON’T PANIC IF YOU GET STUCK. What does it mean if, in the midst of a script or treatment, you get stuck? It means you’re a writer—and that’s all it means. Writing is hard (and good writing is harder!), so getting stuck, or having doubts about which direction to take the narrative, is just part of the job. Writers only get in trouble when they give their writing problems a personal meaning—when they think it’s evidence of some defect or inadequacy in themselves. It isn’t. In my experience, once I help patients challenge the notion that a writing problem indicates something deficient in them, they tend to be better able to grapple with the actual problem itself—and work through it.

TRUST YOURSELF. Your talent, instincts and hard work have gotten you this far, so it’s unlikely that this skill set will abandon you. No matter how things are going, trust yourself. Every writer, regardless of success, has to navigate the ups and downs of the business. This is a lot easier to do if you can trust yourself—creatively, professionally and personally. You’re the one knows best how to tell a story, craft compelling characters, build to a suspenseful moment or the pay-off to a joke. You know best how to thrill an audience, how to make them laugh and cry and think.

Which means, no matter what, remember who you are and what you can do





Reposted from Psychology Today

Breaking News: Writing is Hard! by Dennis Palumbo Featured in the April/May Issue of Suspense Magazine

Work the problem---don't make yourself the problem.

 

AprilMay2016issue

As a psychotherapist who specializes in working with creative people, I'm often asked to speak at writing conferences. At one such recent event, an audience member stood up and asked a question.

"When I write," he said, "I feel like I don't always know what I'm doing. I go over stuff, then I cross stuff out, then I try something else...I feel like I'm losing it sometimes. What does that mean?"

I shrugged. "It means you're a writer."

"But I spend a lot of time worrying, never sure whether or not the damned thing is working..."

"Sounds like writing to me."

This did not erase the perplexed look on his face.

"I don't know about that." He glanced around the crowded room. "I mean, I heard the other day on the radio that we're all crazy."

"Who's crazy?"

"Us. Writers. Artists in general. This shrink was on some talk show on NPR, and he said it's been proven that we're all bipolar."

"I'm confused. Do you mean that because you're a writer you're bipolar, or does being bipolar cause you to be a writer?"

"He said it could be one or the other, but it could be both.What do you think?"

"I think I'm gonna skip the next NPR pledge drive."

Apparently, it's in fashion again: the notion that the creative impulse, with its occasional emotional difficulties, is merely the product of a psychological disorder. It must be, the argument goes, given how much emotional turmoil, stress and disordered mood is often associated with it.

The current favorite diagnosis for artists, particularly writers, is bipolar disorder---what used to be called manic-depression.

In fact, there's a movie currently in release---based on Kay Jamison's influential book, Touched With Fire---that reinforces this very concept. But the idea that writers are of a single and highly neurotic type goes all the way back to---who else?---Freud. Later, in the 1950's, a fellow named Edmund Bergler (credited, by the way, with inventing the term "writer's block") wrote a number of books on the subject. His explanation for the reason that writers write? "Psychic masochism."

Of course, the idea that the artistic impulse is inevitably the product of a psychological condition is not new. History is filled with examples of the tormented artist stricken with melancholy, going on drunken binges, cutting off an ear, and generally behaving---as we therapists like to say---inappropriately. But to infer that some kind of "craziness" underlies creative endeavor, or, even worse, that the impulse to create is itself an indicator of some clinical condition is just plain wrong.

Dennis Palumbo

First, to whatever extent a therapist believes in the validity of diagnostic
labels like "bipolar," one thing is clear: Labels exist for the convenience of the labeler. How helpful they are to the artistic person is debatable.

Second, claiming that the creative impulse comes from any one source---whether mania, psychosis or the moon---is both ludicrous and potentially harmful. Ludicrous because it's oversimplified and inconsistent with the lived experience of countless artists. Potentially harmful because it undervalues the mysterious, indefinable aspects of the creative act.

I'm reminded of a quote by H.L. Mencken, who said, "There is always an easy solution to every human problem---neat, plausible and wrong." The tendency to see a writer's creative struggles solely in terms of evidencing a psychological problem betrays a profound narrowness in scope, imagination, and appreciation for the hidden ways of the artistic heart.

The point is, yes, perhaps Van Gogh did suffer from symptoms that we might label bipolar. But what is also true---and certainly more important---is that he was supremely talented. Both facts can co-exist, without one necessarily causing the other.

Which brings me back to that worried audience member. Because the truth is, he's not alone in his concern about what his creative struggles mean. Many writer patients in my therapy practice wonder about the same thing, given the level of anxiety, self-doubt and fear of shameful self-exposure that accompanies the writing of most scripts, plays, essays or novels.

"If I'm plagued with anxiety," he or she says, "doesn't that say something about the quality of what I'm writing? Let's face it: if I was any good, I wouldn't be going through this agony. If this story really worked, I wouldn't be bumping up against so many technical problems, narrative glitches, inconsistencies in some of the characters. Right?"

Wrong. You're bumping up against technical problems, narrative glitches and issues with some of your characters for a very simple reason. WRITING IS HARD.

This isn't to say that writing isn't often accompanied by anxiety, manifesting in a dozen different ways, from sleepless nights to procrastination to substance abuse. And these psychological aspects ought to be addressed. But these symptoms---and the self-recriminating meanings we give them---are not the reason that writing is difficult. Because whether or not a writer suffers from these symptoms, in small measure or to a crippling extent, the reality is that telling a good story with intelligence, emotional truth and narrative complexity is hard. Really, really hard.

Let me put it another way: what I sometimes tell my writer patients, and what I'm trying to stress here, is that an artist's job is to create. When you create anything---whether a script or a novel, whether painting a landscape or writing a song---you're bound to run into problems. Problems inherent in the doing of the task. So your real, pragmatic, fundamental job is to work on these problems. Solve the difficulties. Answer the nagging questions.

In other words, I believe you should, as a creative person, work the problem, instead of making yourself the problem. You and your psychological issues aside, problems with your work are inherent in doing that work.

Case in point: one of my friends is a Buddhist monk, whose composure and equilibrium is, in my experience of him, a model of psychological well-being. He's also a poet. The last time I spoke with him, he complained about this long poem he was laboring over. "Man," he said, "writing poetry's a bitch."

Note that he didn't say anything self-recriminating about his talent, his character, his work ethic, or his puny place in the pantheon of poets. He didn't see his struggles and artistic frustration as evidence of a failure in himself. Or a reflection of his neurotic insecurity. He merely stated that writing poetry is hard.

So, once again: when you come up against some difficulty in your writing, work the problem---don't make yourself the problem. You may have issues to be addressed, but the difficulties of writing are inherent in the task, not a reflection of your failings as either a person or a writer.

Remember, writing is hard. Writing anything is hard. Especially if you're trying your best.

Which reminds me of an old Hollywood story. Years ago, back in the days of the studio system, a roomful of contract writers were going crazy trying to solve an Act Two problem in a script they were doing. After a week of teeth-gnashing and garment-rending, a new young writer was brought into the room. In a matter of minutes, he hit upon the solution. To which one of the exhausted old veterans mumbled, "Sure he solved it. He didn't know how hard it was."

---------------------------------

Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter (MY FAVORITE YEAR; WELCOME BACK, KOTTER, etc.), Dennis Palumbo is now a licensed psychotherapist and author of the Daniel Rinaldi mystery series. More info at www.dennispalumbo.com (link is external)

Guest Post: Perfect Timing, and How to Get It by Dennis Palumbo

Hollywood on the Couch

The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.

by Dennis Palumbo

Knowing what to write and when to write it

Back in high school, during the late 1960’s, I was part of a tragically un-hip rock band. Desperate to make it big (at least in Pittsburgh), and to ride the wave of the current fashion, we pooled all our available cash and purchased five extremely groovy Nehru jackets. I swear, the very next day, Nehru jackets were “out.” No self-respecting rocker would be caught dead in one.

What this anecdote illustrates, among other things, is the peril of bad timing. I’ve certainly seen this in my work with the creative patients in my therapy practice. Over the years, this painful, maddening aspect of the artistic life has been a common complaint, especially among writers.

“The timing sucked,” a disgruntled TV or screenwriter will say, as another cherished project fails to take wing.

We all know what that’s about. You labor for months on a spec feature script about a murder on a space station, for example, only to learn that a similar idea’s just been put into production. Or you have a great idea for an historical romance, but your agent convinces you it’s not commercial. Then, the following year, two films with similar themes are released to great critical and box-office success.

Recently, I saw an author on PBS whose novel was then riding high on the best-seller lists. He revealed that he’d actually written it 25 years before, but its “government conspiracy”-themed story got it rejected by a dozen publishers.

“This was the post-Watergate era,” he explained. “Political cover-ups weren’t considered sexy anymore.” Only after the recent revelations of the NSA’s dubious actions in the name of national security, and the success of TV series like Homeland, was the author emboldened to send his (updated) manuscript out again. This time it was accepted by the first publisher who read it.

Timing. Every writer has felt its favor and its sting. Certainly, Hollywood is filled with stories of languishing scripts miraculously resuscitated by the interest of an actor who was suddenly bankable enough to get the movie made. Conversely, numerous films and TV series---apparently ahead of their time---appeared before the audience was ready for the material and thus failed.

“So?” you may be saying.The timing of what we write and when we write it is out of our control, right? Case in point: the creators of the cult TV series Archer have portrayed their heroes working for a spy agency called, unfortunately, ISIS. Now, given the current association with that acronym, they’ve announced that the agency’s name will change.

They’re not alone. Every day, films, books and TV series are routinely scuttled by the emotional intensity or political sensitivity of current events. (Just as an equal number of projects seek to capitalize on these same events.)

Yes, timing---like success---is essentially out of our control. However, also like success, there are certain things a writer can do to improve the odds.

For example, writers of all stripes need to be aware of the times in which they live---culturally, politically, and artistically. You might not be lucky enough to write something that hits just as the next wave of the zeitgeist is cresting, but you ought to at least be somewhere near the beach. Nothing is so dispiriting as reading a novel or seeing a film by a veteran writer who seems not to have looked out a window in 20 years.

In addition, the chances of being favored by good fortune (another definition of great timing) improve to the degree to which you apply effort. Pushing yourself to go deeper into character and narrative, to toil more consistently at your craft, to take creative risks. I’m speaking, regrettably, about hard work.

I know too many writers who steadfastly refuse to write a new spec script or take a fresh pass at a novel that isn’t working. In my view, they need to see their task not merely as the completion of this or that project, but as an ongoing, unfolding process of craft-building and discovery, whereby the rewards (if they are to come) arrive unannounced and unforeseen. In which case, success then no longer seems a product of good timing but of dutiful, consistent labor.

As legendary golfer Ben Hogan remarked when praised for his good luck on the green, “Yes, I’m lucky. And the harder I work, the luckier I get.”

Does hard work and artistic relevance guarantee that the gods of timing will smile on your efforts? Nope. But then, if you want guarantees, you’re in the wrong business.

However, there’s one thing I can guarantee will reduce even the possibility of good timing in one’s career: attempting to coerce or anticipate it. Like in my story about the Nehru jackets, all such attempts at success by pursuing the currently fashionable are by their nature doomed. Such as trying to write a thriller “just like” the ones topping the best-seller lists. Or trying to craft an R-rated comedic romp “just like” the ones tearing up the box office.

Sorry to say, in terms of mass appeal, that particular ship has sailed. That cultural moment has passed. And while such moments may be occasionally revisited, as with “retro” clothes and re-booted TV shows, the triumphs are brief, little more than nostalgic back-steps on the continuing path toward an unknown future.

See, that’s the paradox of timing: the only possible preparation for showing up at the right time with the right product involves working authentically in the here-and-now, oblivious to what the outcome of your labors will be.

Which brings me back to my sorry little band. Rather than spending money on new jackets, we would have been better off spending more time rehearsing. Not that I’m convinced this would’ve propelled us to rock ‘n’ roll fame and fortune---but, hey, stranger things have happened. It’s all in the timing.


Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter (My Favorite Year; Welcome Back, Kotter, etc.), DENNIS PALUMBO is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of the Daniel Rinaldi mystery series. For more info, please visit www.dennispalumbo.com.


Reposted from Hollywood on the Couch

Guest Post: Enough: How Not to Over-Write by Dennis Palumbo

How to write enough (but just enough) to engage the reader

 Hollywood on the Couch

The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.

by Dennis Palumbo

There’s a great moment in the classic film Key Largo, when gangster Edward G. Robinson is asked—given the extent of his wealth and power—what he could possibly still want. “More,” he famously answers.

More. Kind of the American credo in a nutshell, which isn’t as damning as it sounds. The word "more," when appearing before such other words as individual rights, artistic freedom and access to information, stands as a proud element of the Western imperative. On the downside, more has also fueled global climate change, the growing gulf between people’s incomes, and an almost obscene preoccupation with material things. When it comes to life in general, "more" is definitely a two-edged sword.

I’d argue that the same holds true with the craft of writing. More is not always better. In a screenplay, for example, an overwritten patch of description can bring the reader to a screeching halt, draining the narrative of pace and forward momentum.
Find a Therapist


Or take monologues. Unless used sparingly, and with a definite intent, a monologue in a film or TV script can often make the character just seem wordy. (Exceptions abound, of course. Such powerhouse writers as Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling and Quentin Tarantino come to mind. And even they occasionally fell prey to mere self-indulgence.)

In a short story or novel, endless words of description—whether of place, a character’s physical appearance, or in the service of the author’s thematic or philosophical interests—can slow the narrative to a crawl.

Overwriting, it’s safe to say, is by general agreement a bad thing. Then why do so many writers do it?

Let’s be clear: I’m not talking about the normal, expected overwriting that characterizes your first draft. During those explosive, flowing, unfolding bursts of creativity, your inner editor is—you hope—asleep at the switch until you get the myriad ideas, incidents, breath-taking narrative leaps and beside-the-point stretches of dialogue down. The first draft is when you do get to describe a character as “grungy, foul-smelling, disheveled, knuckle-dragging and poorly-dressed.” You can even add, “We are repulsed. Taken aback. Aghast. The camera’s eye wants to turn away.” The more socially-conscious might note: “A grim reminder of the dismantling of the welfare system’s safety net in the past thirty years.”

No matter. All that hooey gets edited out in later drafts. Or should. Yet, for some writers, it feels like tearing a piece of their skin away to delete any of it. Why? Is it because they think every word is golden? Hardly. In fact, it’s the reverse.

In my experience with the writer patients in my therapy practice, those who tend to overwrite are usually struggling, whether they know it or not, with issues of self-trust. Either they don’t feel entitled to be writing in the first place and thus need a cornucopia of words to try to mask this, or else they feel unsure of their talent and craft. If the latter is the case, these writers try to convince the reader of the legitimacy of the idea or emotion or scene being depicted by packing it with adjectives, metaphors and authorial asides. Anything—and everything—to make sure the reader gets it.

On the other hand, writers who trust their skills and/or feel entitled to be writing at all have faith in the narrative and emotional power of the single appropriate phrase, the short though vivid description, the seemingly simple line of dialogue freighted with meaningful subtext.

The ancient poet Gensei wrote: “The point of life is to know what’s enough.” That’s the point of writing as well. Not only does self-trust enable writers to shape their work into its most effective, compelling form, but such writing also has enough “air” in it to allow readers to bring their own experiences to what they’re reading (or seeing onscreen), thus increasing the work’s relevancy.

In other words, good writing is what is evoked in the spaces between the written lines. Good writers have enough trust in themselves to know that there’s something there, and that they’ve written enough (but just enough) to convey the thought that sparks the echoing thought in the reader’s mind. They’ve portrayed enough of the character’s emotional life to resonate with similar aspects of the reader’s inner world. A single descriptive word, such as barren or choked or remorseless, can bring with it a wealth of associations to thoughts, feelings and images waiting to be stirred into life in the reader’s imagination.

How do writers develop self-trust? The way we do in most other aspects of life. By doing. Writing. Risking that our readers will follow us where we’re going; that what we have to say, or what we’ve always felt, or what we openly fear or yearn for, will find a recognizable home in the reader’s heart. Self-trust, like it or not, is born of risk. As are most worthwhile things.

Ultimately, if we believe we ourselves are enough, we’ll believe that what we’re writing is enough, too.

Reposted From Hollywood on the Couch

Guest Post: Enough: How Not to Over-Write by Dennis Palumbo

Hollywood on the Couch

The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.

How to write enough (but just enough) to engage the reader

There’s a great moment in the classic film Key Largo, when gangster Edward G. Robinson is asked—given the extent of his wealth and power—what he could possibly still want. “More,” he famously answers.

More. Kind of the American credo in a nutshell, which isn’t as damning as it sounds. The word "more," when appearing before such other words as individual rights, artistic freedom and access to information, stands as a proud element of the Western imperative. On the downside, more has also fueled global climate change, the growing gulf between people’s incomes, and an almost obscene preoccupation with material things. When it comes to life in general, "more" is definitely a two-edged sword.

I’d argue that the same holds true with the craft of writing. More is not always better. In a screenplay, for example, an overwritten patch of description can bring the reader to a screeching halt, draining the narrative of pace and forward momentum.
Find a Therapist

Or take monologues. Unless used sparingly, and with a definite intent, a monologue in a film or TV script can often make the character just seem wordy. (Exceptions abound, of course. Such powerhouse writers as Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling and Quentin Tarantino come to mind. And even they occasionally fell prey to mere self-indulgence.)

In a short story or novel, endless words of description—whether of place, a character’s physical appearance, or in the service of the author’s thematic or philosophical interests—can slow the narrative to a crawl.

Overwriting, it’s safe to say, is by general agreement a bad thing. Then why do so many writers do it?

Let’s be clear: I’m not talking about the normal, expected overwriting that characterizes your first draft. During those explosive, flowing, unfolding bursts of creativity, your inner editor is—you hope—asleep at the switch until you get the myriad ideas, incidents, breath-taking narrative leaps and beside-the-point stretches of dialogue down. The first draft is when you do get to describe a character as “grungy, foul-smelling, disheveled, knuckle-dragging and poorly-dressed.” You can even add, “We are repulsed. Taken aback. Aghast. The camera’s eye wants to turn away.” The more socially-conscious might note: “A grim reminder of the dismantling of the welfare system’s safety net in the past thirty years.”

No matter. All that hooey gets edited out in later drafts. Or should. Yet, for some writers, it feels like tearing a piece of their skin away to delete any of it. Why? Is it because they think every word is golden? Hardly. In fact, it’s the reverse.

In my experience with the writer patients in my therapy practice, those who tend to overwrite are usually struggling, whether they know it or not, with issues of self-trust. Either they don’t feel entitled to be writing in the first place and thus need a cornucopia of words to try to mask this, or else they feel unsure of their talent and craft. If the latter is the case, these writers try to convince the reader of the legitimacy of the idea or emotion or scene being depicted by packing it with adjectives, metaphors and authorial asides. Anything—and everything—to make sure the reader gets it.

On the other hand, writers who trust their skills and/or feel entitled to be writing at all have faith in the narrative and emotional power of the single appropriate phrase, the short though vivid description, the seemingly simple line of dialogue freighted with meaningful subtext.

The ancient poet Gensei wrote: “The point of life is to know what’s enough.” That’s the point of writing as well. Not only does self-trust enable writers to shape their work into its most effective, compelling form, but such writing also has enough “air” in it to allow readers to bring their own experiences to what they’re reading (or seeing onscreen), thus increasing the work’s relevancy.

In other words, good writing is what is evoked in the spaces between the written lines. Good writers have enough trust in themselves to know that there’s something there, and that they’ve written enough (but just enough) to convey the thought that sparks the echoing thought in the reader’s mind. They’ve portrayed enough of the character’s emotional life to resonate with similar aspects of the reader’s inner world. A single descriptive word, such as barren or choked or remorseless, can bring with it a wealth of associations to thoughts, feelings and images waiting to be stirred into life in the reader’s imagination.

How do writers develop self-trust? The way we do in most other aspects of life. By doing. Writing. Risking that our readers will follow us where we’re going; that what we have to say, or what we’ve always felt, or what we openly fear or yearn for, will find a recognizable home in the reader’s heart. Self-trust, like it or not, is born of risk. As are most worthwhile things.

Ultimately, if we believe we ourselves are enough, we’ll believe that what we’re writing is enough, too.

Reposted From Hollywood on the Couch

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A former Hollywood screenwriter, DENNIS PALUMBO is now a licensed psychotherapist in private practice. He’s also the author of the Daniel Rinaldi series of mysteries. For more info, please visit www.dennispalumbo.com

Guest Post: Memo to a Successful Writer by Dennis Palumbo

Hollywood on the Couch
The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.
by Dennis Palumbo

How to keep making it after you've made it


I’ve heard from a number of my Hollywood writing patients who are new to the business, as well as some successful veterans, ask me to write a column about them. People who are doing well, having their TV scripts and screenplays produced, being offered good deals.

So here goes.

It doesn’t suck. When they option your work, when your film is opening or your pilot is picked up, it can be very sweet indeed.

There are still challenges, of course. Like keeping your focus on the writing, and not getting caught up in just having meetings and developing pitches. Not to mention the effort it takes, in the midst of all the business concerns, to remember why you wanted to write in the first place.

Success in the industry can be as terrifying as it is exciting, as complicated as it is gratifying. But it’s worth it. Seeing your words transformed into feature films and TV episodes, getting to communicate what’s in your mind and heart to countless others, is a profound joy.

That said, here are some things to remember to help keep you grounded...and keep you writing.


YOU ARE ENOUGH. You have everything you need—right now—to be the writer you want to be. As Emerson said, “To know that what is true for you in your private heart is true for everyone—that is genius.” Which means each writer has within him or her the entire range of human experience. If you feel it and think it, pretty much everyone else does, too. So keep mining your own particular thoughts and feelings, what excites or worries or intrigues you, and you’ll have an inexhaustible supply of things to write about.

STAY CURIOUS. One of the great gifts that creative people tend to share is a sense of wonder. The best way to keep your writing fresh and your ideas unique is to be open to new experiences, concepts and situations. Moreover, smart writers are always reading new things, discovering new films or innovative TV programs—in other words, keeping their eyes and ears open to what else is going on around them creatively.

BE IN THE WORLD. I don’t mean you have to watch CNN 24/7, but an understanding of the issues and stresses confronting the people around you is crucial to keeping your writing relevant. Whether you write the broadest of comedies or the most sober of dramas, the best writing is informed by the context in which it is created. Our own culture—political, social, economic—is and has always been the well-spring for the most creative story-telling. It’s what makes a narrative or a collection of characters—and their concerns—relatable to the audience.

DON’T PANIC IF YOU GET STUCK. What does it mean if, in the midst of a script or treatment, you get stuck? It means you’re a writer—and that’s all it means. Writing is hard (and good writing is harder!), so getting stuck, or having doubts about which direction to take the narrative, is just part of the job. Writers only get in trouble when they give their writing problems a personal meaning—when they think it’s evidence of some defect or inadequacy in themselves. It isn’t. In my experience, once I help patients challenge the notion that a writing problem indicates something deficient in them, they tend to be better able to grapple with the actual problem itself—and work through it.

TRUST YOURSELF. Your talent, instincts and hard work have gotten you this far, so it’s unlikely that this skill set will abandon you. No matter how things are going, trust yourself. Every writer, regardless of success, has to navigate the ups and downs of the business. This is a lot easier to do if you can trust yourself—creatively, professionally and personally. You’re the one knows best how to tell a story, craft compelling characters, build to a suspenseful moment or the pay-off to a joke. You know best how to thrill an audience, how to make them laugh and cry and think.

Which means, no matter what, remember who you are and what you can do


Reposted from Psychology Today

Guest Post: Gut Check: Living the Writer's Life by Dennis Palumbo

 
Okay, here's the good news, at least from my perspective: my third crime novel, Night Terrors, has just been published by Poisoned Pen Press. It has fine reviews, a promising start on sales, and -- thanks to the publisher's art department -- an extremely cool cover.

So much for the good stuff.

But there's another side to the book's publication. As some of you may know, after a career as a screenwriter (My Favorite Year, Welcome Back, Kotter, etc.), I became a licensed psychotherapist specializing in creative issues. For over twenty years now I've counseled writers through the turmoil of early drafts, the terrors of manuscript submission, the perils of publication. I've helped them struggle with writer's block, procrastination and fear. I've consoled them in the face of an agent's neglect, a publisher's rejection, an editor's disrespect and an industry's indifference.

I mean, let's face it: I know the drill.

So how has it been for me, now just another author with a product hitting the marketplace? If anyone should be able to handle the expected pragmatic and emotional challenges, it's me. Right?

Guess again. In the months leading up to my new novel's release, I have (in no particular order) obsessed about the book's title, fantasized one minute about getting on the best-seller's list and then in the next was absolutely convinced that no one would buy it at all, yearned for my agent to be completely devoted to my personal and professional well-being to the exclusion of all else in his life, already mentally answered potential bad reviews with pithy, scathing rejoinders, and felt unloved and unappreciated when a friend even looked like he was anything less than totally thrilled or profoundly moved at the thought of my novel coming out.

Believe me, I could go on, but space doesn't permit. The point is, despite the knowledge and insight gained from long-time careers as both a writer and a therapist, I found myself wrestling with the same dilemmas as every other author.

Why? Because, like it or not, if you're a writer, there's no escaping the writer's life.

As I've learned with the publication of this new novel, when it comes to the feelings, obsessions and just plain worries that accompany any writer's efforts, there's no "Get out of jail free" card. Even when, like me, you've already published a novel previously, as well as a collection of mystery short stories, and even a nonfiction book about -- what else? -- how to deal with the up's and down's of the writer's life!

Which means that regardless of career experience, advancing age and sizeable amounts of therapy, there's no "cure" for the writer's life. As soon as a writer commits to the writing of a thing, he or she embarks on a journey through both an external world of crises and triumphs, and an internal world of feelings and belief systems.

And this is true for all writers, no matter their level of success, no matter how large and loyal their readership. After many years in the literary trenches, on both sides of the battlefield, I can posit with great assurance two simple facts: first, that all successful writers used to be struggling writers; and, second, that the successful ones still struggle. This is not merely philosophical ruminating on my part. As my recent experience with Mirror Image attests, this is the straight dope. One of those hard truths of the creative life. Bedrock.

On the other hand, I've negotiated the psychological rigors of publication about as well as can be expected. As both writer and therapist, I've learned -- and changed -- a lot over the years, and it's definitely made a difference.

The biggest change? Probably this: In many ways, I'm as neurotic and insecure as I ever was. I just don't hassle myself about it anymore. And although that might not be a cure, it's the next best thing.

Guest Post: Getting Out of Your Own Way by Dennis Palumbo

Hollywood on the Couch

The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.

by Dennis Palumbo

For an artist, "being yourself" may be simple, but it's not easy.

I want to talk about the most important thing a creative person must know how to do---which, for lack of a better phrase, is just to get out of his or her own way. Or as cellist Pablo Casals said, about playing music well, “Learn the notes and forget about ‘em.”

Simple, isn’t it? You have a story to tell, plot beats to tell it, characters to live it, and the will to create it. (You may even have a deal to deliver it.) All you have to do is get out of the way and let the creativity “happen.”

See? Simple, right? Not exactly. Because, as a former teacher of mine once remarked, “It may be simple, but it ain’t easy.”

For years, as a Hollywood screenwriter, I struggled to “get out of my own way,” without really understanding what that meant. The phrase always had a kind of down-home, common-sense, don’t-make-such-a-big-deal-out-of-it quality that I was often frustrated with myself for my difficulty in achieving it.

(Similar to my response to the advice to just “be myself,” whenever I was anxious about some upcoming interpersonal conflict. Again, simple but not easy.)

As it’s generally understood, “getting out of your own way” implies somehow putting aside the anxieties and doubts,ego concerns and career pressures, “mental blocks” and “critical inner voices”---pick your favorite pet term---that stand between you and the effortless flow of work. As though, if you just did enough therapy, or meditated deeply enough, or visualized sincerely enough, or manifested enough positive energy, you could disavow all the “stuff” that gets in the way of your creativity.

If only, in other words, you were different than who you are.

Because the simple fact is, we do bring our “stuff” to our creative endeavors, “stuff” that runs the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime, the irritating to the overwhelming. Some artists can’t get past their fear of failure; some struggle with a nagging sense of inadequacy regarding their talent; some feel the pressure of being unknown and thus feeling powerless. (Or even, ironically, the reverse: Norman Mailer once talked of the feeling of creative paralysis that came over him after he’d achieved fame. “It wasn’t just me sitting down to write,” he said. “It was Norman Mailer sitting down to write. I had to live up to him.”)

Add to that the relationship issues, financial pressures, marketplace fluctuations, and sense of isolation that creative types must contend with on a daily basis---and suddenly the amount of “stuff” you’re supposed to put aside in order to “get out of your own way” starts to feel like a veritable mountain of personal baggage.

That’s because it is. Each of us lugs around enough baggage to warrant the name Samsonite. It’s the trait we share with every other human being. Our “stuff” is who we are. Our hopes and fears, faith and doubt, empathy and envy, loves and hatreds and fantasies and habits and prejudices and favorite movies and the way we tie our shoes and whether we like asparagus and on and on and on. That’s us. Human beings.

One particular subset of human beings, creative artists, have all the same “stuff” as the rest of the tribe. Except for the need and desire to create art out of it. We may produce stories or screenplays. Or films or TV pilots. Or novels, poems, and songs. But what all artists, regardless of approach, really do is try to make sense of their “stuff.” In a language or medium or form that is understandable to the audience. In other words, “stuff” talking to “stuff.”

Now comes the paradox. If I, the artist, get out of my own way---that is, put my “stuff” aside so I can create---what’s left to explore creatively? My “stuff” is the raw materials of my work.

In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and just say it: there is nothing but stuff. Which is great, because that means I’ll never run out of raw material. As long as I’m a human being, I have an inexhaustible supply.

I began this column by stating that the most important thing an artist had to do was get out of his or her own way. Haven’t I just challenged this statement? No. I’m only challenging the conventional view of what that means.

Let me explain: From my perspective, a creative artist who invites all of who he or she is into the mix---who sits down to work engulfed in “stuff,” yet doesn’t give these thoughts and feelings a negative connotation; who in fact strives to accept and integrate whatever thoughts and feelings emerge---this artist has truly gotten out of his or her own way.

From this standpoint, it’s only by labeling a thought or feeling as either good or bad, productive or harmful, that you’re actually getting in your own way. Restricting your creative flow.

Getting out of your own way means being with who you are, moment to moment, whether you like it or not. Whether or not it’s easy or comfortable, familiar or disturbing. And then creating from that place.

As I said, simple but not easy.

Guest Post: Therapist By Day, Crime Writer By Night by Dennis Palumbo

Hollywood on the Couch

The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.

by Dennis Palumbo
              

Doing therapy and writing mystery novels go hand-in-hand.
Published on November 28, 2012 by Dennis Palumbo in Hollywood on the Couch

I must admit, I’ve had an interesting career journey. For many years I was a Hollywood screenwriter, after which I became a licensed psychotherapist specializing in treating creative types in the entertainment community. Now, after 24 years listening to hundreds of people’s most intimate stories, I’ve fulfilled a life-long dream and begun a series of crime novels.

The first, Mirror Image, featuring psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi, appeared in 2010 from Poisoned Pen Press. The sequel, Fever Dream, came out in November, 2011. The next Rinaldi thriller, Night Terrors, will appear in late spring of 2013.

Which begs the question: what, if anything, does a Hollywood psychotherapist and a suspense novelist have in common? Actually, quite a bit.

For both a therapist and a crime novelist, it’s the mystery of character itself that intrigues, puzzles, and continually surprises. As a therapist, I’ve borne witness to the awful suffering, painful revelations and admirable courage of my patients—many of whom have survived unbelievable abuse, neglect and loss. Not to mention those whose lives have been marred by substance use, violence, and severe mental illness.

How people cope with these issues and events, how well or poorly they meet these challenges, goes directly to the heart of the therapeutic experience. My job as their therapist is to help identify self-destructive patterns of behavior, and to empower them by providing tools to address these patterns and, hopefully, alter them.

So much for my day job. Moonlighting as a suspense novelist, I find myself doing pretty much the same thing with my fictional characters. As a mystery writer, I believe that crime stems from strong emotions, and strong emotions stem from conflict. Kind of like life. Which means the secret to crafting satisfying thrillers lies in exploring who your characters are (as opposed to who they say they are), what it is they want (or think they need), and the lengths to which they’ll go to get it.

Moreover, using my experience as a licensed psychotherapist, I’ve woven many of the situations and people I’ve encountered into my crime novels. People like a particularly interesting patient I once met at the psychiatric hospital where I did my clinical internship. Now, many years later, he’s the inspiration for my hero’s best friend, a paranoid schizophrenic named Noah Frye. Much like this patient from long ago, the Noah of my novels is funny, combative, and achingly aware of the reality of his situation.

I’ve used other aspects of my life experience as well. For example, although my practice is in Los Angeles, the novels take place in Pittsburgh, my home town. In addition, the series hero, a psychologist named Daniel Rinaldi who specializes in treating the victims of violent crime, shares a similar background to my own—from his Italian heritage to his love of jazz to his teenage years spent working in the Steel City’s sprawling produce yards.

(Though, as each novel’s narrative hurtles Rinaldi into a vortex of murder and conspiracy, he reveals himself to be a lot braver and more resourceful than I am!)

But there’s another connection between my role as a therapist and my role as a mystery writer. Like the therapist, the crime novelist swims in an ocean of envy, greed, regret, and desire. As a therapist does, the crime novelist must relate to his or her characters. Must be able to understand and empathize with their wants and needs. Must, in fact, go inside their heads and think as they think, feel as they must feel.

Since most of my patients are in the entertainment industry—writers, actors, directors, etc.—they present a broad canvas of creative passions, lofty ambitions, wild yearnings and devastating defeats. They love and hate deeply, with an artist’s fervor, and this extends beyond career considerations into the most intimate aspects of their personal lives.

So too the crime novelist must create and endow his or her characters with out-sized passions, hopes and dreams. How else can things go so awry in their lives? How else can things lead, as if inevitably, to treachery, blackmail, murder?

All the things, in other words, that make reading a crime novel so satisfying! 

Guest Post: Giving to Your Career When It's Not Giving Back by Dennis Palumbo

Hollywood on the Couch

The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.

by Dennis Palumbo

Years ago, I worked with a screenwriter patient who regularly claimed to have two great loves: her teenaged daughter Susie, and writing. I remember vividly her struggles during a particularly turbulent period in her life. Her last two scripts for a major studio had gone nowhere, and a current one had just been handed over to another, younger---and, by implication, “hotter”---writer.

On the home front, there were daily battles with her increasingly rebellious daughter. Finally, during one of our sessions, my patient came to a painful realization.

“Lately,” she said haltingly, as though baffled by the idea, “I don’t think I like the things that I love.”

On the evidence, it was easy to see her dilemma. Now in her 40’s, she’d worked hard to carve out a screenwriting career. There’d been moderate success, a produced credit or two, with the accompanying money. There’d always been another development deal or a six-week re-write. Her agent always returned her phone calls. But more important than any of these, she’d always loved to write...

But in recent years, things had slowly unraveled. Whether due to ageism or a changing film market, her career had stalled. Maybe her own creative energies had flagged: divorce and a new life as a single parent can do that to you. For whatever reason, the job offers were fewer. Her work was more often rejected, or hugely re-written. She sank into that state so tellingly phrased by Satre: incomprehension and rage.

Her daughter Susie, now sixteen, was an equally infuriating challenge to the idea of unconditional love. Her rebellion---what therapists often refer to as “age-appropriate differentiation”---was taking the usual form: sex, drugs, and an almost pathological inability to agree with her mother about anything.

As my patient and I worked together during this period, I kept her words in my mind. Lately, I don’t think I like the things that I love. On the surface, the meaning was clear: she loved her daughter, and she loved writing, but at the moment both seemed to offer nothing but grief, rejection, and humiliation.

But beyond the obvious, what was my patient saying to me? That she could only love something as long as she liked it, in the sense of receiving appropriate personal and professional rewards from it? Hardly. Raising her daughter had always been a struggle, as it is for most parents, yet her love for Susie only grew with the years. Likewise her writing career, marked by the same triumphs and failures as most writers experience. Yet she’d always approached every new writing job with the breathless excitement of an astronaut setting foot on a new planet.

So what was I missing? I found out soon enough, during a session, when I reminded her of what she’d said about not liking the things she loved. Apparently, she’d forgotten she’d even said it. She was even embarrassed by it now.

“I said I didn’t like Susie? Or writing?”

“Not that anyone would blame you. Remember what’s been going on with your daughter? As of last week, you two weren’t even speaking.”

“That’s right. I got tired of being told to go screw myself every two minutes.”

“As for your career,” I continued, “aren’t you being re-written by some smart-ass kid who just signed a multi-million dollar deal?”

“Yeah, and thanks for reminding me about his deal. I’d almost succeeded in blocking it out.”

“Look,” I said, “you’re getting hammered by the two things you love most. How could you be okay with that?”

“But it has to be okay,” she replied. “Or else...“

Her words trailed off. I took a guess.

“Or else it means you don’t really love your daughter, and you don’t really love writing. There’s no space in your conception of loving these two things for you to be disappointed. For them to occasionally break your heart.”

She nodded. “I’m only allowed to be disappointed in myself...for failing them.”

I tried to choose my next words carefully. “When we love something, whether our work, a mate or a child, we better figure on disappointing it...and enduring the times it will disappoint us. If we’re not vulnerable to that, I don’t think we have a right to even call it love.”

She looked up sharply. Pointed a painted nail in my direction. “Now you’re starting to piss me off...”

“Of course I am. We’re in a relationship, too. A micro-version of the one you have with your daughter, or even with your work. We’re bound to piss each other off sometimes.”

She sat back in her chair, digesting this. “So I just get through all this... this anger at everything, until---“

“Until you’re okay with it. And then it’s just another feeling, more—“

“I know. More grist for the mill. Christ, you’ve said it enough times. But the way I’ve been feeling lately...it just sucks.”

“Sounds like it.”

She looked off, at the sky outside my picture window. “Getting through this...could take a long time.”

“Probably. Your relationship to Susie, and to your writing, might go through a lot of changes. But I’m betting you’ll come to some sort of peace with both of them.”

Her eyes narrowed. “A long time...”

I shrugged. “You going anywhere?”

She hesitated only a moment, then almost smiled. Then shook her head.

Guest Post: Turning Anxiety Into Creativity by Dennis Palumbo

Hollywood on the Couch

The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.

by Dennis Palumbo 

 

 

Using what scares you to motivate you

An old deodorant commercial on TV once proclaimed, “If you're not a little nervous, you're really not alive.”

Pretty sage advice, even though the only thing at stake was staying dry and odor-free. But there is something to be said for accepting---and learning to navigate---the minor turbulences of life. I'm talking here about common, everyday anxiety. The jitters. Butterflies.

This is particularly true for artists in Hollywood---writers, actors, directors, composers---whose very feelings are the raw materials of their craft. No matter how mundane, the small anxieties can swarm like bees, making work difficult. Those everyday distractions, like an impending visit from the in-laws, money worries, or that funny noise the Honda's been making.

Then there're the more virulent, career-specific anxieties, shared by few in other lines of work: Your theatrical agent hasn't returned your phone calls. You're three weeks past deadline with your latest screenplay draft. Your short film didn’t make the cut at the Sundance festival.

In other words, you're the stereotypical struggling Hollywood artist: bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, staring pathetically at a blank computer screen (or the waiting edit bay, or the silent piano keys), hoping for inspiration and yearning for another cup of coffee, and maybe a nice piece of cheesecake. A dozen nagging, self-mocking thoughts echo in your head: You're untalented, a fraud. You're getting old and fat. No woman (or man) will ever want to sleep with you again. Your life is over.
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These kinds of feelings are tough to deal with, to be sure, even if validated (and then gently challenged) by a supportive therapist, mate, good friend, or fellow creative type who's “been there, done that.” These deeply embedded, childhood-derived, seemingly inescapable Dark-Night-of-the-Soul feelings can, in fact, be crippling, regardless of your level of craft or years of experience.

And, as I've said countless times to the creative patients in my practice, struggling with these doubts and fears doesn't say anything about you as an artist. Other than that you are an artist.

Frankly, this difficult emotional terrain is where an artist lives much of the time---in a matrix of triumphs and defeats, optimism and despair, impassioned beliefs and crushing deflations. In the end, it's all just grist for the creative mill.

And, believe me, this is equally true for both beginning artists and accomplished, battle-hardened veterans.

But there's another kind of anxiety that emerges occasionally in a creative person’s life: the kind of gut-wrenching, dizzying upheaval from within that throws everything you think you know into doubt and that scares you to the very core. A puzzling, alarming career dive. A shattering divorce. The death of a family member. A spate of sudden, dizzying panic attacks.

Then, what balm is there to offer---or to receive---that doesn't seem trivial or woefully inadequate? Catharsis and validation, the foundation of most psychotherapeutic work, suddenly feel like mere word games. Medication, while often clinically appropriate, seems at best an armoring against something primal that's working within you.

What is an artist to do with that level of anxiety?

Use it.

Because, for an artist, when all that's left is the work, the work is all that's left.

What kind of work? Maybe numbed-out and shapeless at first; chaotic and unsatisfying. Maybe dark and ugly, or self-pitying and shameless. Maybe a blind, angry clawing at the air with inchoate feelings and inexplicable images.

The important thing to acknowledge, to accept and to make use of, is the fact of this anxiety -- its weight, its size, and its implacability at this time in your life. For whatever reason, it's there. As immoveable as a brick wall, as deep and fathomless as a sea.

And, for now, it isn't going anywhere.

So you, the artist, must ask yourself this question: Is there a character in the story I'm working on who feels such anxiety? Who feels as overwhelmed, as out of control, as terrified as I? These are the raw materials of the work. Whether writing a scene, directing a scene, acting in a scene, or composing the music for a scene, you must inhabit those aspects of the character whose narrative you’re building.

If you’re willing to do so, then plunge headlong into creating the hell out of that character, giving him or her your voice, your fears, your dreads. Create situations and scenes in which these anxieties are dramatized, exploited, “acted out.”

Create monologues, rants, vitriolic exchanges between characters, letting passions and behaviors emerge that may astound or alarm you; that stretch or distort or even demolish the narrative you've been working with. These problems can all be dealt with, deleted, perhaps even woven into the story later, in the cool light of day, when you have some kind of perspective.

Because to be truly in the eye of the emotional storm, to create from a state of anxiety, is to surrender any fantasy of perspective. In fact, in the purest sense, it's the ultimate act of creative surrender from which, out of the crucible of your deepest pain, you might discover a joyful, wonderful surprise.

Do this: put those trembling fingers on a keyboard, RIGHT NOW, and start stringing words together that reflect how you feel...without context, or narrative, or character. Just raw feeling, in as many vivid, living words as you can call forth.

Then look at what you've written. Feel whatever it is you're feeling. And hit that keyboard some more. Soon, I believe, you'll have a sense of the logjam cracking. You'll feel the urgency of creative expression, the palpable release of banked anxiety. Without judging what comes, without needing it to be anything, I think you'll find yourself creating something---even if that's just defined, for the moment, as putting words down on a page.

Does the idea of this exercise itself make you anxious? Doesn't surprise me. We're all pretty scared of creating, or making art, out of the very emotional space we'd most like to avoid or deny. It's human nature.

Besides, as famed psychiatrist Rollo May reminded us, real creativity is not possible without anxiety. In many ways, it’s the price of admission to the artist’s life.

Which means, for those artists who have the courage to embrace their own fears, to co-exist with potentially crippling anxiety and create anyway, the rewards can be significant. Consider artists as diverse as Woody Allen and Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen King and James L. Brooks, Anne Rice and Phillip Roth, Richard Pryor and Diane Arbus. They use who they are---all of who they are---as the wellspring of their creativity. Just as it is for yours.

Moreover, when all that’s left is the work…the work is all that’s left.

So trust it. Trust yourself. Like it or not, you’re all you have.

And the good news is, that’s enough.

Guest Post: The Art of the Pitch by Dennis Palumbo

Hollywood on the Couch

The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.

by Dennis Palumbo

How to Survive Pitching Your Ideas 

Pitching your ideas to producers, TV networks and film studios is one of the realities of the creative life. Whether you’re a director hawking a supernatural thriller franchise to Paramount, an actor hoping to produce and star in a prestige historical film for HBO, or a comedy writer trying to sell a sitcom idea to NBC, you’re part of a time-honored tradition of artists offering the promise of their talent to someone with the money to pay for it.

I know this aspect of the creative life quite well. Prior to becoming a psychotherapist, I was a screenwriter. Before that, a staff writer on sitcoms. I’ve free-lanced episodes, too, and done my share of pilots.

In other words, I took meetings. Lots of them. Something like a thousand, over eighteen years. Most were pitch meetings, selling my ideas, my craft, myself to others.

But before I talk about the issues involved in pitching one’s work, from my own experience and that of my creative patients, let me get my favorite “Pitch from Hell” story out of the way:

A producer and I were pitching a film at a big studio. We met with two executives, a male and a female, late on a Friday afternoon (already we were in trouble). About half-way through the meeting, the man left to take an urgent call. Moments later, the woman excused herself to go to the rest room.

They never came back.

After waiting about twenty minutes, the producer and I sort of wandered the halls, peeking into empty cubicles. We figured each exec thought the other would cover the rest of the meeting. In any case, the place was deserted.

As we drove off the lot, I said to the producer, “Gee, they missed the best part of my pitch.” Only I said it somewhat more colorfully.

Pitching is something that comes up constantly in my therapy practice. At the very least, for most artists, it’s a difficult and often dispiriting experience. For some, it’s literally terrifying.

To deal with this, most creative types I know develop little tricks or techniques to get them through the process. Some memorize the entire pitch (and pray nobody interrupts them). Some have arcane theories as to how long to talk about each character, plot point or act break. Others believe in researching the professional (and sometimes personal) successes of the people they’re pitching to, hoping to flatter their egos. Toward the further end of the spectrum we find hypnosis, relaxation tapes, and “lucky socks.”

My problem with these strategies, even the ones that appear to work, is that they’re all an attempt to hide the artist. He or she “hides” behind the pitching technique, using it as a shield against what might emerge in the meeting. By that, I don’t mean its professional outcome; I’m referring to the feelings that might be set off within the artist.

Samuel Johnson said, “Adversity introduces a man to himself.” Likewise, I think pitch meetings introduce a creative person to him or herself. That’s what makes them so frightening for so many people.

Years ago, I had a screenwriter patient who suffered terrible anxiety before every pitch. No matter how strongly he felt about the idea he was proposing, how solidly constructed the story, the pitch rarely went well. Then, during a session about some difficult aspects of his personal life, he blurted out, “It’s as though every event defines who I am.”

A potent realization for him, and one that we saw applied as well to his fears about pitching. He experienced a pitch meeting as an event that ultimately defined how okay he was, how acceptable. Perhaps even how entitled he was to be there.

As a result, his defense against the powerful feelings of shame that might emerge if he failed to sell his idea was to work harder on the story, prepare more diligently, practice the pitch with friends, etc.

What he needed to do instead---which became the focus of our work together---was to challenge the underlying assumption; namely, that if the pitch didn’t result in a sale, this defined him as unacceptable or inadequate.

Every pitch meeting, like every human encounter, is a relational event. We bring all our “stuff” into that room---our performance anxiety, the meanings we give to failure and success, the requirement we may have felt in our families to be the “best and the brightest.”

(Or the reverse. I recall a sitcom director patient who often “sabotaged” her performance in meetings, re-playing her parents’ injunction when she was a child not to “show off,” or draw undue attention to herself, because it might make others “feel badly about themselves.”)

I think it’s important for creative people of all stripes to explore what’s underlying their fears and expectations about pitching, so that they can develop better tools for alleviating the more painful aspects of the experience.

But it’s also important to remember that pitching is a difficult task for just about everyone. To convey to others what’s in your mind and heart is hard enough, let alone convincing them to pay for it. Let’s face it, that’s practically a recipe for anxiety.

However, as the late Rollo May reminded us, anxiety is a necessary component of any creative act. Which even pitching can be, in the right circumstances, when our fears are accepted with humor and compassion, and our convictions and enthusiasms can be engaged.

And the other guy hangs around long enough to see it.

But I’m not bitter.

Guest Post: The War Between Faith and Doubt by Dennis Palumbo

Hollywood on the Couch

The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.

by Dennis Palumbo

It's not a war, it's a balancing act.


A misspent childhood watching Saturday morning cartoons has left an image indelibly imprinted on my memory: a character is in conflict between doing right or wrong, prodded to do good by a tiny angel whispering in one ear, while an equally tiny devil argues the opposite position in the other.

Of course, since these stories were aimed at kids, the ethical dilemmas were usually pretty clear-cut: i.e., whether or not to tie an over-sized napkin around your neck and eat your co-star. However, there was still an almost theological aspect to the sight of funny talking animals — rabbits, ducks, and “puddy cats” — with competing imps sitting on their shoulders, caught in some Warner Bros. version of moral angst.

This image occurred to me again recently, when I came upon something written by Lillian Smith. “Faith and doubt, both are needed, not as antagonists but working side by side, to take us around the unknown curve.”

Often, working with my actor, writer and director patients, it sometimes seems as though little twin entities — one named Faith, the other Doubt — sit on their shoulders, whispering their respective messages, like those winged imps in the cartoons.

Which can be a real problem. Because what gives these cartoon scenarios their curious power, what makes them so compelling, is the illusion of moral clarity they provide. The animated image of these imps is of two competing forces, of which one must inevitably win out. And, of course, one is represented as unequivocally better than the other.

With anyone struggling to grow and maintain a Hollywood career, it’s frequently the same. We all want Faith to win out over Doubt. We want Faith whispering constantly in our ear — inspiring us, encouraging us, instilling hope. And make no mistake, these are blandishments every creative artist needs. It’s too daunting a task otherwise.

The mistake, I think, is to strive to banish Doubt, to see it as the enemy. Because, just as courage has no meaning without fear, faith has no meaning without doubt. They’re the yin and yang of all aspiration.

As creative types, we naturally long to sequester our doubts and fears, to disavow pain and worry. Unfortunately, to vanquish doubt is to leave the domain of the human being. Conversely, to embrace both one’s doubt and faith, one’s fear and courage, is to relate to the totality of the human experience.

The paradox of struggling with doubt — as with all so-called “negative” feelings — is that only by inviting it in, exploring and illuminating its meanings, can we be enriched as creative artists. This is especially true for those writers and actors among you, whose work involves creating life-like characters. The plain fact is, the more willing you are to mine the landscape of your own doubts, the truer and more recognizably human your characters will be. (And the more impact your characters’ faith, if such is their destination, will have.)

Keeping the tension between Faith and Doubt alive within you, without either falling prey to blind optimism or succumbing to despair, is not easy. We veer so often in one direction or the other that, in their exaggerated forms, Faith and Doubt can look like two sides of the same coin.

“But how can that be?” you might be asking. Faith and Doubt are so different, such opposites. Not necessarily, not when taken to extremes.

Let me give you an example. Picture two recent therapy patients of mine, both struggling screenwriters. One is full of confidence, with the faith of a saint in the ultimate success of his career goals. He “feels great” about everything he writes. All he has to do is wait for show business to discover him.

The second patient is full of doubt. He took an evening screenwriting class at his local college, but left after two meetings. He won’t show his work to others because “they’ll probably hate it.” He’s just wasting his time even trying to write, because the odds against success are so huge.

Faith and Doubt, two sides of the same coin. Whether an artist subscribes to one or the other, he’s engaged in a kind of “magical thinking” that leaves him out of the equation. In any creative endeavor, as in all aspects of life, an unquestioning faith is the same as unwavering doubt — both are belief systems employed to try to protect a person from the complicated, sometimes contradictory, always unpredictable ebb and flow of actual experience.

“Faith and doubt, both are needed...”

Which brings us back to those Saturday morning cartoons. Because the truth is, if we each had winged imps named Faith and Doubt parked on our shoulders, competing for air-time, the ideal situation would be for their voices to stay at more or less equal volume. For our attention to shift from one to the other, and back again.

And, ultimately, for us to integrate what each has to say, and to struggle to create and thrive from that place within us where all feelings, including faith and doubt, reside.

Guest Post: In Praise of Goofing Off by Dennis Palumbo

Hollywood on the Couch

The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA

by Dennis Palumbo

Day-dreaming as an aid to creativity.

Some people call it puttering, or screwing around, or just plain goofing off. Others, of a more kindly bent, call it day-dreaming. Kurt Vonnegut used the quaint old term “skylarking.”

Then there are the sanctimonious, uptight, non-creative types who call it, simply, wasting time.

What I’m referring to, of course, is that well-known, rarely discussed but absolutely essential component of a successful creative person’s life—the down-time, when you’re seemingly not doing anything of consequence. Certainly not doing anything that pertains to that deadline you’re facing: the pitch meeting set for next week, the screenplay you’ve been toiling over, the important audition that’s pending.

The concept of down-time, or goofing off, is shrouded in mystery for one very simple reason: it infuriates the creative artist’s spouse, family, collaborators, agents and friends. Let’s face it: they just don’t get it.

Here you are, struggling with a TV pilot re-write that’s due in two weeks, or behind on the final cut of the short film you’re submitting to festivals, and your mate finds you spending precious hours looking out the window, or reading The New Yorker, or watching His Gal Friday for the fifteenth time.


(In my own case, as a writer of mystery fiction, I make it a point to read The Great Gatsby every year, just to revel in its jewel-like prose and striking emotional economy. As an aid to my own writing, I’ve found reading it the perfect way to clear out the cobwebs.)

Finally, one salient fact must be accepted: the creative process is goddamned mysterious. As a kid in parochial school, I was often chided by the nuns for gazing out the window, my attention who-knows-where, instead of focusing on the blackboard.

I was a “day-dreamer,” according to Sister Hillaire, the principal, in sharply-worded notes routinely sent home to my parents. “Nothing good,” she warned, “could come of this.” (Nuns, I was to discover, could be melodramatic as hell.)

The point is, most creative types start out as kids looking out the window, their heads “in the clouds,” their minds “a million miles away,” etc.

But one man’s “day-dreamer” is another man’s “artist-in-training.” No matter how much we try, it’s impossible to quantify the creative process. It’s mysterious, even to artists themselves, and it resists all attempts to explicate its secrets.

Which is why it’s ultimately fruitless to try to explain to family and friends what you’re doing when—instead of banging away at the keyboard, or rehearsing that difficult scene, or re-doing the storyboards for your short film—you’re re-cataloging your CD collection.

In such cases, I suggest you just give them a knowing, mysterious, “genius at work” smile, and go on about your business.

Not to mention the valuable, potential working time wasted repairing your old bicycle, cleaning out the garage, or organizing your bookshelves according to author and/or subject.

I know what you’re thinking: the above examples sound suspiciously like procrastination. I understand your confusion. But there’s a very subtle difference between procrastination and creative, productive, process-nourishing goofing off.

Procrastination, as I see in my therapy practice every day, is a product of an artist’s inner conflicts around his or her creative gifts. Fears about failure, questions about one’s sense of entitlement, doubts about competence, concern about the potential for shameful exposure.

With rare exceptions, I’ve found that artists procrastinate to avoid the pain of discovering what they feel will be inadequacies in their art—and often, by extension, in themselves.

I remember, from my days as a screenwriter, the painful, embarrassing feeling that procrastinating brought to the most trivial and pleasant of diversions. Hanging around a bookstore, walking on the bluffs in Santa Monica, indulging in three-hour lunches with other writers—all these activities were tinged with anxiety, with the awareness that I should be elsewhere, back at my desk, writing.

In other words, these were all things I was doing instead of writing, instead of grappling with problems in plot and character. Instead, moreover, of examining what might be going on inside my head about my ability to solve these problems.

How different in feeling this miserable state is from the liberating pleasures of goofing off, or skylarking, or puttering! In my experience, when an artist is working well, these same side-activities—hanging pictures, reading, cleaning out your files—serve as an adjunct to creativity. They provide necessary down-time for letting your thoughts percolate, for letting a sudden new idea simmer in the pot for a while.

Think of it this way: You’re not watching the entire first season of Mad Men merely to avoid working. Rather, you’re allowing that part of your brain that creates to labor away unconsciously, filtering and sorting, selecting and discarding.

Equally important, I think, is that there are often analogs between seemingly non-creative activities and creativity itself. Who’s to say that clearing out your desk isn’t a way to help organize your thinking? That talking with other artists about their ideas, goals and troubles isn’t a way to help re-invigorate your own creative ambitions, or to get perspective on a particular concern?

Let’s take writers, for example. Certainly reading others is a path to clarifying your own writing goals and issues. Many screenwriters find both inspiration and motivation in reading noted screenplays like Chinatown or The Social Network. Smart television writers know the value of reading each season’s best pilot scripts.