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kleinbl00  ·  4098 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How do you use other social media?

"Badass" is all in the attitude. Dos Equis' "Most Interesting Man" is a Jewish dude with good lighting. Anybody can find good lighting.

So - the trick to writing isn't in what you write, it's in what you don't write. The best stories are always those told in the most interesting way possible, and the key to "interesting" is obfuscation. As Heinlein put it, "indecently decent" - a decent pair of lingerie is vastly more erotic than a buck naked girl. We don't want to see it all, we want a little mystery.

The natural order, however, is to write everything. This is particularly deadly in screenwriting (I've written ten and optioned two) where you aren't writing prose, you're basically writing an epic sonnet. The trick of good writing is to make every word count, which means if you're any good at it, for any word that makes it onto the page there are a dozen that died in your head.

This can be frustrating, and it can cause a literary embolism. Stephen King famously writes a short story after every novel just to use up all the leftover energy from the novel; SHAWSHANK was left over from Dark Tower, if I'm not mistaken.

"how much do you write a day" is a very personal question and everyone has a different answer. My natural order is a scene (or group of scenes) a day. Which really means only about 750-1000 words that actually count and hell - maybe 4-5000 that never make it out of my head. So they sit there spinning around and pissing me off and getting in the way of the next 750-1000 words that count.

So I dump them.

Reddit is the repository of my "diarrhea of the fingertips." Simply writing a bunch of words in response to something clears the buffer and allows me to return to the writing that matters. Lots of people will say things like "stop hanging out on screenwriting websites and write a damn screenplay" but I'm most prolific when I'm actually writing something because I need the "heat sink" forums provide.

The useful thing about Reddit is that it provides near-instantaneous feedback on your writing. Not only that, the feedback comes from the target demo most desired by marketers. Anyone who isn't refining their writing by bouncing it off Reddit is an idiot; yeah, Reader's Digest publishes stuff too but they don't have the numbers Stephanie Meyer has.

Pretty much, after a hard nine innings I hit the batting cage so that I don't get into bar room brawls. It has the advantage of making me a better baseball player.

Does that make sense?