IT’S OKAY TO NOT WRITE

An injury has us talking about the flaws of being too efficient and focused

As you might have noticed, we did not complete our 1990s film playoffs yet. Within a 48 hour period we got assigned a full feature script and—after testing a lens on our building’s roof—I fell down the stairs holding an entire camera kit. While not broken, my ankle was the size of a football for all of June. It was one of those moments where you have to limp away from anything non-essential. While recovering—and still working—I started thinking about how writers can get obsessed with efficiency at the expense of art.

During a cross-country drive this week I turned on the recorder with Emily Schultz and we talked about the importance of not writing, as well as how long periods of convalescence could be formative for writing habits.

Because it’s us, we also talked about mosh pit injuries, Italian Jaws ripoffs, and gangrene.

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EMILY SCHULTZ: Unfortunately, distraction does not help my driving.

BRIAN J DAVIS: What I was thinking about since I busted my ankle up was how important immobility was to learning how to write. You do have to learn that skill: focusing and being away from the world. But you also have to eventually unlearn that.

ES: So you had this unexpected thing happen. It made you look at your habits differently?

BJD: When I’ve talked with so many artists and writers over the years it seems like we all had this critical moment in childhood—an illness, or an accident—and it took us out of the flow of time. And that gave us the skills to do this. When someone asked me how I survived five years of writing for an alt weekly without being fired, the only answer I had was: I never once filed anything late.

ES: You’re talking about two different things there.

BJD: But two connected things! We learn how to be alone to do what we do.

ES: Where you pretty much only have your imagination.

BJD: But there’s a tradeoff. We have to then learn how to distract ourselves from the work. My theory is that’s when the ideas get good. Let’s say I write every day and I hit my deadlines. It will be finished, but there’s no guarantee of that being good.

ES: So for me that alone time was in the sixth grade. I broke my ankle and I had a full length cast and I was on crutches for a full season. There was a complication, which was gangrene. Going back to how you learn to be alone in those long stretches of childhood illness—

BJD: Wait! You don’t get to say “gangrene” and move on! Tell the gangrene story.

ES: The problem was the cast was too tight. So after a couple of days my parents didn’t understand why I was still crying about my break. I was still screaming so they took me to the doctor and he cut a little window in the cast to take a look. And everything seemed fine. But he didn’t cut the window up high enough to see where it was actually rubbing. By the time the cast came off I had this stinky black necrosis on my heel.

BJD: So unlike many other people, you’ve been a zombie before. When you’re writing The Blondes, you’re writing from a place of real lived experience.

ES: I do know what my own rotten flesh smells like!

BJD: Alright, so mine begins at my first punk show. I’m 14 and I go to see the Bad Brains. I am this tiny art punk and my friends convince me to go into the pit. I begin my “mosh” and within seconds I’m head-butted in the stomach. I’m knocked backwards and on the ground. And I was like, that hurt. And then later that night I was like, that still hurts. The next day I could not walk upright. My mom takes me to the hospital and my appendix is about to burst. I end up missing the first month of ninth grade, and I think that permanently took me away from my peer group. I just didn’t bond with them. My only social life after that was zines or bands. By the time I was 17 the UK Subs were crashing at my apartment—I mean, that’s amazing, but not normal.

ES: And your ankle brought you back to thinking about that?

BJD: What’s interesting is right after I fucked up my ankle, my immediate split second thought— after screaming—was I'm going to have a bit of down time after this. Maybe change some things about my life.

ES: What are some distraction techniques for writers, to get away from too much focus?

BJD: One of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock stories is how he worked with screenwriters. The screenwriter would be at Hitchcock’s house or studio bungalow and his whole thing was to avoid work as long as possible. They’d have breakfast and then breakfast would lead into lunch. They’d order something insane, like lobster thermidor. Then after lunch, they’d have cocktails. At 3 p.m. they’d be hammered. And that’s when they might write a few ideas down. This was completely orchestrated by Hitchcock because when you set out to seriously work, there’s a chance you’re going to stick with your first or second level ideas when really you want to skip ahead your third or fourth.

ES: I think what happens when I get stuck is it takes something to jostle me loose to get unstuck. I have to feel like I know where I’m going. When I was younger, I just wrote and felt it, and wound up where I wound up. Now I have to have more sense of direction. And if I don’t know where I’m going I can’t sit down and write it.

BJD: If I can reveal something about you as a writer, when you start you will burn through a book. You’ll write 80 pages and then your life will fall apart or something, and you’ll not go back to it for two months. But you’ll go back to it in a completely different state of mind.

ES: I didn’t know that I had this break at 80 pages and then went back in.

BJD: It’s almost like you’re starting a new relationship with a novel and are unsure at around the one month point. You’re like, “I don’t know. Let’s take a break and see if we really like each other.”

ES: The other thing that happens when you’re a writer is obviously sometimes you have to stop writing to go promote a book!

BJD: With me and screenwriting, I’ve gotten into this groove now where if I write one good page, I’m happy. And if I write 20 good pages in one sitting, I’m happy. I think that’s actually a very good spot to get to. You’re not judging yourself on your productivity, you’re judging if you still have ideas that day or not.

ES: I actively try not to write too long in terms of page count anymore. I mean, even The Blondes was too long.

BJD: Considering we’re adapting it right now, yes, I agree!

ES: When I went back and I looked at it this month, it’s really strange. It’s incredibly literary for a horror novel.

BJD: It’s incredibly literary for someone who had gangrene!

ES: It’s the book I wrote the fastest, that I was the most efficient on, and it’s the one that people like the best. And I don't think it’s my best book at al!

BJD: I think it doesn’t matter if a book takes 30 days of effective writing time or three years. Good or bad, it’s going to be up to other things. I think that some ideas have energy and other ideas don’t.

ES: And it’s a little bit luck of the draw. So what is your go-to when you need distraction?

BJD: If I wrote a lot during the day, now I know exactly what to do: watch a very bad movie. And it’s not that I’m going to sit in judgment about a bad movie. I want to watch a movie like that to remind myself that you can actually reduce this form to the bare minimum effort at storytelling, with no budget whatsoever, and you can still have something watchable for an hour and 30 minutes. It’s hypnotic. It’s better than Ativan. Something like Killer Crocodile— a Jaws ripoff filmed in the Dominican Republic by Italians. What’s your go-to?

ES: Soccer, obviously. I don’t think that I learn anything from it though.

BJD: You come back with everyone’s story of the week though, which is very you.

ES: I do go out in the world and never come back without some kind of interaction! I know what’s happening with everybody in the neighborhood.

BJD: So your gas in the tank is talking to people out in the world?

ES: Right. Like, just before we left for this wedding, I was sitting in a cafe and two women were sitting next to me and they were having a chat. They were obviously good friends. And one of them said, “Blah blah something your boyfriend.” Then she corrected herself. “I mean our boyfriend.” And they both just kind of giggled after that.

BJD: And there you have an entire generation and era in one line of dialogue.

ES: And after hearing something like that I could go home and write all day!

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