The truth about discipline

My first real attempt at writing a feature length screenplay at the age of twenty one spiraled out of control. I suffered from the flipside of writer’s block; writer’s diarrhea. Following the screenwriting calculation equating a page to a minute of screen time, feature film screenplays commonly vary in length from eighty to one hundred and twenty pages, and mine had reached its one hundred and thirtieth page before the story I was telling had barely even begun. I split my time between churning out more pages and complaining about my tower of Babel project in my journal. I wrote “The description of this screenplay’s writing here in my journal is starting to resemble an unconscious tale of slipping into insanity.”

I was working on the screenplay within the loose framework of a screenwriting workshop offered to alumni of the screenwriting school of Tel Aviv. The official meetings were behind us and we’d all retired to our homes for three months of writing. We kept in touch through hilariously desperate group emails, and on one or two occasions got together without our instructor for the sheer purpose of finding moral support in each other’s writing horror stories. Some people hadn’t made it beyond page fifteen; I was already on page one hundred and fifty. I thought to myself, yes, I am living the dream! The dream is living me and I am living it, I’m writing every day, isolated and excluded from the game of life! An email invitation to another night of screenwriter’s commiseration read “You should come, you’ll probably reach your two hundredth page with no end in sight by tonight and need our encouragement.”

The story’s end snuck up on me during one of those mornings, leaving me at a loss for the rest of the day. My script clocked in at a ridiculous and unwarranted one hundred and ninety two pages. We’d walked each other through the writing process in the workshop, but never really read more than a few pages of each other’s scripts. I never even bothered printing my script out; it was too many pages long, a waste of wood and ink. I tinkered with it for a while, on and off. A year later I even put in the effort of translating the script to English, just to see whether alienating it from myself would provide me with insight or an epiphany. It didn’t. On a hot Saturday afternoon at his sticky Tel Aviv apartment my friend Tal asked me “How did you write one hundred and ninety pages?”
I said, “Time.”