On day jobs and distraction (and how to tell when a draft is done)

Do your practices inform one another?

When I think about art as a practice, I think the core fundamentals are the same. A lot of it is about having some connection to a work that you try to maintain while you’re making it. It’s a very intuitive or emotional connection. Throughout making a record or film, those processes can go on for a long time.

What I’m finding to be the most important skill is trying to learn more about the craft and about myself. Finding a way to stay connected to the work and not let it get away and start looking at it from the outside. So in that way, I find the orientation towards it or the perspective on it similar.

The crafts though, I find to be different. Film has this other side of being like a team sport. You have to bring in all these collaborators to do it. There’s resources, lots of time, and many different steps to the process. That can be true for music too, but especially in my music practice now, I’m trying to make it much smaller. Where it’s more me and the tools that I make music with, as a studio practice.

When you’re writing a script, how do you know when it’s done?

First, I try to have a little distance between the actual writing and the times I stop to sit and do a full read-through. When I’m writing and make the choice to switch into, “Okay, let me read back this work,” there’s some sense of having done a pass at it where I feel like I’ve arrived at a feeling and it’s lingering there, and then I put it down when I come back to it, I try to be really honest as I read through and try to stay very present to where the story is.

The difficult thing when you’re making something, is your mind starts to jump ahead to what you know is coming or you start to think about the problem that you just encountered. But I try to just go through line by line, beat by beat, scene by scene and just see what emotions are coming up and be honest with those. If I keep hitting something and it’s making me contract, I make a mark in pencil and come back to it. Often, I print it out, read it, but then I try to move through the whole thing. It ends up being a process of doing that over and over until I can read through it and nothing feels off or untruthful.

One thing I’ve noticed a lot is my own subjectivity on any given day. One day [I might] feel like, “Oh, this is pretty good,” and then on another day I’m in a bad mood or not feeling very confident and feel like, “Oh, this is not good.” I think there’s honesty there too. I try to drop into my body and understand what mood is present in me that might be coloring my opinion. And in those cases I’ll put it down, take some space, and come back.

I think the other thing is about when I share work with someone in the process and ask for feedback. I think when I was younger, sometimes I shared too quickly, because I wanted to get out of that uncomfortable space of, “I don’t know what to do and I don’t know what the answers are.” You want to ask someone else for the answers. It can be helpful, and sometimes you need that early on, but sometimes you need to just confront yourself a little bit more. You need to think, “Oh, this idea you thought was great, maybe it actually isn’t, and maybe there’s a little bit of it that you need to get rid of.” Now I try to sit with it more.

When I get to that place where I want to share with a person and have particular questions, I know that’s draft one. I’m reaching the end of a draft or a version and it’s ready for that input. But I want to have enough of my own sense of it at the time, because other people’s opinions can really change the whole thing. If you feel too fragile in the moment and ask the wrong person and they say the wrong thing, it can really disrupt it.

I think a lot of art-making is about finding your own north star and it’s never going to satisfy anyone else.

When you say north star, what is that specifically? Is it a feeling or tone or a certain taste?

It can be an image, character, story, or a location that I really love. It’s not always the same, but I think at some point in the project I start to have some feeling of what the essence of this project is and why I’m interested in it, why I keep coming back to it.

Sometimes I can articulate that in words and sometimes I can’t, but sometimes it’s not until the thing is out that I really start to understand in words what it is. But sometimes I get lucky and early on have a name for that feeling. I’m actually mixing another record of mine right now. I knew the title of it almost before I started writing the music, which never happens.

The title of the record is Radiance Abyss. Those two words–”radiance” and “abyss”–have such visceral feelings for me. I knew that the record was going to have this sense of light and dark in it at all times, and that was my north star. Sometimes when I stepped back during the process I’d ask, “Do I want to go in this direction or this direction? Is it A or B?” I’d think, “Well, you know what, B is more Radiance Abyss. It has that dark/light tension, that feeling, and A isn’t. It’s interesting but I don’t think it fits in this project.”

So I think that those north stars are really helpful for me to give some sense of the confines of a project, and put up those limitations. Because, especially when I was younger, and I still have this tendency, I’d want to put in everything that’s going on in my life, every feeling, but there’s only so much space in something before it starts to just be diluted. There might be a period at the beginning where I’m casting a wide net, but as it goes on I’m making edits in a script to cut something out. It’s trying to get it back to, “Are these things all pointing in that same direction?” It might not be what I thought, or my favorite scenes, or my favorite bit of music, but these things together point in one direction and that feels like a way to have some guidance.

Do you have a day job? How do you balance work or what you do with what you do and all that?

I’ve always had day jobs. I’ve had dozens of jobs throughout my twenties and thirties now. Everything from being a caretaker for adults with mental disabilities to working in a restaurant, planting trees, doing odd jobs, and being an assistant for artists.

For the last few years I’ve worked in human rights organizing, and I also do some audio production. Some of those are skills I have from the audio world. I think there was a point when I was younger, in my early twenties, when I felt like being an artist meant making all of your income from your art.

There was a book I read, a biography of Robert Irwin, that a friend gave to me in my early twenties. I don’t know exactly how he phrased it, but he talked about not trying to tie your income, the thing that supports you, to your art practice because it puts too much pressure on it. And that really helped me mentally shift a bit. Again, it’s this subtle shift between being ambitious about achieving and having a career in something, versus the vocation of an art practice.

That was the beginning of my understanding of, “Oh, actually, if I’m making my income from other things, it frees up all this space for me to follow those north stars wherever they take me.” It might not be the thing that’s best for my career in some ways. I’m a big believer in that. I also think it’s helped me really value the time I get to be in my studio working. I used to live in New York City, and now I live in a rural place. I grew up in a rural place, and I wanted to be able to make less money and have space for a studio.

That tension can be very hard at times, but I also think there’s something helpful in it for helping you focus on what it is about this thing you’re drawn to, and maybe why.

My partner’s an artist too, and our friends all are, and things can get hard. Sometimes we’ll just say to one another, “Okay, well then just stop. Just do something else.” And it’s a good question to ask yourself every once in a while, like, “I could.” But then there are points where I say, “Well, I actually really love this. It’s very meaningful to me, and it’s worth all these things.”

Writing a feature is no small feat, and some people never finish writing theirs. It’s a marathon-like experience, did you have any grounding rituals or tools that helped you in your process?

I try to decide when I am actively in a phase of writing and working on something, and when I’m not. All these rules are there to be broken and that’s fine, but I try to set myself up to say, “Okay, right now I am working on rewriting this script that I maybe already have going. I put it down for a few months, but this next month I’m going to spend three hours in the morning just sitting down at my desk, and I have to write.”

Getting into that can be really difficult. I have a little kitchen timer and I’ll set it for half an hour and put it on my desk. Any time my mind starts to wander, or I want to procrastinate, or do something else, or get up, or I catch myself just sitting there not writing, I’ll notice the timer is still going and I’ll remember, “Okay, I’m writing.” I have to write for half an hour, and then I can get up and take a break for a minute.

Then I try to build it up. Usually, if I do that over the course of a few days or a week, at some point I don’t need the timer anymore, and I train myself. I’m also really aware of how many distractions we live with in the modern world. So I’ll often just turn the internet off in the house. I put my phone in a drawer the night before, so when I wake up, I’m writing. I also try to set up my space physically so I can just get up and get into writing, because I can very easily, and I think it’s true for a lot of people, encounter this friction and want to jump to something else. Like, “Oh, you know what, maybe I won’t write. Maybe I’ll just research this character a little bit.”

Sometimes I’ll think, “Okay, I can’t do the computer.” Something about it just isn’t working, and I’ll write freehand for a while. I think a lot of it is about trying to slow my brain down and, like I said, be with it beat by beat. I’ve never written prose like a novel or anything, but I find writing scripts is a little different because you’re seeing these images and describing them in simple ways. It’s not literature that you’re writing, but you’re trying to say, “Okay, I’m describing this action.”

I think the longer marathon of working on something over three years and not getting demoralized is harder. I don’t really have a methodology, but I do think that just because I get to a place where I feel like it’s not working or not good doesn’t mean that’s true. There’s probably some truth that something isn’t working, and I will have to go back into the weeds of it, sit down, really stare it in the face, and work again.

You get up and have to put one foot in front of the other. It doesn’t always feel great, but I think taking breaks helps, and choosing moments to share it with someone helps.

I think feedback helps too, if you can find people in your life whose feedback style works for you. For me, I’ve found it helps to ask very specific questions and ask for the feedback I want at a certain time. I also think that when someone gives feedback, if they try to provide an answer, it’s usually not the answer that ends up working. But they might be putting their finger on something that isn’t working. At first I might be really defensive about it, but usually nine out of ten times I come back and I’m like, “Oh yeah, they weren’t right about where they thought it should go, but there is something there. And actually, if I really sit with myself, I know that it’s not quite right.” But I wanted to check it off the list and move on. So I think it’s about taking breaks, bringing other people into the process when you need it, having some compassion toward yourself, and understanding that, to me, it’s almost sculptural. It’s like I’m trying to unearth this thing in the dirt. It’s messy sometimes and bad, but if I can hang on to that essence and keep coming back to it, then I’m going to keep working on it.

When you’ve never written a feature before, where do you even start? Everyone’s process is different. What has been helpful to you?

I didn’t go to film school, so I never took a screenwriting class. Early on, when I wrote short films, I just wrote spontaneously. When I started writing a feature, I wrote a lot and then realized I didn’t quite understand how what I was putting on the page related to the films that inspire me. At a used bookstore, I found a screenwriting book and started reading it, but I had this physical reaction that I should not read it so I put it away. I wanted to stay in discovery and keep figuring out form, structure, and rhythm by doing, until I hit a point where I truly did not understand.

Instead, I watched a lot of films and paid attention to structure. At some point, I had practical questions, like how long a scene or dialogue should be. That’s when I decided to find five or six screenplays from films I love. I found the scripts online and read them to see what they actually looked like on the page.

That helped immediately. I saw that some dialogue scenes were three or four pages, and some broke that completely. More importantly, it helped me understand that the script is not the film. It’s a first version that will change many times. That freed me from trying to write something perfect. I don’t think a perfect script exists. And once you get to set, everything can change, especially once actors, camera, and editing enter the process. You end up rewriting again in the edit.

For me, the scriptwriting process ends when I can clearly answer what the film is and what it’s about. It’s how I figure it out for myself, before I have to articulate it to other people. When someone asks me a question that I can’t answer, I know I need to go back and see if I really understand it. I’m trying to communicate the essence of what I want to make. The script is like a drawing of a house you’re going to build later. It’s not the house.

What’s your relationship with procrastination?

Procrastination feels like a way I’ve found to avoid dealing with a difficult moment. It can be a small moment, like when I’m writing and don’t know what the next thing is, and I can feel my body and mind trying to grab for something else that feels easy. Just sugar for the mind so that I don’t have to deal with this. There are definitely periods when I’m working in this gray area where I’m not really committing to working on something, and maybe I need to back up a little bit. I procrastinate a lot. It can look like starting to research something, or, in music, thinking, “Oh, I want to look up what plug in will work to make this sound,” and then you just end up down some rabbit hole.

But sometimes I like to let myself go there, because it can be too constraining. Over the last year or so, though, I’ve had a much more dedicated studio practice. I try to be very specific about when I’m allowed to do that and when I’m not. Like I said before, I often now spend three or four hours in the morning where it’s focused work. Whatever creative project is in that spot at that time, I’m working on that project for that time. If I catch myself procrastinating, I try to bring myself back to work. Of course it happens all the time. Even if you get rid of the internet and your phone and everything else, you can still just stare into space and do something that feels easier than dealing with the problem. I don’t know.

At times I used to be harder on myself for getting lost in thought, distracted, or procrastinating, and now I think it’s always going to be there in some way. It’s more about whether my intention is to be focused on something, or whether I’m okay with it in that moment. My studio practice is always up against distraction and procrastination, these things I feel myself wanting to move toward when something in the work itself is difficult.