The Best Writing Advice I Have
By: Mister Lichtenstein
Tags: Writing, Screenwriting, Writing Tips, Creativity, Alan Bennett

About twenty years ago I saw The Lady In The Van on stage in London. Maggie Smith starred in it. It was the play’s first time on stage. It was delightful. The script, written by the genius Alan Bennett, would later be adapted as a feature film.

It was 2000. I was in London to study screenwriting with the talented and generous Roy Kendall, so seeing a fantastic piece of stagecraft was especially valuable to me. Shortly after I returned to New York, I read that Alan Bennett would be speaking at the 92nd Street Y, right across town from me. I had to see him speak.

Alan Bennett in 1973, from Wikipedia

As someone who reads a lot about writing, I’ve read plenty of nuggets of specific advice. These sorts of things speak to niche areas like how to write an antihero or how to pace the parts of the story structure depending on the genre in question. As Mr. Bennett spoke, a new question occurred to me. It wasn’t a craft question, but a process question, one that Mr. Bennett was uniquely qualified to answer.

You see, Alan Bennett isn’t just a playwright. He is also a screenwriter and a novelist. He wrote The Madness of King George: the book, the stage play, and the screenplay. Alan Bennett is one of the most prolific authors of our age when working in different media.

My question: “How do you handle it when you’re hard at work on something and you are gripped by a sudden inertia, finding yourself unable to push through?” Translation: “What do you do about writer’s block?” Mr. Bennett’s answer was as simple as it was clever. He said he writes something else. The moderator asked him to elaborate.

Mr. Bennett said that sometimes you just kind of exhaust yourself on something, but that doesn’t mean you can’t write. It’s like working out: if you exhaust your abs doing crunches, you work on your arms or legs. He said that when he hit a wall while working on a novel, he’d pick up an article he’d set aside. If that didn’t work, he always had a couple of scripts and other ideas on the go to which he would turn for a change of pace. If nothing of the sort worked, he’d write a letter to a friend. The key was to keep writing because you never know when inspiration will strike. As long as you have that keyboard available, or at least a pen and paper, you can always get to work doing something productive, and you’ll eventually turn back to the urgent work at hand.

As a result of this advice, I changed the way I work.

I always have a few stories on the go. Some are scripts that are in their final drafts — the urgent work. Some are stories I’m still outlining or characters I’m still fleshing out. Some are ideas I executed badly and need a total rewrite but require an amount of distance from them before I can do that. I still write letters (paper ones) to certain friends. Until he died, I still wrote letters, in longhand, to Roy Kendall. Writing, no matter how you’re doing it or what you’re doing it about, keeps you in practice and makes you better at it. You’ll never know when something will suddenly click, and that half-baked idea of yours will suddenly emerge from your brow fully formed like the goddess Athena.

So keep writing. If you need to take a break, then write something else but, whatever you do, don’t stop.