BY WRITER-DIRECTOR AND AUTHOR BRENDAN FOLEY (NUJ/WGGB) WWW.FILMFOLEY.COM

Writer's block itself is just one ailment in a whole family that is more accurately called Creative Block. Dancers lose their creative spring. Musicians lose their groove and writers extract sentences like Victorian dentists pulling teeth without anaesthetic.

It's an odd thing, but journalists rarely complain of writer's block. Screenwriters, yes. Authors, yes. Actors fed up waiting for someone to write them a decent part who decide to write it for themselves? Most definitely.

The reason for the difference between the journalists who seem immune and the others who stare at a blank page or white screen, or a bare stage or blank canvas until steam comes out their ears, may help to explain the nature of writer's block.

So why are journalists immune? One word: deadlines. Journalists are moaned at by editors. In most cases they are writing short articles and they are due on a specific day or at a specific hour. By and large journalists are not overly bothered by perfection. It is about cranking something out. Something that will fit the bill.

So when I became a screenwriter, I had a very dim view of anyone who grumbled about Creative Block. Whiners and slackers the lot of them. Until I found myself staring at a blank page in the middle of Act Two. It took me years to work out the difference and devise ways to avoid it. In a nutshell there are three root causes:

1. Wanting perfection

The drive for perfection is a double-edged sword. Voltaire described Perfect as the enemy of Good.

Nobody wants to turn in crappy work, but it may be that a short article for a technical newsletter does not need the same level of polish as the novel of a lifetime.

Perpetual dissatisfaction can be soul-sapping and sometimes it is better to get something down and hope to return to polish it later. There are 100 first chapters of books for every finished novel. And there are no prizes for first chapters. Though there is an award for the worst opening paragraph - the Bulwer Lytton.

The problem for a lot of us in the creative industries is that it is damn hard to make a living at the best of times and to have any chance of our work standing out or attracting attention it has to be pretty special. Keeping motivated to do our best work while not beating ourselves up for not attaining perfection is a tightrope act, but most sufferers from creative block err on the side of perfectionism rather than pragmatism and should try tacking over to the other view to see if that helps. When you find yourself churning out unalloyed rubbish, it may mean you have tacked too far.

2. Not knowing what comes next

This Block-bringer is most common in the craft side of the creative business - screenwriters, commercial composers and suchlike: not knowing what comes next. Almost always this is down to a lack of structure in a story or piece of music. Structure is not always cliché or predictability. It can be the recognition of a creative skeleton that holds your story together.

Planning out the structure, whether acts and scenes on stage or chapters and sub chapters in a book gives a very specific freedom. It enables a creator to jump over a problem and come back to it later, because they know what comes before and after it. Much better than hitting a brick wall and head-banging until it or your forehead wins.

3. Not having a short-term deadline

The third head of the Block-monster is the lack of a deadline. Much of our work is carried out under our own steam, at our own expense in the hope that someone else will buy the finished work, record the song or produce the play or publish the novel.

The journey is often measured in months or years rather than days or hours. The secret is to set self imposed deadlines - not just "to finish by Christmas" but a series of sub deadlines.

For a book it might be a chapter a month, a quarter of a chapter a week or a specific number of pages a week. Daily deadlines are tough but great if you set a realistic minimum rather than something that just makes you miserable when you don't achieve it. Monthly deadlines are too long as a first line of defence - missing one is demoralising and missing two results in many abandoned projects. Self-imposed weekly deadlines, like Baby Bear's porridge, seem just right for many freelance creatives, giving enough impetus but also the ability to mend our ways after an off week.

The key seems to be to have large, medium and small deadlines with appropriate self-rewards along the way. I know one author who rewards herself with a trip to the cinema or a meal out each time she finishes a chapter and a holiday each time she finishes a book. My strongest word of warning, whatever micro-reward you choose each time you finish a page, or a verse or a few bars of music, make sure the small unit of reward is not a chocolate biscuit.

One last tip. If you are writing, try not to finish on the end of a chapter. Such Hard Finishes sometimes make it difficult to start again. Leave your work in the middle of a section. Next time you start you will easily get back into the swing finishing the previous section and then be on a roll into the new section. I even know some people who stop in mid sentence for the same reason. And another thing...

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For another perspective on creative block, check out these 10 types of writers' block and how to overcome them.

 

By writer-director and author Brendan Foley (NUJ/WGGB) www.filmfoley.com

Like many of you reading this, I have a Facebook page with a smattering of friends and acquaintances. I also have a Twitter account languishing with not a single chirp, tweet or utterance to its name. I’ve even been dubbed the ‘Facebook groundhog’, for emerging once a year to say Happy New Year before sinking back into my offline burrow.

My reasons for not posting more have been to do with getting asked to read too many people’s screenplays; also not feeling my lunch ingredients are cause to alert the global media, nor being overly interested in the equally dull minutiae of others.

So when seeking someone in the entertainment world who has used social media to great effect, I decided to start with the person who called me a cyber-groundhog – my nearest and dearest, social media queen Shelly Goldstein. Shelly is a writer, performer and pop culture commentator. She is very funny and has a mighty online following.

Why do you think most people in media and entertainment don’t make more use of social media?

I think most of us start out being a bit afraid of it. We don’t want to look like the idiot describing their lunch in lavish detail, and we don’t see how social media can in any way relate to our professional lives. But over recent years, I’ve discovered the opposite is true. Social Media is like broccoli - it’s not as bad as its reputation and it can be good for you. If you serve it up right, it can even prove quite tasty!

You use Facebook and Twitter. Are there other media that you choose not to use?

I don’t do much on Linkedin. As a concept it seems well intentioned but most requests I get on it are from people who live on the other side of the planet who seem to be phishing. That’s not to say it mightn’t be useful for some. Social Media is not a single glass slipper. Different sites are more of a perfect fit for different people. Facebook and Twitter work best for me.

So tell us about Facebook in terms of its usefulness to you.

Building a base on Facebook takes time and energy. You have to decide to allocate that time daily as opposed to doing something else to generate enjoyment or income with the same time. But Social Media is also a place where you can measure progress. It started paying off for me within days of my starting regular posting. People came out of the woodwork who I had not heard from in years, including many fellow professionals in entertainment. It really is awe-inspiring software in terms of its ability to create matrices of people with shared friends or interests.

But isn’t that more like a social use as opposed to a professional one?

To use social media well, you have to shake off some of the old definitions. It may be that your professional work will benefit simply by more people knowing about your interests, talents or character. Just as most of us who are freelance do not stop working when a whistle blows at 5pm, not everything has to be divided into work or fun. Hopefully most of our lives can involve both.

Yes, but you can’t pay the mortgage with funny-money, grumbles the Groundhog. Tell us about how interest translated into progress in your working life.

I have different facets to that working life – comedy writer, performer, pop culture pundit and avid news-junkie. I started posting various things: thoughts on news of the day, humorous observations, commentary on pop culture.

As a professional writer and comedy writer, I have to do this sort of thing anyway. I simply began making more of my observations a part of my Facebook page. Other people joined in the conversation. People began sharing my thoughts on their FB pages and re-tweeting what I’d been saying. Word of mouth started to factor into things. People recommended their friends to friend me. More people, more perspectives made for more interesting conversations. I got my first professional job offer via Facebook about two weeks after my page went up.

And it’s not just performers who can benefit. Here’s a terrific example of an author who has found a way to use social media to help promote her first book – which has sold half a million copies.

So why do politicians and journalists not have the most friends then?

I’m not running for office. I’m not doing critical analysis. I’m a pop culturist and comedy writer. Any insights I have come from a comedic perspective. I don’t think anyone wants to be preached to online. People want to converse. People want to share opinions. People want to laugh.

I hope I offer them a place to do all of that and I get as much out of it as the people I communicate with. Facebook makes it easy to see when you’re getting through to people – and when you’re not. People join in or they don’t. They “share” your comments or they don’t. You can buy shares in companies, but can’t buy ‘shares’ from one friend to another on Facebook. You earn them based only on what you write. It’s like an instant Nielsen rating - or people voting with their mouse.

Any of us working in media and entertainment these days have to have a profile. We have to be seen in order to reach an audience and also to reach more potential employers on the other side of that audience. A job interview today involves being Googled.  Producers, directors, employers check your work online. These days, people know you - or what they think is you - long before you meet in person. We all have the power to impact what people see or learn about us online.

Give us an example of how a single post can end up contributing to your working profile or income.

It’s usually a cumulative thing – people deciding you are consistently funny or observant or whatever, based on multiple small examples. But to give one in real time, I just read about the very talented comedy actor Fred Willard being arrested for, er, allegedly pleasuring himself in an adult movie theatre. I posted and tweeted that arresting the guy in a porn theatre for being horny was like arresting someone at McDonald’s for being fat. Within minutes that line was heavily re-posted and re-tweeted.

But does that really translate to income?

Honestly, if I only did this in the hope of getting paid, it would be a lot less fun.  I am a performer. Writing and posting is as much of an outlet for my performing as is being onstage. I live the life of a freelance. Every single day it seems like I’m working for someone different. And I can point to at least a dozen of my employers in the past year as coming from people who either befriended me on Facebook, followed me on Twitter or saw my videos on youtube. This runs the gamut from being hired to write a single original lyric for somebody’s cabaret act to writing an episode of a TV show, to being asked to bring my show to a brand new city.

Find the ways social media can best represent what you do. For example, I write a lot of comedy satire material including new lyrics to old songs. My first cabaret show was called, “Gay Man Trapped in the Body of a Straight Girl.” I’m passionate about marriage equality and wrote a parody of the Mary Poppins song “Supercalifragilistic…” called “Super Callous Homophobic Hateful Legislation”. A friend of mine with a video camera shot me singing it. We had one light. The production took less than two hours.

Within two days, the video was on my Facebook page. A friend of mine sent it to a political pundit who linked it to his blog. The next day 5,000 people had seen it. It was embedded on over 1,100 different Facebook pages. Within a month it had been viewed in more than 17 countries and had over 50,000 views. Without FB that never would have happened.

So there is an economic basis, albeit an indirect one?

Bottom line: social media is a fantastic way to get your work seen. Now there’s also a huge amount of online chatter and static that you have to break through, but if your work is good and you work hard to get it out there online, you can get further, faster than any time in history. Despite all the difficulties, I think there’s never been a better time to be in the entertainment business.

What is also true is that the American Idol Illusion of being discovered the first time you sing a song or crack a tweet is a ridiculous myth. In reality it takes lots of work on a daily basis to gain a following and a professional online profile. But if you are willing to put in the time, social networking lets you connect with your potential audience and potential employers.

Is there a difference between the sort of responses or results you get on Facebook and Twitter?

Twitter has much more immediacy. I’d suggest using Twitter for very of-the-moment comments on news or gossip. On the night of the Academy Awards, instead of making a comment to the person beside me on the sofa, I tweeted my thoughts about the people and the movies in real time. And that brought the biggest response I’ve ever had on Twitter. People know I write a lot of ‘special material’ for similar shows, so they decided to join me on the virtual sofa. It was fun going back-and-forth.

It all feeds into an overall online presence, and for people who want to follow that in detail, there are sites like www.klout.com, which quantifies your overall reach on the internet through a mysterious algorithm of all your online incarnations.

So, are there any downsides to the Brave New World?

Absolutely. The first is that you have to put in a great deal of time, thought and energy to maintain a connection with so many people. But you have to do it. It is no good thinking it is a one-way street, it is a direct relationship with a friend-base and sometimes an audience-base.

And another downside is that the more successful you are in raising your profile online, the more you open yourself to nasty anonymous comments. You have to just shrug it off as some modern form of jealousy and insecurity.

If I ruled the world anyone could be as mean or nasty as they liked, but they would have to have the guts to put their real name to whatever they said, not as ‘knobhead666’. Anonymous postings always pander to cowards. It is very important not to respond to idiots. However, I did break my own rule of ignoring one troll who objected to my being in favour of marriage equality and posted a comment calling me a “F%$&ing dike” (sic).  My response was to point out that since he’d called me a “dike” he wasn’t making an  (incorrect) assumption about my sexuality as much as he was making an assumption that I retained water.

Any last words for people seeking to get serious about their online presence?

Don’t post anything you’d be embarrassed to see on a poster on your high street. It will be out there forever. Don’t post drunk, and don’t post things just to be mean. That’s just dull and depressing.

But on the bright side, the online world really is your oyster, and it is a shame not to use such an amazing asset. You don’t need to let it take over your life, just fit it in to a routine and enjoy it, rather than worrying if any one tweet or post is going to bring you fame or fortune. And my last word? Hope you’ll friend me on FB (Shelly Goldstein) and follow @groovyshelly on Twitter.

By Brendan Foley (writer, producer and director working in books, film and TV)

One of the biggest battles for people who make their living in the entertainment and media industries is that they get little sympathy from nine-to-fivers as both sides struggle to make ends meet.

The underlying attitude is often something along the lines that: “I have to get up five days a week to go to a job I hate with a boss I hate while you just write/sing/prance and get paid for having fun. Stop complaining.”

And in a way, they have a point. For most of us, no one held a gun to our head and demanded we work long hours often for little recognition and sometimes for little remuneration in the tough world of 21^st Century media and entertainment. We do it because we love it. It is who we are. As Hyman Roth observes in Godfather II “This is the business we’ve chosen.”

So, does that mean we just have to sit in perpetual penury, tolling the bell and waiting for society to catch up with the true value of our genius? Not for a second. Studying virtually anyone who makes a decent living in our world can give clues as to how some people do much better than others in terms of surviving long term. Here are three tips on how to making a decent living out of what you love.

1. Develop more than one string to your bow

This is the single most important ingredient in a successful self-employed person in the media or entertainment business. Your career should be like a cooker with at least four hotplates burning away at any one time, and maybe a proverbial bun in the oven as well.

The easiest way to come a cropper in this business is just to have one product/service to sell. For a freelance journalist it may be that you need four utterly different areas of expertise – you may be able to write about Musical Theatre, Electrical Engineering, Trends in Dental Hygiene and Bog Snorkeling.

If you are in business for long enough you will be able to watch as one of these becomes, for a time, the dominant bread-winner and others barely tick over. Then there will be an economic or social change and you find yourself writing non-stop about one of the others.

Or if you are a musician, playing a certain sort of engagement, be it pub gigs or the Albert Hall, you may find that a totally different revenue stream forms a useful second-fiddle. And a third.  And a fourth. If one of your income streams takes a lot of time but brings in very little, put it on the back burner and identify a new one that brings in more for less effort. You don’t have to abandon what you love, but you do have to pay the bills and not starve to death along the way.

There are of course those people who just want to do one thing. Write one sort of book. Do one sort of dance. But the truth is, of those who really succeed in any specific business or art form, most of us have had to do what pays the bills, not just what we happen to love most.

The good news is that sometimes having three or four different revenue streams, always jostling for attention, can sometimes make life more interesting, or even make us better at whatever we regard as our core skill.

2. Be your own Publicist

Few of us can afford our own publicist. Those who can usually do employ one, not out of a sense of self-agrandisement but because having some level of profile among the people who can pay us means more work in the future.

So when times are hard, the best possible approach is to “accentuate the positive”.  It is a strange facet of human nature that we flock to success. This has always been the case – the adage: “Success has a thousand parents but failure is an orphan” rings true to those of us who have had a near miss or two along the way. But while bandying quotes, Shakespeare had a more useful one: “Nothing is but thinking makes it so”. If you have had even the most modest success, for example a writer coming fifth in a small competition may not be front page news, but on a blog or a tweet or rolled in with a few other honourble mentions it can set the writer apart from the herd enough to get a read by a decent agent.

One very successful entertainment colleague used to view Friday after lunch as his “publicity time” and for a few hours he devoted himself to trumpeting in print, online or just in email, about whatever small victories had come his way in the preceding week.

A word of warning – this is about thanking people who help you succeed much more than just tooting your own horn in an obnoxious way. You want to be known as a positive person and success, not a blowhard. Just one of a million examples of self-promotion without being obnoxious is comedian Mark Malkoff who developed his own ‘brand’ and made sure the world knew about it.

3. Spot economic trends

Hindsight, it is said, has 20/20 vision.  But many writers and performers have survived past economic downturns by identifying skills that are growing in demand just as some of their other expertise seems to be on the wane.

One actor friend, fed up with the lack of TV or film roles and irritated by the constant requests to be in shorts for free (“it’s only a few days”) spent some time making it clear that they would gladly work in shorts if not busy, but only if paid some sort of modest fee upfront. No exceptions. What this did for them was to modestly increase their income on one hand, but more importantly allowed them to channel previously wasted energy into a concerted PR campaign that eventually landed them their first well-paid TV ad work. That blossomed into a living and held body and soul together until he eventually got a regular TV drama role, in turn because someone had seen his face on an advert.

If you can identify a future trend early on and become an expert in that field, you can effectively invent not just another “string to your bow” but a string that may become a significant revenue generator and yet allow you enough time to still nurture whatever core skill you want to pursue.

Life is not always an either/or. Sometimes this requires understanding parts of the business that may seem very far from what we do. For instance for a film actor, it is important to understand what, if any, of his or her future revenue may come from DVD sales versus people downloading films online, so an article such as this one may give a clue as to which way the economic wind is blowing. For the actor, or for a union, such changes mean changes to contracts and ultimately to income.

Sometimes, to make the most of such an opportunity, you will need to polish your own skills base. The difference between a freelance journalist waiting for the phone to ring and one able to ring a commissioning editor with a great idea to boost circulation may be as simple as you brushing up your skills on a course. It might be on feature writing, building your first personal website, using social media to get your name out there. The ultimate thing that successful folk seem to do is make a plan and put in the work to make it real, rather than waiting for the cavalry.

Lastly, if it doesn’t sound too glib, it is important not to get bitter about how damn hard it is. Enjoying the bumpy journey is probably a better bet than always squinting towards some far off destination. After all, it has never been easy, as this interview with Dustin Hoffman attests.