Dispatch from The Quest: Emma Millions
Last week as we did here on GITS, the Quest writers focused on the fourth week of Prep. Today’s dispatch: Emma Millions talks about the joy of paper and pen:
This week I got a rare opportunity to go away for a few days on an actual holiday. And I didn’t take my computer. Four days without the internet. Without email. Or facebook. Or BBC iplayer. Or any of those other magical modern things we can’t live without these days. Can you imagine it? It was scary but I survived. Not only that but I rediscovered an amazing set of tools and a skill I thought I’d lost a long time ago — paper and pen and the art of scribbling stuff down. Jotting notes, thoughts, ramblings, even a bit of doodling. No delete button. No cutting and pasting. Just a stream of consciousness, ideas as they come, in bits and pieces, words, on paper, in pen. And no distractions from youtube or internet auction sites. No accidentally watching one video of cats saying funny words human style and finding you’ve suddenly lost two whole hours to the hilarious world of animals acting like peoples. And… actually… I loved it. It’s fun. And something I’d never realised before, this way of working is actually a lot more dynamic and expressive then Microsoft Office Word. When I looked at my pages of scribblings they were expressive in a way my writing never is on screen. I’d underlined things, used excitable punctuation, there were arrows everywhere linking one idea to another, some words were big, massive even, some words were small. Even the spaces were telling. Big gaps on the page, question marks instead of words or question marks after words telling me where I am missing ideas or need to do some more thinking. Hardly any gaps, tons of ideas running into the other, line after line running into each other, overlapping, showing me that maybe I need to do some trimming. Things crossed out, things circled, little drawings to highlight and illustrate my own thoughts to myself. It kind of looked like my brain had actually vomited onto the paper. My thought patterns in black and white. And it was so visual. You could almost see the pace unfolding as I more and more urgently bashed out the plot points and as subplot thoughts came to me, bashing into and up against the main plot, nudging in by way of arrows or tiny lines squeezed in between already existing sentences.
I remembered that this was a way I used to work back before my hands became irretrievably stuck to my computer keyboard. I am so old that I did my film degree before the days of a computer in every home. You had to actually book a session on one of the three computers available between the thousands of students at the university. And there was no internet access. Seriously kids, can you imagine? So you had no choice but to use Ye Olde Paper and Pen. And I actually submitted the scribbled, nonsensical ‘notes’ that were my prep for my final movie — Three Psychics and a Little Baby — as part of my support material. And digging them out I was surprised to see how similar they looked to the notes I’d written on holiday (and that I’d even had the nerve to put those bonkers, all over the place, jottings in front of the degree board). You could see my excitement for the project right there on the page. And although they initially appeared mental and rambling, everything was there that made it into the final film. And you could clearly see the process of going from idea to finished script right there on the page. And, in the same notebook, I found loads of other long forgotten ideas for films scribbled down in random bursts (some even useable) amongst hilarious lists of positive affirmations I used to do in order to get the universe to give me what I want. Ahh, nostalgia. (Oddly though, two of those affirmations were to get first class honours in my degree and to become a full time writer — both of which came true… spooky! Maybe that shit really does work?)
So now I have decided to go old school with my writing prep, go cold turkey on the distracting shinyness of my netbook and all the webby delights it contains therein and make magic appear on the pages of my notebook in some dark runny stuff they call ink. And you never know, if I become a rich and famous screenwriter, maybe some day the very same scribbles will find themselves being auctioned off on ebay for a stupid sum of money. At the very least I’ll spend less time watching cats talking about Long Johnson all the live long day.
Over the years, I have weaned myself off the practice of printing pages in order to stop killing trees. But I get what Emma is saying. There is something tactile about jotting down ideas onto actual paper with actual ink.
Sometimes a writer has just got to… you know… write. Like with your fingers. And a pen. Onto paper.
Tomorrow: Another Dispatch from The Quest.
About Emma: British based writer of ‘the funny’. Lover of cats and bad TV. Often found in pyjamas a bit drunk or a bit hungover. Occasionally does burlesque. Twitter: @emmamillions.