Screenwriting 101: Billy Ray

“Here’s my day. I wake my kids up in the morning, I take my son to his bus stop at 7:30. I’m at my desk at eight. Somebody feeds me at one. I’m back at my desk at 1:30 and I write till five or six. My nights and my weekends belong to my family. I don’t surf the web when I’m supposed to be writing — I don’t look at porn, and I don’t gamble on some offshore site. I don’t do anything stupid — I just work all day. If you do that, you can get a lot done. I don’t spend three hours a day at Starbucks. I don’t consult my muse. I just work. I just try to solve problems all day long. I don’t know another way to approach it. And I can feel when the solutions I’m coming up with are functioning and I can feel when they’re not. You know the difference — you can’t kid yourself. At the top of my computer in big, bold letters, it says, ‘What is the simple emotional journey?’ That’s what I look at on my computer monitor all the time. When I get into a jam I just think, ‘Okay, what’s the story I’m telling? What’s the emotional journey that I’m telling?’”

— Billy Ray (FilmCraft | Screenwriting, P. 139)