Writing is a lonely road

For rea­sons I won’t bore you with, I’ve been with­draw­ing from the world a bit recently. Friends and asso­ciates are reced­ing into the back­ground and I’m focus­ing more and more on my writ­ing. This is nei­ther good nor bad, it’s just the way things are, and I’m try­ing to make the best of it. But in the process, I’m dis­cov­er­ing some­thing about writ­ing that I don’t think I fully real­ized in the last 23 years that I’ve been writ­ing seri­ously. Writ­ing alone is hard.

To a cer­tain extent, we all write alone, of course. It’s the nature of the job. But what I’m find­ing now, cut off from my for­mer writ­ing part­ner and hav­ing left the cri­tique group I founded long ago, is that I miss the fel­low­ship of other writ­ers, and could really use some­one to bounce ideas back and forth with. It’s just not the same ask­ing myself ques­tions and try­ing to answer them.

Case in point. I’m gear­ing up for Script Frenzy in April. I’ve got a good idea for a screen­play, some­thing I’ve been kick­ing around for about a decade that I’ve always known would make either a kick-​ass action movie or a good Crichton-​esque (before his State of Fear sell­out hack­i­tude) tech­nothriller. Per­fect fod­der for the “100 script pages in a month” white heat of Script Frenzy. But I’ve got sec­ond act prob­lems. I know how the movie starts, I have a great, kick ass end­ing, but how to get from one to the other is a mite fuzzy. And it’s here that I really wish I had some­one to ban­ter with, some­one who could help me answer some of the ques­tions I have about get­ting to that cru­cial plot twist that takes you from the end of act 2 and car­oming into act 3.

But I don’t have any­one left that I trust. This is fool­ish, I know, since there’s real­is­ti­cally no dan­ger in talk­ing openly about my story. Give two writ­ers the same basic story and you end up with “Armaged­don” on one side and “Deep Impact” on the other. But old habits die hard, and I’m keep­ing the details to myself. The story ques­tions I’ve teased out of my out­line I’ll have to answer myself. The answers will come, and at least I have sec­ond act prob­lems and not the third act prob­lems (good story but no sat­is­fac­tory end­ing) more com­mon, and deadly, to screenplays.

I didn’t appre­ci­ate the social aspect of writ­ing until it was gone. Like so much in life, I sup­pose. So I ask my read­ers, those of you who know the soli­tude of the writ­ten word. How do you deal with the iso­la­tion of writing?