Don't Be Yourself

Advice from Jeff Tweedy on getting out of your head

Happy Friday!

Quick Work Update:

Since the beginning of the year I’ve written two series pitches. Pitch #1 is ready to go, we have our first zoom with a studio on the books for mid-April. Pitch #2 is the adult animated series, it’s in the hands of my creative partner at the attached studio.

I had a meeting last week with a director and producer about adapting my feature spec HALF-LIGHT into a series. It took me a little while to get my head around it because it’s not just chopping the feature in half. It’s a full rewrite, adding new characters that can carry their own storylines but also resonate tonally and thematically, and figuring out how and why those stories intersect in a satisfying way. For a few months I wasn’t sure it was going to work but I kept mulling it over.

The more I thought about it the more excited I got about the potential. The thing I thought was my biggest obstacle - preserving an M. Night style twist late in Act Two - became the thing that I’m most looking forward to. It’s a structure I’ve never seen before in a series. I pitched them my general direction over zoom and they were psyched. For a brief moment we talked about using the feature spec as an ambassador for a pitch but now I’m off to the races re-breaking and rewriting instead.

One of the reasons I’ve been able to get so much done since the beginning of the year is that I finally got my office set up. I have more space than the old place, room for a pinball machine or two down the line.

I got a nice email from one of my reps about the new feature spec, ROAR. The team is putting their heads together to talk about next steps. I think the thing I’m most excited about when it starts circulating is that it shows off a different side of my writing and interests.

I’ve talked about it over a number of recent issues so I won’t bore you with it again, but basically I wanted to combine my love of crime fiction, action, and creature features. I also wanted to recapture the feeling I had watching stuff like THE CROW when I was just starting to become a writer. Thinking about it this past week, I realized that desire helped me get out of my head. The longer I do this the more I realize what a gift it is when I’m able to get out of my own way and just write.

YOU CAN GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD, TOO

Rick Rubin tells a great story about working with Metallica. They’d been around for decades at that point, sold millions of records, they’d done it all. He told them, “Imagine there’s no Metallica. Nobody’s ever heard of you, nobody knows who you are. There’s a Battle of the Bands coming up next week and you have to write the song that’s going to blow every other band out of the water.”

It was his way of getting them to set aside all the preconceived notions, both from the audience perspective and their own understanding of what a Metallica song is or should be. It was just about writing a killer fucking song.

I just read Jeff Tweedy’s book, How to Write One Song, and I think it’s great for anybody looking to be more creative. He talked about another trick for getting outside your head and shaking off your ego in a chapter titled, “Don’t Be Yourself.” From Jeff:

“Even after I had made peace with my voice, I still had the strong impulse to write with the voice, life experience, and gravitas of other artists in mind. It really helped a lot of songs come out of me that I’m not sure would have made it through the dense neurotic thicket of self-doubt and insecurity that defined my own self-image. “Forget the Flowers” on Being There is a good example. Johnny Cash! That’s what I was hearing in my head when I wrote that one.”

I was never a great singer. I went to a conservatory of music and did summer stock with singers who are still giving me chills, thirty years later. It was glaringly obvious, on a daily basis, how much better these other folks were.

But I was a good mimic.

I could kind of sound like Mandy Patinkin or Colm Wilkinson or Joe Cocker or you name it. (Julie and I met doing LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, I was the voice of Audrey 2.) I never quite had a sound that was all my own and to be honest, it didn’t bother me back then. I was getting jobs and I think my versatility helped, especially when I was doing five or six different shows in a summer season.

I moved to Chicago in 1995 and finished my first full-length screenplay in 1996. Again, sorry if you’ve heard this one, but for the new folks… I printed it out, read it, and immediately threw it in the trash. It was a bad Quentin Tarantino ripoff and I knew it was a bad Quentin Tarantino ripoff. He’d taken all of his influences and passions and encyclopedic knowledge of film and remixed it into something that was uniquely him. I was ripping that off wholesale without the twenty years of deep film nerd-dom that led him to that point.

The lack of my own “voice” as a writer bothered me and it continued to haunt me for another fifteen years or so until I cracked the code. I’m glad I finally found it.

But after reading Jeff Tweedy’s book this week I’m also… kind of excited to throw it away from time to time?

I watched John Frankenheimer’s RONIN last week, the first time in maybe twenty years. It was written by John David Zeik and David Mamet, who was writing under a pseudonym. That and HEAT are another two movies I’d like to recapture the spirit of seeing for the first time. I kind of want to spend a day pretending I’m David Mamet writing a movie like RONIN or HEAT. (Just pretending I’m the writer, not the human)

Here’s the great part.

Even though I’m trying to channel David Mamet I’m bringing forty-nine years of experience as a human being on this earth and thirty years of experience as a writer. I’m bringing all the stuff I didn’t have when I was just ripping off Tarantino. I can’t help but be me as well.

We put so much pressure on ourselves to find our “voice.” In every Q&A with a showrunner, rep, publisher, whatever, when they’re asked what they look for in a script or a book, 99 times out of a hundred they’ll say, “A voice.” It gets drummed into our heads day after day that it’s one of the most important aspects of our writing.

But at a certain point it can start to feel like dead weight. It can box us in. It’s like any “best practice” that becomes a rule then eventually sacrosanct.

“Don’t try to be somebody you’re not.”

“Don’t chase trends.”

“Just be yourself.”

This is all sound advice, but also, “Lol, who says?”

If I can free myself up for a few hours or a few days by stepping in to someone else’s shoes, even just as an experiment, it’s worth it.

If you’re feeling stuck or boxed in by your own voice, put it all up for grabs. The kinds of stories you want to tell, the genre, the characters you want to explore, the way the words are laid out on the page. Give yourself permission to borrow someone else’s voice for a while. You don’t have to do it forever.

It works for Jeff Tweedy and he made Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, for God’s sake.

By the way, there’s an incredible documentary about the making of that record, called I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART, which you should absolutely check out. Here’s a quote from the book that sums up one of the lessons he learned:

“Being willing to sound bad is one of the most important pieces of advice that I can give you. Writing a song will teach you that it’s OK to fail. And more than that, that it’s actually good to fail, and that you can come to appreciate the gifts of failure. Failure can be a kind of pain that you shouldn’t let go to waste, at least as long as you’re in the proper space mentally. It will help you deal with rejection in a lot of other areas of your life.

The reaction I got from the Warner Bros. execs when we handed in Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has been well documented. We sent them mixes as they were completed, and they hated every one and claimed each was worse than the last, eventually dropping us before another label that was also part of Warner Bros. rebought the album. Right, you know that story. But the part that I don’t think I’ve ever discussed is how liberating it was to realize I could survive the absolute worst-case scenario for an artist—being told directly, flat out “You suck!”

IDEA LADDER EXERCISE

In the book there’s an exercise called “word ladder” that he uses to jumpstart the lyric writing process and come up with some unique combinations of nouns and verbs. In one column, you list ten verbs that are associated with a concept (he uses “physician”), then in another column you write down ten nouns that are within your field of vision. Next, draw a line to connect nouns and verbs that don’t normally go together, like, “window - listen.”

I was curious if you could tweak it to make a quick and easy idea generator in my journal. In the left column I wrote down ten genre tropes:

1. Aliens

2. Ghosts

3. Pocket Dimension

4. Robots

5. Dark Matter

6. Astral Projection

7. Divination

8. Cryptozoology

9. Doppleganger

10. Genetic Engineering     

In the right hand column, I wrote down the first ten jobs that I found on a link that came up when I searched “best professions 2023.” I skipped a couple that seemed too similar, here’s what I came up with:

1. Software Engineer

2. Nurse Practitioner

3. Health Services Manager

4. Physician Assistant

5. Information Security Analyst

6. Physical Therapist

7. Financial Manager

8. Dentist

9. Lawyer

10. Veterinarian

Then I just started drawing lines between things that seemed interesting but not obvious, or something I’d never seen before. Right away, I drew a line from aliens to lawyer. What if you were a lawyer who was assigned the very first case where an alien was going to be tried for murder? I would have never come up with that. I think my two favorites were, “Infosec analyst hired to design a security system that can contain and protect an encoded consciousness, aka, a ghost,” and, “Dentist discovers a pocket dimension in a patient’s cavity.”

You could do this for any genre, or just make a list of ten genres and ten unique professions. Try it. It’s fun and it will get you out of your head.

Last quote from Brother Jeff’s book, I love this definition of process:

“To me, process is whatever act you can engage in, whatever steps you can take, and whatever device you have at your disposal that you can use, together, that reliably results in a work of art. “Process” is also the only name I know of for whatever series of contortions and mental tricks we have available to lose ourselves in when we create.”

Watch the trailer for I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART!

Check out the book on Wilco's site!