When They Ask For A Table and You Deliver A Chair

Or, What Happens When You Make The Best Chair Ever But It’s Still Not a Table.

First, The Inspired Newsletter is soon going to be accompanied by An Inspired Podcast!  My partner Jim Hall and I have already recorded several episodes and are busy making it as awesome as possible before we release it to the world.  Each episode we interview a screenwriter and delve deep into their creative process.  How they write specs, how they approach assignments, what works for them, what doesn’t… and I’ve got to say, it’s been so enlightening!  I love learning how different people find their magic - what their guiding lights are.  Not to be cheesy but, it’s been so inspiring!  We plan to expand beyond just screenwriting as well and get into all sorts of artistic fields. I’m very excited to share it with everyone and will let you know when it’s ready to launch.

Second, this week we were talking with Dalan Musson, writer on the Marvel series The Falcon And The Winter Soldier and also the upcoming Captain America movie Brave New World.  There is a forthcoming ‘How People Create’ post taken from that conversation that will appear later this month.  However, there was something in particular that came up as we talked that I wanted to dive deeper into now.

One of Dalan’s most resonant pieces of advice was, “If they asked for a table, don’t give them a chair.”

Photo by name_ gravity on Unsplash

I immediately jumped all over this because I have my own version of this sentiment.  I call it: The Promise of The Premise.  This is an issue I have struggled with.  A lot.

Let’s say I get an idea for something.  It’s exciting.  I pitch it to others, they’re excited.  I go off and write it.  It’s good.  Then, when I have the same people, who were excited initially, read the draft, they like it, but…  something.  They offer notes but… it’s mostly a lot of vague statements or random suggestions.  What happened?  I know the draft is good.  They agree, it’s good, but…

No one can say what’s wrong, really.  But something is definitely not right.

At some point last year, I was puzzling over yet another round of confusing notes on a draft and I started to have the feeling that maybe I just wasn’t capable of executing the ideas I came up with.  I couldn’t deliver.  It was a dark time. 

And then it hit me.  I knew what was wrong with the draft.  I had promised one thing, but I had actually written something quite different.  In the process of writing, I had let the story change, the characters change, and although technically the concept was still the same, it had morphed.  If I had sold them The Terminator, I gave them Ex Machina.

I hadn’t thought anything of it when I was writing, I was just following the thread, letting things go in whatever direction they wanted to.  I mean, that’s the best way to do it, right?  Stay out of the way and let the muse take over, the story will unfold organically on its own.

Well, like a lot of things I’ve discovered, these ‘rules’ we come up with… they don’t apply unilaterally.  For me in particular, if there is a ‘rule,’ something I should do, I will strictly adhere to it, usually to my detriment.  I believe this behavior is mostly leftover from my younger self’s black and white thinking - i.e. ‘this is good so I will do this.  ALWAYS.’  

For the record, I’m not saying not to let a story tell you where it wants to go.  That’s a crucially important part of the creative process, in my opinion.  However, there’s following a thread and then there’s jumping to a different thread entirely.  In trying to stay as open as possible to inspiration, I had gotten off track from what was exciting about the idea to begin with.

This was a huge realization for me.  I needed to be both open and focused.  Let the magic happen but within guardrails.  Ah, that grey area.  How I long to define you.  

I believe this applies whether you are working for someone else or not. Deliver on the promise of the premise to yourself, too. If you lose sight of the thing that got you excited in the first place, you can find yourself in a hole that’s hard to get out of.