Good morning! Happy February.

I managed to get up at seven (woooooo), and I'm out on the porch as I draft this, quietly drinking my coffee. Ricky's out of town, and I've been holed up working on a grant application, revising and re-revising one ten page chunk—the sample—of my current script. I find I do my best work the first hour I'm awake, while my brain is foggy and a little smushy and I don't have the capacity to judge myself yet.

Is the secret to writing maybe just figuring out how not to judge yourself??

I guess that's the secret to the first draft, and maybe the second draft too. But at some point you have to be a critic. Be incisive. Cut the shit that isn't working. Tell yourself to start all over again, sometimes. That comes easily to me. That's who I am. But the smushy just-letting-the-words-come-out thing is so hard for me, man.

Who am I kidding? All of it is hard. At every stage I tell myself, this is the hardest part. The outlining. The first draft. The second fucking draft. And on and on. It is never not hard.

I wish I could keep my brain smushy the whole way. 

Aline Brosh McKenna, screenwriter (and now director!) and co-creator of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, offered a bit of advice on the Scriptnotes podcast that really stuck with me. She's talking about TV writing vs film writing, but it's relevant to any kind of writing I think. The bit about things playing better the way they "splurted" out of you...

One thing I really thought a lot about with writing in a TV environment as opposed to a film environment is sometimes I found, as a screenwriter, I would overly machine things because I had so much time with it. And so I would tinker with things to make them scan perfectly when actually they play better just the way they splurted out of you.