It's all celery's fault

So this morning I was making my usual veggie and fruit smoothie. Yes, I live in LA it's what we do. So as I'm chopping up this and that, I go to take out my organic celery from the package and it won't come out. So instead of figuring out why, I decide to keep pulling the exact same way. Which as you know, means it won't come out again! So I finally take a moment to go, well, I'm doing the same thing over and over, so I'm going to get the same results, over and over, let's change it up and see what happens. Lo and behold, I try something new and it comes out easily. I stopped fighting it.

So it got me to thinking, how much of our writing is like the stuck celery? How many times have you tried to write something a certain way with no results? For instance, if I'm stuck on a scene, if I don't force it and go to sleep with that concern on my mind, I always wake up with the perfect solution. Have you tried this? It always works for me. My guess is that somewhere in the recesses of our mind lies the answer. But we can't uncover them by telling our brain to figure it out on the spot! No person can perform well like this, why would our brain?

And what about when it comes to trying a certain genre or a certain medium. I'm mostly a comedy writer. But recently I've had horror writing opportunities. Instead of telling myself or these producers, yeah, I don't do that, I went okay, why not? And partnered up with other writers whose genre it was. This also happened with animation opportunities. A producer at some networking event, not a screenwriting networking event, approached me and asked, do you write animation? I hadn't but, why not? So I said yes. We haven't worked together yet. But that got me to come up with ideas, which got me to meet with an animation artist on a project, which got me one of my managers who specializes in animation! If I had stayed only in comedy, I would have missed out all of those opportunites!

So sometimes I think we have to shake things up. We have to zig, when we've been zagging. We just never know what great opportunity lies in another area that we haven't even tried. And we have to stop trying so hard. The more we just let go, just let things happen without a fight, the more it will just happen.