Name: Patrick Sheane Duncan, writer, Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995), Courage Under Fire (1996), Little Red Wagon (2012)

Situation: How to get writing

Writing habits—don’t have any except for one: write every day. Writing habits just become excuses for not writing: I haven’t had my coffee yet. My favorite pen ran out of ink. I need the right music.

Writers write.

I’ve heard it a few thousand times by now: “I have all these ideas, but I don’t have the time to write.” Then you don’t want it enough. Go into real estate.

Again, writers write.

When I first started out, I worked for Roger Corman and other film companies as an accountant. I hated it. I wrote every day to get out of that rut. Every day. You say you’re too tired at the end of a long day? I can empathize. I was beat; I worked 50-, 60-hour weeks for those slave drivers. So I wrote on my lunch hour—or, at one company, my lunch half hour.

A page a day, that was my rule.

Writing can mean research, outlining, thinking, and proofing, but ultimately pages are what count. So I tried to produce a page or two a day. Actually, I tried to write a scene a day, but a page was the minimum.

I wrote every day at lunch and on occasional evenings, weekends, and holidays. A little trick I used to make that lunch hour as productive as possible was to check my scene outline every morning before going to work. Then I would think about that scene all morning: on the drive to work; during dull meetings; and while adding columns on my adding machine, paging through computer printouts, or just sitting at my desk appearing busy.

By lunch I had written and rewritten that scene a half dozen times. And it would flow. Usually.

After lunch I would study the next section and let my brain work on that evening’s pages.

By writing just one page each day, you are working toward your goal of being a writer. And if you write a page a day, at the end of three months or so you will have a feature script.

Then you can rewrite a page a day and end up with a better script.

I still do this for side projects. When I am writing an assignment, my spec script becomes the page-a-day project.

Takeaway: Dare to write badly. You can rewrite a bad scene; you can’t rewrite a blank page.