Today’s Gothamist Interview is with Warren Leight who just might be my new writer hero. If you don’t know Leight by name, chances are you’ve seen or at least heard of his work. He won a Tony Award for the play Side Man. He has a new play officially opening this weekend called No Foreigners Beyond This Point, and Sunday night is the season premiere of Law & Order: Criminal Intent on which he’s a writer and co-executive producer. In 1993 he wrote and directed the wonderfully clever romantic comedy The Night We Never Met which I vividly remember seeing and loving at an early press screening. In the interview, he mentions that people occasionally say to him that it’s one of the most underrated romantic comedies of the 1990s, and I would most certainly agree.
But why is he my new hero, you ask? Because while talking to him on the phone last week, for the first time in my life I heard a writer talk about his working habits in a way to which I could completely relate. I guess the most specific passage that I printed over at Gothamist would be this one:
You know, I guess there’s two kinds of alcoholics; there’s also two kinds of writers. I’m a binge writer. I’ve always been a binge writer. Again, that’s why TV is fine for me. You know, I’ll have three days to write a whole script, and I’ll go 20 hours a day for two days or something like that. There’s something about just disappearing into the world and coming out with a first draft that’s a bit of a narcotic for me I suppose. Something happens when I get into that world, that I don’t have any sense of time. I’ll look up, and 14 hours will have gone by, and I’ll stand, and my legs are all cramped up. I have writer friends who set the alarm every morning, wake up, make a cup of coffee, and sit down at the typewriter. I don’t understand what they’re doing.
Halleluljah! Tell me about it. I’ve tried to force myself into that make-it-a-habit mode, and it just never works. It makes everything harder. He also talks about how he needs deadlines; that he’ll always do what it takes to get it done; that sometimes he’ll agree to a deadline (for a script reading, for example) before he even knows what he’s going to write about. I relate.
Two years ago, I was determined to finally write a complete draft of a screenplay idea I had had for a few years. So what did I do? I actually paid to take a screenwriting class, not because I wanted someone to teach me how to write a screenplay — I’ve had plenty of classes and read books and read hundreds if not thousands of screenplays — but just to give myself a deadline. I’m terrible at setting deadlines for myself because if I don’t make it, who do I disappoint or fail? Just me, and in my own head (here comes the dysfunction), I’m not always important enough. But if I spend several hundred dollars paying someone else, you better believe I’m going to complete that draft. And I did. And now, two years later, “Dwight and the Lady in White” (that’s just a working title!) remains in that complete first draft state. I really need to get back to it, but how without a hard deadline?
In fact, the best part of my conversation with Warren was a bit that I didn’t print on Gothamist, just because of length — as it was, I cut well over 2000 words from the final interview and it’s still rather long. But I’ll tell you what he said here.
Honestly, the self-loathing … the worst thing in the world is how you end up hating yourself because you’re NOT one of those other kinds of writers. I guess … here’s my tip, Aaron: just accept it. Give yourself … It took me 20 years to figure this out. Impose a deadline on yourself, but the only way it works for me is to have eight people waiting, or something like that. Tell somebody, Oh, I’m going to get you a screenplay in a month. But otherwise, I don’t know. How would you finish?
Yup. I hear ya. I may not always be the best writer, but the “self-loathing”? I got that shit nailed, yo!
One more interview will run next week, but I have to say, as busy as I’ve been and as difficult and time-consuming the past two weeks have been — and no, as of this moment, I still do not have a new apartment or job, although I have a big job interview in under three hours that I’m really hoping for — the interviews I’ve done this go around — with Warren, Christine Vachon and Liev Schreiber are easily among my favorites. Maybe because I actually got something personal out of conducting and editing each of them. I don’t know … but I guess it’s why I keep doing this.
Out of Focus 