Who are you and what do you write?

My name is Eric Heisserer, a screenwriter and (soon to be) director. I’ve worked with a number of studios on a variety of genre films, but the ones that have withstood the arduous trek to screen are all horror movies like Final Destination 5 and The Thing (2011).

I’m looking to break that streak by shooting a script I wrote based on the short story Hours, first published on Derek Haas’ anthology site Popcorn Fiction. We’re in pre-production now, aiming for an April 2012 shoot date.

I’ve written a few other stories for Popcorn Fiction this year, like Last Vegas and Simultaneous. I try to write in at least two different mediums each year because it helps me develop/maintain new creative muscles.

On Twitter, I’m @writerspry.

Where and when do you write?

I’m a hallway commuter with a home office. I’ve been writing at home my whole career (and before then, too), so I’ve come to find a discipline in keeping a normal work schedule. Before this I was a cubicle monkey in the white-collar world, so my body is used to getting up and putting in eight hours every weekday (typically 9 – 6).

If I don’t write at least a little each day, I start to feel nervous and on edge, as if I were quitting caffeine cold turkey. My best hours are typically just before and after lunch. When I need to stop for a meeting or to eat, I try to break at a point where I know the next thing I want to write, because it makes getting back into the work so much easier when I return to the keyboard.

In my home office I have my computer desk, a reading chair, a TV, and a cork wall where active projects are tacked in the form of a hundred different index cards plus photos and magazine clippings as visual inspiration. The cork wall and a few of my magazine clippings are relatively new to my process, courtesy of my brilliant wife Christine Boylan (@KitMoxie), whose home office is just across the hall from me. (Check out her Workspace post.)

What hardware to you use?

I’ve recently upgraded to a desktop iMac with a cinema display, but my last iMac was four or five years old. I also have a small MacBook I take with me to set or when I’m going out of town. Both Macs get the job done, but I get best results from my desktop.

I use a lot of 3×5 index cards. White ones. Colored ones. Lined and unlined. I use whatever I can get my paws on when I’m seized with a new thought.

The cards are the first form my projects take, and they fall in two categories: Story and Snippets. In the story structure side of things I’ll have cards like “[hero] states his goal” or “[villain] collides with [hero] for the first time.” These are basic milestones that form the frame of the thing I’m building.

The Snippets side of the cork wall is for all the flotsam and jetsam that comes to me for the project. Specific details. A line of dialogue. A character description. An illustration from a comic book. A photo of a setting.

Once I have a critical mass of cards on the board, I take them all down and Voltron them into a single document. I will scan visuals if I need to. Then I create a new set of cards, this time designed to look more professional, and I print them on my color printer.

This is probably the most important step for me, because it tricks my brain into believing it’s a real project and not some crazy collection of thoughts. I use photos of actors to cast the major roles, and I look for images and key words that evoke the tone of the project. The casting choices aren’t meant to be realistic options for the actual production, but they remind me I’m writing words for someone else to say. And if I can’t envision the actors delivering a convincing performance in a scene, I know I’ve strayed off-course.

I do this with every project, but where these cards are most helpful is in a pitch. Studio and network exes love visuals and they love structure. It helps that the movie or pilot is already pseudo-cast for them, because it reinforces the tone and the size of the story. Through trial and error I’ve come to learn not to put too many words on a card, otherwise the execs will read them instead of listening to the pitch, and sometimes the writing on the card spoils a reveal before you speak it.

Here’s an example: I adapted the Popcorn Fiction story Simultaneous into a TV series concept, and then built the pilot structure as a modified procedural. When I designed my cards for the polished version, I made a title card (at top), my major characters, their supporting characters, and then the guest stars for that episode (at bottom). My villain/crime for the pilot episode is the card placed in the center; the Ash Killer card.

The right-hand column offers a card with two films as my thematic or tonal touchstone for this project, and then three sample episodes that I had developed. This particular layout of cards resembles a Tarot spread; the Celtic Cross. That was intentional, as one of my characters reads Tarot.

Again, at this stage there isn’t a lot of words on these cards, because all that content now lives in the Voltron document I built from my first round of index card collecting. These new cards go on my cork wall where I can see them as I write the script. They’re visual cues. They speak more to the characters’ motives than to story, because that can be my blind spot during scripting.

That was a terribly long tangent. Sorry. On to other hardware:

• Sharpie pens. For that first round of index cards. I like their fine-point retractable ones, but any will do as long as it’s black ink.

• Office Depot 4×6 postcard sheets. The fancy cards. There are other options; Avery makes some, but generic brand works just as well.

• My Canon MP560 color printer. For the fancy cards.

What software do you use?

I use Photoshop and QuarkXPress for the card design process, because I worked in print design for many years, but they could just as easily be made in a word processing application. I’m just more familiar with Quark and Photoshop.

For the scriptwriting, I use Final Draft. I’ve worked in Movie Magic Screenwriter, too. Both get the job done.

What would you change?

Not to cheat off Phil Hay’s answer, but: I would write more.

I tend to abandon ideas before giving them the proper attention. I have a bad habit of expecting a reader or studio response long before I get one, and I can talk myself out of a good idea like a pro. I need to be better about silencing the voice who discourages new ideas and new hope with my work, because it is painfully easy to say “This won’t sell” or “This won’t survive production.”

There is a town full of people ready to say “No” to my projects. I can’t be one of them.

Who are you and what do you write?

My name is Chris Sparling. I write screenplays and, on occasion, wills for old people I plan on squandering money from after they die. My first paid writing gig was for a website I had never even heard of, and the article was on veterinary pet insurance – a topic I had no knowledge of whatsoever. I was paid $20. Boo-yah.

I won Best Original Screenplay in 2010 from the National Board of Review for writing Buried, and also won a Goya Award in the same category.

These days I’m prepping two projects, Mercy and Incident on 459, which are being produced by Peter Safran and Mike DeLuca, respectively. I primarily write feature-length thrillers, including the upcoming film ATM, which will be released by IFC Films in early 2012, and Reincarnate for producer M. Night Shyamalan, the second of three films in The Night Chronicles series.

I will be making my feature directing debut this spring with the supernatural drama/thriller Falling Slowly.

I recently joined Twitter. Find me @ChrisSparling.

Where and when do you write?

Most times, I write in this little-known coffee shop not far from my house. I’m not sure what it’s called. Stardust? Starburst? Hold on, let me ask the girl behind the counter…

She said it’s called Starbucks. What a stupid name.

Anyway, here I am, and here I usually am, stealing their electricity and working for at least a four-hour clip. I have a small office in my house, but because my wife works from home (and we have an achingly cute little daughter toddling around), it’s nearly impossible to not forego work for the day to instead hang out with them. So, Starburst it is.

I sometimes like to change things up and visit my satellite office, a.k.a. Panera Bread. I’ve been lobbying for them to change their name to Pantera Bread, thinking it will cool up the joint a bit, but they don’t seem all that receptive to the idea. I steal their electricity, too.

Typically, I split my day around my trip to the gym. My daytime writing happens outside the house, but I also try to put in about three or four hours of work at home each evening. As pretentious as it probably sounds, I also do a good deal of “writing” in my head while driving. Thankfully this hasn’t resulted in a car accident yet.

If I have any “process” (dangerously toeing the pretension line again here), it’s plugging in my headphones and listening to some movie scores that match the tone of what I’m currently writing.

Also, I have a fantastic manager, and he’s great with feedback — such as, “Dude, this fucking sucks.” Well, maybe not that exactly, but he’s not one to pull punches, and that’s incredibly valuable. When I’m done with a draft, or a treatment, or even just a sentence describing a new idea I had, I’ll run it by him. It might not be the most scientific approach, but it seems to work pretty well.

What hardware do you use?

I use an HP laptop. It’s about two years old by this point. I’m not really a tech guy, so it suits me just fine. The only problem is battery life (hence why I’m always stealing electricity). I frequently travel back and forth between the east and west coast, and my battery barely lasts half the flight. The other weird thing about it is that these obscure websites — showing attractive women in various states of undress — always seem to randomly pop up on my screen. Go figure.

My wife’s a Mac user, and she pulled the trigger on buying an iPad. I love that freakin’ thing. I don’t really know how to use it, but that doesn’t stop me from loving it. Primarily, I read scripts on it and/or source material (books, producers notes, character bibles, etc.) either for an assignment I’m going after or as a general point of reference. It’s also great for watching movies during cross-country flights after my laptop battery dies.

Lastly, I sometimes still rock the pad and pen. I have a bunch of old notebooks filled with ideas, sketches, and nearly-incoherent scrawling that I refer to from time to time. I had my fair share of crappy jobs in my pre-screenwriting days, and I used to always jot stuff down that I could plug into a script I was working on when I got home that night. Or morning, depending on the hours said crappy job ran.

What software do you use?

I’ve always used Final Draft, but it was only about a month ago that I finally upgraded to Version 8. Before that I had been using Version 5 for over a decade. Again, I’m not really a tech guy, so upgrading didn’t seem all that necessary. Both versions format screenplays; I didn’t need all the bells and whistles later versions offered. That is, except for the ability to convert to .PDF, which Version 5 did not do.

Prior to the upgrade, I used a separate .PDF-conversion program; however, the text would, on rare occasion, show up all funky on certain computers. So, I said enough is enough and upgraded to Version 8.

How’s that for a boring fucking story? Wow.

What would you change about how you write?

For starters, I would stop wasting so much time online. Twitter has been fun so far, but it is a pretty big time suck. Same for Facebook, and I don’t even have an account. I would also like to be better at prioritizing projects I’m working on simultaneously, rather than bouncing back and forth so much. The work suffers, I feel.

But all in all, I don’t think I’d change too much about how I write. I mean, it’s writing; you think up some stuff, you write it down, and you hope people like it. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. And, sometimes they actually pay you for it, even if it’s only twenty bucks.

Who are you and what do you write?

My name is Christine Boylan. Most of my day is spent writing and producing television — I started on Leverage (TNT), worked on the sweet but never aired alien invasion series Day One (NBC), then Off the Map at ABC and now I’m a co-producer on Castle.

I occasionally write short stories (such as Hoss at Popcorn Fiction) and plays. I’ve also written comic books for DC, Marvel, Boom, Tokyopop and NBC, including two of the Heroes comics.

On the Twitter, I’m @kitmoxie.

Where and when do you write?


Most of the time I write in my home office, which is a stone’s throw away from my husband’s office, but, luckily for him, we have doors.

I can write anywhere if I can get the spirit to move me (or I have a heart-stopping deadline) — passenger seat of cars (no motion sickness), trains, planes (usually drunk), the middle of the jungle, etc.

I try to change locations during a long writing session to keep myself going — this might be as simple as moving up to the kitchen and sitting on the annoying bench that hurts my back but keeps me awake, or it might mean just lying on the floor in some kind of weird cobra-pose for an hour and writing there. My office has a giant wood desk that’s more like a table than a desk. I alternate using two different chairs: an Aeron I stole from my husband when I moved in and a Swopper.

I had spine surgery when I was younger, so I try to move around and change positions as much as I can. I have yoga blocks and a foam roller, too. Also, a heating pad. And Vicodin. It’s a back-friendly office.

If left to my own devices, I’m a night person. When I was unemployed and writing my first spec pilot, I would sleep until noon, run errands, and then settle down to write from about 4pm to 8, then break, then 10pm to 4am. That was a very special, very Scotch-driven time in my career.

Now that I’m employed, I find that every TV writers’ room has its own culture and rules, so I adjust my schedule to theirs when the season starts.

John Rogers (@jonrog1) at Leverage is a productivity nerd, so he likes to use his writing staff to try out new processes. A lot of what we did there has stuck with me: working on a story for 48 minutes, then resting for 12. That one’s inviolable. You can’t fool around too much during a 48, you can’t discuss work on a 12. If caught, John would stop you — “Respect the 12!” — thus inculcating the idea of an earned rest period.

Speaking of rest, Mark Waid (@MarkWaid) taught me the value of walking away for a few hours and letting something simmer. If I’ve put in the time, then sleep, then I shower or take a yoga class, an idea will come. Maybe the idea is for the next project, but hell, it’s an idea, and I’ll have it happily.

This has been my schedule since June: I’ll get up at 7, head to the gym for swimming or yoga, then to the Castle offices in Hollywood. We run writers’ rooms all day, usually 10 to 7, and we often have two going at once. Then in the evening I’ll spend two or three hours working on one of my own projects or, if I’m burned for the day, have a drink and watch TV or read.

Weekends are exercise, writing in the afternoons, socializing. If I really need to get a personal project done, I’ll get a hotel room in Malibu or Palm Springs and marathon — room service is very, very helpful.

What hardware do you use?

I have a Macbook Pro at home and on the road, and I sometimes use the desktop Mac provided for me at the Castle offices. If I want a little extra crunch or manual exercise, I’ll hook up the Das Keyboard recommended to me by the lovely and talented Leverage writer M. Scott Veach (@mscottveach).

I use an iPad (first gen) for reading scripts and some books (GoodReader and Kindle for iPad, respectively) and watching shows on Netflix or the beautiful HBO Go. I have in the past written entire first draft outlines on my iPhone while on set. (I love being on set. Everyone knows what his or her job is. Boundaries are such a relief sometimes.)

I use index cards — something else I picked up at Leverage — to break story. I have cork squares on an entire wall of my home office, and it’s a nice, big wall space useful for everything from pilots to plays to features. We use white boards at Castle, which I admit I still dislike. I have the distinction of having really terrible handwriting on the board. 

What software do you use?

I handwrite my first drafts, which drives some of my colleagues crazy. I don’t know if it’s advantageous or not, but it’s just how my brain works. It’s good to be away from the computer (though I may use the dictionary/thesaurus on the phone or iPad); it’s good to feel the pen in your hand (I use a Libelle fountain pen, because the nib forces me to hold the pen correctly and not hurt my hand); it’s great to see the legal pads (letter sized) stacked up, full of scenes. They may be terrible, they may be marvelous, but they exist, and now you can rewrite them.

So then I type it all up — I use tall document holders from Fellowes (one at home, one at Castle) and I rewrite and edit to an extent while I’m typing that first draft. Then I print and go through it with the red or green pen — the pilot G2 works great. (I can’t stand ball points. Using one feels like scratching nails on a chalk board.) Then I re-type the changes.

If I’m in a real hurry — and on Leverage I had to write the first draft of one episode in a weekend — I’ll get someone in and dictate the script. My gorgeous friend Alex Engel can use all the software and can also read my mind. Unfortunately, he’s now a working writer and I can no longer take advantage of him for long dictation sessions. Sometimes I’ll dictate the boards in the writers’ room to our writers’ assistant at Castle, Adam Frost, and it ends up becoming a rough draft for the outline. Whether I dictate the script or not, I always have a step in the process where I read it through out loud.

Some people are visual, but I’m predominantly aural. I can hear if it’s wrong faster than I can see it.

For software, I use whatever the show uses. My first three shows used Movie Magic Screenwriter, and I still use it for comic books and stage plays. Castle uses Final Draft, which I hadn’t picked up in four years, but I’m getting used to it again.

None of these programs feels particularly elegant to me, though. Hand writing helps me avoid any software frustration early in the process, so by the time I’m typing I feel enough urgency to learn the damn keyboard shortcut and move forward.

For notes and research archives I use Evernote. I don’t know how I ever got along without it…except I do, and the evidence is scraps of paper in project-specific piles all over my office floor.

For organization purposes I swing insanely between orthodox GTD and total chaos, but I’ve been through Things and OmniFocus and now I use 3×5 cards in a Levenger Circa PDA.

Sometimes I listen to music when I’m working, usually something without lyrics unless I’m desperately trying to evoke a tone. Then I can put the same song on repeat for a few hours. Otherwise white noise apps are great (I listened to a lot of Amazon jungle sounds while writing Off the Map), and a good, solid metronome helps me find rhythm.

What would you change about how you write?

I would eliminate some of the self-loathing that takes up a lot of the energy I need to write. Procrastination is both useful and deadly. Again, if I’m stuck on a problem and I go away for four hours to ride horses, I’ll come back with a solution and I can get to work. But if I’ve procrastinated all weekend and then my time is up, I’m going to go to bed unhappy and have five miserable wake-ups in the week ahead.

I’m a huge fan of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art – I have it on my Kindle, I keep a copy on my desk at home, I have an audio version on my iPod. Those lessons unfold themselves every day.

A really good friend of mine, Jacob Krueger, instills some of this stuff in his screenwriting classes, acting classes and hypnosis sessions in New York. It’s not about removing blocks per se, but about embracing the part of yourself that puts up those blocks.

Or maybe it’s about needing another Scotch.

Who are you and what do you write?

I’m Phil Hay, a screenwriter. I write (always have) with a partner, Matt Manfredi.

At the moment, our film R.I.P.D. is in production in Boston, and we are back and forth from here to there. We wrote, with Adam McKay, an adaptation of the great Ennis/Robertson comic The Boys. McKay is putting that together right now. We’re also working on a quasi-secret movie for Fox and an adaptation of a Japanese movie called Big Man Japan for Sony and Neal Moritz (who is, indisputably, our main man.)

Before all this, we wrote crazy/beautiful, Aeon Flux, and co-wrote the Clash of the Titans remake, and directed a movie, Bug (2001).

Where and when do you write?

From the beginning, Matt and I have tried to keep to a very regular schedule. We go Monday-Friday, 10-5:30 or 6 in normal times. Obviously, if in production, or when we’re close to a deadline, we can scramble into any hours.

For many years, we worked out of an office lovingly hewn from my garage. Recently, we moved to a place called “The Lot,” in West Hollywood. It looks pretty much exactly as you’d imagine a 1930s studio lot would. It’s mellow, and several of our writer and director friends are here, too, or come here when they are cutting or shooting.

We have one bigger room with two desks and a couch, and one smaller room with the corkboard and a table with chairs around it. We have a mini-fridge with beer in it, acquisition of which was a personal and professional high water mark.

My desk is piled with stuff — scripts, notes, books, scrawls. Matt’s is completely, eerily, annoyingly clean. The desks face the same direction but are angled slightly toward each other so we can talk. We used to sit directly across from each other, but I think we can all agree that that’s a bit much, right?

We’ve both realized that the immediate surroundings don’t affect us all that much. Our HQ used to be the kitchen table in an apartment we shared. At times it’s been a hotel room, a veritable broom closet at Warner Brothers, a spotless, oddly narrow room at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, a shivery, cavernous room with dangling electrical wires at Longcross (a tank-proving-ground- turned-studio in England,) a glass fishbowl in Boston that actually, and truly, and deeply, smells of fish.

(An interesting bit about production: during the last couple weeks of preproduction, the editorial department always comes sniffing around your office, measuring, assessing… craving. They will inevitably annex your space and kick you down the hall. 3-for-3 so far.)

But at home, going to our own office every day is a ritual that is very helpful. We always outline together, then we divide scenes and write — sometimes still in the same office, sometimes at home, sending files to each other at the end of the day. When we have the raw scenes down we manufacture a Frankenstein’s monster version, stitch it together, then come back together and work (battle) it through.

What hardware do you use?

I use a previous-generation MacBook Pro, because I always, always pull the trigger on a new computer moments before the new model debuts. Matt uses a MacBook Pro of the current generation, bought two weeks later. I love all office products. I buy a lot of them, but I rarely I end up using them. Little cardboard folders, aluminum boxes (the greatest), envelopes, binders… going to Staples is like going to Toys ‘R Us. But as I said, I can’t figure out what to use them for. I guess what I’m realizing is that I love to store office products. That my true passion is for warehousing.

I truly love pens. I’ve only met one person who loves them more, and that’s Robert Schwentke, our friend and the director of R.I.P.D., who turned me on to the greatest pen in the world. Pilot G-TEC-C4. Do yourself a favor.

Drawing pens. I scribble and doodle a lot, maybe even obsessively, over all surfaces.

Notebooks. I also love notebooks. I’ve had some great composition books from Japan that have weirdly translated slogans on the front: “It must Perfection try to it” or “Information: here fell the NewHand”. I used to use those great hardcover lab books when I was in grad school. Now, I like those orange Rhodia deals that are the size of a pack of cigarettes and can fit in your back pocket.

Freitag bag. I got my first in Berlin, where they are very popular. They’re made of old truck tarps and seatbelts. For me, it’s the greatest computer bag in the world.

A corkboard. We aren’t big on notecards, but we post a 10-12 page outline sequentially on a corkboard, and kind of check it down as we are writing. We often write out of sequence — our belief is that we should write the stuff that most excites us on any given day, both because it’s more productive for us and it eventually exposes any scene that feels obligatory or dutiful — so this is really helpful. We also put storyboards up here, diagrams of action sequences, things like that.

What software do you use?

Final Draft. Never occurred to me to use anything else.

Sometimes, iAnnotate, which allows you to write on PDF’s on the iPad. It’s the first thing that has come around in a while that feels like a leap forward and has made a dent in my totally locked-down habits. Still, I generally need to print a script out and make notes by hand.

What would you change?

Here’s what I definitely wouldn’t change: having an extremely talented and excellent partner. He’s truly great.

What I would change: I’d write more.

I’d be less snowed under all the time by an avalanche of thoughts and fragments and 100 movies or stories I’d like to write. I’d be more methodical and I’d move on faster. No matter how much we write — and I think objectively we write pretty much — it never feels like enough. That definitely haunts me.

But I bet I have a lot of company in this feeling out there (don’t I?!). So maybe what I’d change is accepting that more. I never stop thinking about stories. Even though I feel I do 90 percent of my own work while walking around doing something else, there’s something very important about having the dedicated physical space and an ironclad ritual about attending to it every day.

Someone once told me that as a writer you’re like the proverbial Newton under the apple tree. Your job is to be there when the apple finally falls. Sometimes that is the job, just being there, putting in the hours, as many as you can. You have to be sitting there so you don’t miss it.

Who are you and what do you write?

I’m Heather Hach, and I’m lucky enough to call myself a mostly-employed screenwriter. My best-known credit is Freaky Friday — the recent one, not the 1970s version. I’ve also written for Broadway (Legally Blonde the Musical), TV (an ABC pilot last season that didn’t get picked up), and a book you may have seen in the Bargain Bin pile (Freaky Monday), but I still consider myself first and foremost a screenwriter.

I tend to write comedies and more female-driven material. I’ll share credit on the upcoming What To Expect When You’re Expecting, which comes out Mother’s Day 2012. (Please go opening weekend. Please.)

I probably identify myself primarily as a screenwriter because I simply love movies all out of proportion. When movies are good, I’m the woman randomly clapping and guffawing with loud delight in the back of the theater. (Actually, not the back — the middle, and always on an aisle. Always. Small bladder.)

When I went through the ego boost of having my husband walk out on me 15 years ago, I told myself, “Good god, seriously? This is my life? Okay, what do I REALLY wanna do now then? Because my personal life is in the toilet but maybe my professional life could kick ass.”

And I realized while watching Good Will Hunting, I love movies most. (And while watching Star Wars. And while watching Jaws. And while watching Crimes and Misdemeanors. You get the idea…) And I love comedy. (I used to perform with an improv troupe in Denver.) And writing. (Which is what I did professionally.)

So I combined those passions, and realized that’s called being a screenwriter. I started writing scripts, and I knew this was ‘it.’ I moved to LA in 1998. In 1999, I won the Walt Disney Fellowship, and my first assignment was Freaky Friday. I had no idea then this is generally not how Hollywood works.

Where and when do you write?

I try — operative word being ‘try’ — to write from 9 to 5-ish at my home office, with varying degrees of success. I have a 21-month old boy at home who wants to wander into my office, and he is damned irresistible, so that’s challenging.

I also can be easily distracted and spend an inordinate amount of time looking up flash sales to places in the Bahamas I’ve never heard of and for ridiculously high heels I’ll never wear and why Kim Kardashian is the worst person on the planet.

Oh, and interactive maps predicting whether Indiana will go blue or red in 2012. I love those.

What hardware do you use?

I use a Macintosh OS X (I had to go to the “About This Computer” icon to find out that information, if that gives you a clue) and have a painfully out-of-touch Mac laptop. It’s so old I’m not even going to look it up and embarrass myself.

What software do you use?

Final Draft, of course, and I think I have version 8 but I could be wrong. I use Word a lot for my outlines. Frankly, I’m like a fawn whose mother has been shot in the woods when it comes to technology.

What would you change about how you write?

I think writing would be a lot easier if I could somehow magically be Aaron Sorkin for 23 minutes a day — or Beyonce, even. Both, ideally.

That’s not going to happen. So I have to maximize my own skills and do the heavy lifting and painful work of breaking a story (the part that inevitably makes me want to lay down). I wish I knew how to make that process more digestible. I still don’t. I wish I could tune out the world better and not be so ADD all too often.

I strive for five pages a day when I’m in delivery mode — whether that takes me an hour or ten. If I’m ambitious, I’ll do more.

Who are you and what do you write?

My name is Gary Whitta (@garywhitta). I started out as a journalist and editor in the video game industry; I edited PC Gamer magazine from 1993-2000 before starting a new career as a screenwriter.

I wrote the Denzel Washington movie The Book of Eli. I’ve written on projects like the live-action feature adaptations of Akira and World of Warcraft. My next movie, set to star Will and Jaden Smith, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, goes into production early next year for release in Summer 2013. I’m currently working on an animated feature for Paramount, and recently signed a TV development deal with ABC Studios. I’m working on some comic-book projects.

I also got to play a zombie in the pilot episode of The Walking Dead, which was pretty cool.

Where and when do you write?

I work from home, in a spare bedroom converted into a quasi-office. I’m usually at my computer by 8:30 each morning but spend an hour or so catching up on news, social media stuff and generally procrastinating before knuckling down to work. Sometimes I’ll manage to blow off the whole morning but then guilt sets in after lunch and so the afternoon tends to be when I get most of my actual work done. I’m easily distracted so if I really need to concentrate I’ll turn off everything that can bleep/bing/flash at me (email, twitter, IM, etc) and go into full-screen mode on my writing program so I’m properly blinkered.

When actually writing the first draft of a new script my over/under is five pages per day — anything less, I’ll feel like I slacked off, anything more is gravy. At five pages per weekday, you’ve got a 120-page script in about five weeks, which is pretty decent. When I’m really consumed with what I’m writing it can be much more — the first draft of The Book of Eli was written in less than a week, writing well into the night, blasting out about 20 pages per day.

Those are the rare good times; more commonly each page is like pulling teeth and just making my “daily 5″ is a victory.

A daily quota is harder to quantify when outlining or rewriting. If you’re honest with yourself you just instinctively know at the end of each day if you’re satisfied with how much you got done. Particularly when rewriting you can work hard all day, coming at a problematic scene ten different ways, and still wind up back where you started. On those days I don’t beat myself up too much because at least I know I worked hard, but it’s still frustrating if you feel like you didn’t make any meaningful progress.

I know a lot of writers like to have music playing when they work but I find it a distraction usually. I need a quiet environment to work, although in some cases — mostly in the early stages of a project when I’m still feeling out the feel and tone of a piece — I’ll make an appropriate playlist of music that takes me to those places. When I was writing The Book of Eli I listened to a lot of gospel and devotional music — Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, Johhny Cash, stuff like that.

I’ll also put that stuff on my iPod and listen to it in the car, I find that immersing myself in music that evokes the atmosphere of the piece I’m working on really helps me.

What hardware do you use?

I’m an Apple guy through and through. My main desktop work machine is a 27″ iMac and I take an 11″ MacBook Air with me when I travel. I also use an iPad which has become an indispensable tool when pitching. I create PDF “flash cards” in Pages that I can easily swipe through with the iPad on my knee as I’m sat there pitching to someone. I write just enough information that I don’t get lost or trail off, but not so much that it feels like I’m just reading off a script.

I also use my iPad for reading scripts that are sent my way as well as comics and other things sent for consideration to adapt/rewrite. Almost everything is a PDF these days. The iPad really is an amazingly versatile device and it’s already hard to imagine what being a screenwriter without one was like.

I also have a pretty capable gaming PC under my same desk, which is hooked up to my iMac in target display mode so it’s easy to switch over when I want to play games. Which is pretty much all the time that I’m writing.

What software do you use?

Like most screenwriters I use Final Draft. And like John, I don’t love it.

It’s just what I’ve always used and I’m too set in my ways to learn something new. It works well enough despite its sometimes annoying quirks and it is the closest thing there is to an industry standard, although these days all you really need is something that will properly output PDFs (until you actually go into serious development/pre-production at which point they will want you to give them editable Final Draft files).

For general writing I use Apple’s Pages, which is a very elegant and simple word processor, and it comes with a full-screen mode that eliminates distraction. If you’re looking for something free on Mac, WriteRoom does a similar job.

I’m pretty much within the Apple ecosystem for everything else, too. I use Apple Mail and iCal synced to my iPhone via iCloud which is pretty idiot-proof and therefore perfect for me.

I had a serious hard drive crash several years ago and it really was a big wake-up call on the importance of backing up. Now everything gets backed up to my Time Capsule hourly every day, and I keep important work files both in my Dropbox (which is the greatest thing ever) and iCloud.

What would you change about how you write?

Despite all the devices and tricks I’ve developed to minimize procrastination I still do it more than I’d like. The great thing about this job is that you can keep your own hours so long as the project is turned in on time (and it’s good) but the flipside is it’s so easy to decide the kitchen really needs cleaning instead because WRITING IS HARD and there’s no-one there to keep you honest.

For that reason I’ve recently found myself more attracted to collaborative writing, because two brains are always better than one (provided they’re in sync), and just the presence of that second person forces you to keep up your end. It’s okay for me to waste my own time, but not someone else’s. Plus there’s an energy and fun to collaboration that you just don’t get when you’re writing by yourself, wearing out the carpet as you pace up and down trying to crack a story problem and convincing yourself that you’re a fraud who will be found out the minute you hand in this next script.