MY MFA AESTHETIC: Writing is a road trip through the Dark

People sometimes ask how you write a script.

The least romantic answer is also the most useful one:

You plan the trip, then you drive.

For me, writing a feature is not unlike planning a long cross-country road trip. It helps to know where you are starting. It helps to know where you are ending. It helps to know who is coming with you, where you are stopping for the night, and how often you will need gas, food, coffee, silence, or a reason not to turn around.

A 27-hour drive sounds impossible when you say it all at once.

Break it into four days and it becomes manageable.

Break each day into three or four segments and it becomes something you can actually do.

Scripts work the same way.

A hundred pages sounds like a mountain. One scene sounds like a task. Forty to sixty scenes sounds like a route.

That does not mean the route will not change.

It will.

Roads close. Weather hits. Someone gets sick. A strange exit appears and suddenly you are eating the best meal of your life in a town you did not know existed.

But if you have no map at all, every inconvenience feels like an omen.

I usually do not commit to an idea until a few major pieces have revealed themselves. I need to see the beginning. I need to have some sense of the end. I need a couple of big turns, moments where the story pivots and becomes something it was not before.

Until then, ideas go into a leather journal I keep nearby.

The journal is part holding room, part junk drawer. Story fragments. Character names. Lines I may never use. Images. Questions. The occasional grocery list.

An idea has to sit there for a while and prove it has a pulse.

Once it does, I start looking for the people.

The protagonist usually announces themselves through the concept. If the story is strong enough, someone is already standing at the center of it, even if I cannot see their face yet. Then come the opposing forces. The friends. The mirrors. The people who create pressure, reveal contradictions, or walk into the room carrying a different belief about how life should be lived.

I try not to overthink them at first.

Give each person something to want.

Give each person something to hide.

Give each person a reason to be in the movie besides making the protagonist talk.

Then I start building the route.

There is another metaphor I use, and it is more embarrassing, but it is true.

Sometimes the creative process feels like staring at a text conversation and seeing the typing bubbles appear.

Something is coming.

You do not know what yet.

You just know the other side of the conversation has not gone silent.

My best ideas rarely come when I am trying to strangle them into existence. They arrive when I have given the story enough attention that some deeper part of my mind starts replying. A line appears. A turn appears. A solution I could not force shows up while I am walking the dog, cleaning the kitchen, driving, showering, pretending to listen to something else.

That sounds mystical.

It is not.

It is attention.

Attention plus patience.

Attention plus enough humility to stop pretending the conscious mind is the only writer in the room.

When the bubbles finally send something useful, I move into production mode.

That part is less magical.

It is time. Space. Repetition. A laptop. A plan. A chair that is comfortable enough to keep me there but not so comfortable that I become furniture.

Coffee shops help. Not because coffee is a personality, though many of us have tried to make it one, but because they remove decisions. Someone else picks the music. Someone else does the dishes. I am in public, which means I am less likely to drift into some household task and call it “clearing my head.”

The physical space matters.

The mental space matters more.

I find it difficult to write when I am overwhelmed. Stress narrows the hallway. The work becomes forced, and forced writing has a smell. There is an old joke that writing is like passing gas: if you have to force it, it is probably crap.

Crude, yes.

Useful, also yes.

Meditation helps me. Cleaning helps. Minimalism helps, though I hesitate to use the word because it has been flattened by social media into white walls, expensive chairs, and people with suspiciously profitable opinions about owning fewer mugs.

For me, minimalism is not an aesthetic.

It is a writing tool.

For years, I lived in an accordion pattern. Accumulate too much, then purge too hard. Closets. Drawers. Bags. Ideas. Scripts. Pages.

My writing did the same thing. I would either try to cram everything into a script until it became bloated and directionless, or I would cut too violently and end up with something thin, technically feature-length if you squinted, but not alive.

Learning to curate changed that.

Not hoard.

Not destroy.

Curate.

Keep what serves the story. Release what does not. Trust that less can create focus, but too little can starve the thing.

Once I am in the chair with a plan in front of me, writing becomes less mysterious than people want it to be. Character A needs to get from here to there. Something must stop them. Their choice must reveal who they are. That choice creates the next problem. The road continues.

Easy peasy.

Except, of course, not easy.

But possible.

And possible is enough to start the engine.