2021 Zero Draft Thirty March Challenge: Day 28

One month. FADE IN to FADE OUT. Creativity meets Productivity.

Scott Myers

28 Mar 2021 • 4 min read

http://www.kylecease.com/

One month. FADE IN to FADE OUT. Creativity meets Productivity.

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 28.

Write an entire draft of a script in March — FADE IN. FADE OUT. Or any sort of creative goal you have in front of you.

Feature length movie screenplay. Original TV pilot. Rewrite a current project. Break a story in prep. Generate a month’s worth of story concepts.

Whatever you feel will ratchet your creative ambitions into overdrive…

DO THAT!

On Twitter, use this hashtag: #ZD30SCRIPT.

Join the Zero Draft Thirty Facebook Group: Here. 4,200+ members strong.

Today’s Writing Quote

“Script gurus sell you their structure rules as dogma. Watching and liking movies tells you dogmatic rules are stupid.”

— Amos Posner

Today’s Poem

Larson’s Holstein Bull

By Jim Harrison

Death waits inside us for a door to open.
Death is patient as a dead cat.
Death is a doorknob made of flesh.
Death is that angelic farm girl
gored by the bull on her way home
from school, crossing the pasture
for a shortcut. In the seventh grade
she couldn’t read or write. She wasn’t a virgin.
She was “simpleminded,” we all said.
It was May, a time of lilacs and shooting stars.
She’s lived in my memory for sixty years.
Death steals everything except our stories.

While I suppose a poem about death is not something one would ordinarily consider to be inspirational, this is different. First, it’s written by the great novelist (“Legends of the Fall”), essayist, and poet Jim Harrison who died in his home in Arizona. He was 78 years old. Second, it’s a powerful poem which reminds us of two things: Each of us is born with an expiration date. And “Death steals everything except our stories.”

Stories transcend death. See if that doesn’t inspire you in writing your current story.

Today’s Loos Award winner: Elle Waitt.

Over at the Zero Draft Thirty Facebook group, Elle posted an Inc. article: Follow the ‘70–20–10 Rule’ to Produce Your Best Work. For we Zeronauts, it has a notable tagline:

Aiming to do more work will generally get you further than aiming to do excellent work.

Two quotes from the article:

The famous parable of the pots from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book Art & Fear claims to answer that question with an anecdote about a ceramics class. The professor divides the class into two groups: One will be graded on quantity and the other on quality. The first group will have all their pots weighed and the heavier they are, the higher the grade. The second will be graded on the best pot they produce, no matter how much work they turn out overall.

“Grading time and a curious fact emerged: The works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity,” the authors report. “It seems that while the ‘quantity’ group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the ‘quality’ group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

The Zero Draft approach right there. But what’s the whole 70–20–10 thing about?

Another handy way to force yourself to embrace this truth is to tape the number 70–20–10 to your laptop screen (or above your pottery wheel).

As extremely prolific songwriter Jonathan Reed has explained on Medium, the truth is whatever you’re trying to produce, 70 percent of your attempts will be mediocre, 20 percent will suck, and 10 percent will be amazing. These percentages hold steady no matter what level you’re working at. Your “amazing” might not be to the same standard as a world-class performer, but even world-class performers only reach their own high bar 10 percent of the time.

“According to Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson went through 800 songs to get the nine that appeared on Thriller (that’s almost certainly exaggerated, but the point is clear),” Reed notes. “The more songs you write, the more good songs you’ll write.”

70 = mediocre
20 = suck
10 = amazing

Again, the Zero Draft approach. Don’t strive to get it right. Focus on getting it DONE! In rewrites, you can elevate your story from suck to non-suck to good to great.

For that insight into the creative process, the recipient of today’s Anita Loos award is Elle Waitt!

Only a handful of days left! Want an Anita Loos Award? Upload an inspirational thought or photo here, on Twitter, or the Facebook group. Aspire to inspire! The spirit of the Award!

Final Thoughts: Writing a Story = Wrangling Magic.

— Scott Myers

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