Are You In The Mood?

Photo by Isai Ramos on Unsplash

Are you in the mood? It’s Sunday the 1st of March, and the best collective screenwriting exercise starts today. It’s the Scott Myers Zero Draft 30, and you don’t get screenwriting accountability for free anywhere else like this.

If I’m not in the mood today, I’m in big trouble.

I am, thankfully but hang on, I’m a storyteller, I’m always in the mood for this kind of thing. It’s some of the other essentials in life. Like, you know, work sometimes and in truth even screenwriting has its dull moments.

Recently I had a piece of work that I didn’t enjoy. I thought I would, had some early excitement, but halfway through the first draft of the project, I realised I had made a mistake. Tough dues I said to myself. Carry on. I was on the third iteration of one part, and I’d been stalling for hours. I was bored, and the deadline was approaching.

But more frightening than the three hours I have left ahead of this work is the prospect of giving up.

Giving up is a treacherous path to tread. Today, this piece of work, tomorrow my business, the week after that my screenwriting projects and one day in the not so distant future I might even give up walking my puppy, then where would my world be? No, I mustn’t give up, no matter what. Not on this little piece of tedious work.

So I carried on, but it hurt, oh boy, did it hurt, and I only had myself to blame at this late stage of the process.

What should I have done?

I should have gone back to my points of inspiration. Back to the reason, I have to do some of this dreary work sometimes and why it’s best to get on with it and not drag it out for too long.

I should have used a combination of three tactics to go into the task with a better mindset. I should have engaged one of the following mood enhancers for the long road ahead.

A Clear Head

Go into your task with a clear head. I.e., one that hasn’t spent an hour reading through emails, checking out the latest points of political despair on Twitter or watching telly. Going into a hard activity with a brain that has been under sense attack is not going…