"Writing was, for Hughes, not so much a profession as a condition of life. The thoughts that germinated in his brain took a direct path to his hands, which filled notebooks, floppy disks, and hard drives with screenplays, stories, sketches, and jokes. When he wasn't writing creatively, he was writing about how much writing he was doing. A spiral-bound logbook from 1985 finds Hughes keeping track of his progress on Ferris Bueller. The basic story line, he notes, was developed on February 25. It was successfully pitched the following day. And then he was off: '2-26 Night only 10 pages... 2-27 26 pages... 2-28 19 pages... 3-1 9 pages... 3-2 20 pages... 3-3 24 pages.' Wham-bam, script done. All in one week."--from David Kamp's "Sweet Bard of Youth," his piece on late director John Hughes in the current Vanity Fair (February 2010).
(Nineteenth in a series.)
6 comments:
I may have to stop reading these. They make me feel like a slug.
I love these, Duane. And I know I'm a slug. I'm trying to make myself less sluggish, though, and the Legends of the Underwood help.
Mike and Charlie: I post these to prod myself. I, too, feel like a slug. (Maybe we should form a support group.)
One thing I've sort of learned from the series is that these are writers who didn't believe in writer's block; they had deadlines to meet and money to earn; they had to chase the next project, so they had to write. It probably wasn't a big deal to them that they wrote as much as they did as quickly as they did. Being out of work for the last two years have given me plenty of time to write, and I have one novel (written in two months) and four outlines for future novels (usually done in a month apiece) to show for it, so when you have time in the chair and nothing else to do, the pages pile up. Whether or not they are good pages is anybody's guess.
Let's be honest, they also knew there was a ready market for their work. You were able to put out so many novels and stories because the pulps were flying off news stands. If I was confident I could get paid for 90% of the stuff I write (and that it wouldn't sit in a pile for weeks, waiting to be read), maybe I'd churn 'em out too.
Knowing there is a market is a huge motivator. Still, it took me a month to bang out the first draft of my latest script, even with a check waiting. Hughes took a friggin' week. Of course, he didn't have a full time job and a two-year-old. But still...
Even if I was a full-time writer, I don't think I could've done that.
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