“One of the only real skills that I seem to have cultivated is patience,” jokes screenwriter Ed Solomon. “Once you realize nothing is going to happen at the pace you thought it was going to happen at, trying to rid yourself of this notion of time and rush, allows you to deal with the constant let down of it’s not ready, more notes, or actors not available, or turnaround.”

“That’s part of why I started to develop that I need to work on more than one thing at a time. But once you’ve been doing it long enough, you have all of these things that are one quarter through, an idea you’ve been noodling on for four years. That becomes your day to day.”

Today, however, as of the publication of this article, screenwriters are just past the 100-day mark of the current Writer’s Strike. This is the first time, in a long time, that Solomon has had some time to sit and think on projects without deadlines, without accountability, but also without the next payday in mind.

“I can never work on the same part of multiple scripts. I can’t be in the middle of one script and be in the middle of another script. That’s hard for me to jump back and forth between. What I do is, work on an outline, while rewriting something else. That kind of thing, I do very naturally.”

Solomon says he would not advise the same advice to new writers. “It’s not as easy to jump around when you’re new because it’s so hard just to get through one, especially the first few. You have to get the muscle memory in, so when you get lost and feel like something is not moving forward, you stay with that feeling.”

Look for this article on the Creative Screenwriting website and join Solomon’s next episode here:

https://linktr.ee/wordbywordbl

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