From a 2023 interview David Simon gave with Ari Shaprio at NPR:
SHAPIRO: Okay, so you’ve spent your career creating television without AI, and I could imagine you today thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems …
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: …or saying …
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: … boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don’t think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you’re trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you’re stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.
Same, David, same.
Here’s the deal. If you get “stuck with that transition”, like really stuck, and your first thought is running to AI, then maybe reconsider calling yourself a writer. Everyone gets stuck. When a real writer gets stuck, they put the work away, take a walk, go out to dinner, or sometimes they clean their whole apartment in a frenzy of procrastination. All real writers know this behavior. Look at me PROCRASTINATE. Then the writer comes back with fresh eyes. Maybe you’ll have to rewrite scenes five and six in an attempt to make them fit together. Maybe you try and it still doesn’t work. Maybe you try write a small new scene you call “5B” to put between the two – maybe this will fix it? But it doesn’t. You get up, you go for a walk, you play with your pet, you clean your apartment again, even though it’s, at this point, spotless. You take a nap. You have a cocktail or a cup of coffee. You exchange morose texts with another writer friend about being stuck and frustrated. Then you come back to the desk, you look the piece over and realize “Huh. Actually it’d be cool to do these scenes without a transition”. And so you end up where you started. Nothing has changed. But the process had to be gone through to come full circle. You only reach this point after trying five other solutions. That’s creativity. That’s hard work. That’s being a real writer. Wanting to skip the “being stuck” part takes the fun (and agony) out of it. And it is agony. It’s the WORST. When you finally land on something that works – when things click – when you are happy with the result – and it’s all you who did it – you and your hard work and stick-to-it-iveness and determination – there is no better feeling. To quote Dorothy Parker: “I hate writing; I love having written.”
God bless you, Sheila. The thing about being stuck, in art and life in general, isn’t just that getting through it is satisfying. It’s that the stuckness makes you realize that **other** things might be wrong with the work beyond those scenes; that maybe the overarching work has flaws; that the writer or artist or person in general has some more growing up to do. Wendell Berry once wrote this:
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work / and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey. / The mind that is not baffled is not employed. / The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
And trying to smooth that out, or worse to think that smooth surfaces are the goal (and the best sign of “good” work), is both infuriating and soul-crushing.
Walter – hi! always so good to hear from you. This AI shit is driving me crazy – and some of the “discourse” around it has also been bothering me. It’s really disheartening – especially the writers who are sharing AI slop on their various feeds – like do they not realize what they are doing??
// the stuckness makes you realize that **other** things might be wrong with the work beyond those scenes //
absolutely!
I always think of one of Billy Wilder’s rules for writing – “If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.”
This is true for all writing, not just scripts! I did go through this with my script – I had a problem with the ending, and I kept tweaking and re-writing and agonizing – and then I remembered Wilder’s rule and went back to the first act. Once I fixed that – the rest fell into place.
All of this is the work of writing. You can’t skip over it. You MUST go through it. and you must WANT to go through it. you can’t reject this as NOT part of it. I guess since everyone “writes” now on social media posts it seems like writing must be an easy thing that everyone can do? I don’t know. It’s like any pursuit. It may sound mean but – I don’t know, I grew up pretty tough: not everybody can do it. It’s not “for” everybody. You need to have a certain sensibility. I encountered this too in acting classes sometimes – people who were defensive, closed-off, righteous – the acting process was very very tough for these people. There was so much “in the way”. Nobody can tell you “don’t be an actor” or a writer – but at the very LEAST you have to be able to tolerate the “process” of whatever pursuit it is. I hope I’m being clear. I always compare it to sports or dance. It’s completely clear in any dance class that some people are better than others. And it’s obvious the things you have to do to get better. And it always involves working harder on the things you need to work on. There is no shortcut. Ballet people have no confusion about the process. they don’t resent the process and wish the process was something other than what it is.
// The mind that is not baffled is not employed. / The impeded stream is the one that sings.” //
this is so beautiful and profound.
// worse to think that smooth surfaces are the goal (and the best sign of “good” work), //
yes. and it really scares me.
Hope you are doing well, Walter! (or as well as can be expected in these terrible times)
Sheila, you shared this video, or at least I think you did, of a skateboarder working on a trick over and over again. He keeps trying and failing but is never discouraged, and then, on the take before he finally lands the trick, he goes, “I know what it is. I got it.” I think about that clip often, whenever I’m struggling with working on something. Gotta trust the process.
I LOVE that video. Good memory! The skateboarder was Joaquin Phoenix!! I have searched for that video and haven’t been able to find it – I think it was on Vine, when Vine still existed.
I think about that clip a lot too. You don’t get the feeling of accomplishment if you don’t fall a bunch of times!