Oh, my god. Every day. I listen to a lot of podcasts about artists, screenwriting and stuff. Some people say they don’t get writer’s block. I’m like, “What the fuck? How?” I get writer’s block every day. I get stuck all the time because you always hit a road block. You think what you planned before was going to work out so smoothly and then you start writing and it doesn’t quite flow the way you want it to, or the structure may not be working. Happens all the time. But for me, I have a lot of people I trust and can bounce ideas off of… I’ll send the script to other filmmakers and ask their opinions. I have a lot of people that I trust and that I can really talk things out with. I think the thing that’s helped me the most is being able to talk it out.

I would say I feel stuck more often than I feel creatively flowing. It’s about not beating yourself up about that, not getting on your own case for long periods of not being productive, because it can happen in a big sudden burst. And usually, forcing it too much has never really resulted in good stuff. So, it’s a lot of being patient and forgiving of yourself. I watch a movie every night and listen to a lot of music. I’m constantly surrounding myself with stimuli, that anything could be the spark that gets the creative juices flowing again. I have experienced times, though, where I’ve found it’s not happening, and I get tired of movies and music and I need something else. So, then I’ll go to an art museum or go see an orchestra perform and see if that helps.

Just realizing that the block’s part of it. There’s always a week or two, or even a full month, where I’m convinced I’ll never write again, that everything was a fluke before. Or I’m writing, and I can’t tell if it’s inspired or shitty, but I don’t really freak out like I used to. I know that it’s just part of eventually figuring it out. It used to make me panic, but now I know it’s just what happens.

There were a few times I got stuck and I would do automatic writing where you just decide, okay, for five minutes or eight minutes or 10 minutes, you just write and you don’t stop for a second, and you end up with pages and pages of stuff that way. And there’s stuff you can glean from it. There’s vague ideas or just a couple of sentences that’ll make you think of something. So that would be an easy-ish way to worm myself out of hitting a wall.

I don’t know the answer to that, especially with projects like Seat Assignment or Sorted Books, because both do still feel ongoing. The Sorted Books Project is my longest ongoing project to date, where I’m working in libraries or book collections with other people’s books and trying to work only with what’s there, to draw something out from the book arrangements I make.