How I deal with writer's block (by not believing in it)
a conversation w/ Matt Conner of The Resistance
Awhile back, Matt Conner at The Resistance podcast invited me on for a discussion. You can find the audio of our conversation — along with other episodes — here. I thought readers of this substack might find our discussion of writer’s block and writing rituals of some interest. I also talk about how my prior identities as a worker and a poet inform my daily practice as a screenwriter. Below is a transcript of our discussion, which I’ve lightly edited for clarity.
Matt Conner: Tony, I guess I could say you’re a screenwriter, a poet, you’ve actually worked in academia before, now you’re working in TV and film. How do you normally introduce yourself in sort of who you are?
Tony: I guess I usually just say “writer.” But I guess, yeah, TV writer, screenwriter. I’ve kind of lost the poetry, academia mojo. So yeah, I’m kinda of the school that you’re only what you practice, what you actually do. I’m no longer a practicing poet or academic, but I am working in TV and screenwriting right now.
Matt: I like that as a differentiator. That also sounds odd in Hollywood where everyone identifies themselves, or many people do, in entertainment, “I identify as a writer, but I’m a waiter.” I say I’m this, but I’m all these other things.
Tony: Well if you’re actually writing, then I think it’s all good. It’s like, if the conversation ever gets there, I kind of refer to myself as a former intellectual, because I don’t practice it anymore. There was five years of my life where I was reading philosophy and critical theory and trying to make headway through that, but I don’t really do that anymore, so I don’t get to claim any kind of intellectual status or poet status. So I think as long as you do the shit, you can make your claim on it, whether or not anybody actually sees you do it.
Matt: I like it. Well, Tony, I want to begin our episode where we begin every episode. That is, our source material comes from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Let me just read a quick quote here, and I’d love to get your response. Pressfield writes this. He says, “Most of us live two lives: the life we live, and the unlived life within us. And between the two stands the resistance.” I guess I’d love to get your reflections there. At this point in your career as a writer, what does resistance look like for you, and what’s your relationship to that?
Tony: As I think I gestured earlier, I’m having trouble wrapping my head around that quote, because having the life and the inner life being separate is so kind of contrary to how I think. When I was talking to my wife about it, I was like, there’s this quote, and I think I know what it means, but to me, it’s like saying there’s an undriven car lurking within the car that I drive, and there’s a resistance to it. I don’t know. I kinda get what that means, but I don’t know how that helps me drive the car. And I think, it’s not that I think I’m too good for this kind of introspection. I just don’t think my brain works that way, or that I’m so maybe anxious about what might be lurking inside that I like to just pretend that it’s not there. So I almost categorically say, that quote doesn’t track for me. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.
This is going to go weird spots, so I apologize ahead of time. So I kind of look, back when I was an intellectual and read books, and I was always drawn towards process philosophy, from the ancients and Greeks with Heraclitus, all the way up to people like Alfred North Whitehead, and I would access it from these different points of entry, from poetry and stuff, from people like Charles Olson. To me, the world is not full of eternal forms. It’s not full of necessarily even objects. It’s full of actions.
So for me, my self only exists in how it’s my operational perspective through which acts are performed. So in that way, any sense of inner self that doesn’t lead to action or to actual creativity or some kind of process, I may as well be talking about a fairytale. So it’s interesting. I don’t think I process a resistance or an inner self separate from myself. I have unaccomplished ambitions, and I have things that I have yet to do that I want to do. Or there’s things that I’ve done that I wish I would have done better. Absolutely. I’m not the picture of self-realization or anything. But I don’t have this unlived inner self that I’m aware of. I could come in and talk about it, but I think I would be mostly kind of making things up to be agreeable. I don’t know. I want to turn it back to you, because obviously that quote must resonate for you, or it’s something that you’ve found to be a good prompt for conversation. What draws you to this particular quote, if you don’t mind?
Matt: Yeah. No, I think it’s complete bunk, too. No, I’m just kidding. That would be really interesting, if I found a random quote.
Tony: Yeah, the author paid you 50 bucks to use it. “Yeah sure.”
Matt: Right. I’ve got nothing to do. What I love, too, is that initially your quote starts out with, “Oh great. My guest on the podcast does not believe in the premise of the podcast. This will be really wonderful. This sounds like a wonderful way forward.” But I do understand what you’re saying. I guess I have several thoughts. Let me bounce back to what you were saying to maybe give you the answer to your own question, which is what I understand you to say is different than…like I grew up in very religious circles. So there’s a sense there where there’s an ability to remove yourself from what you believe. Or like a person can say, I believe in whatever. Or I believe in God. Or I believe we should be good about climate change. And not do anything about it. Like there’s this western ability to remove ourselves from what we believe.
I think maybe that in some way is what you were saying. No, it should be more holistic than that. If you don’t do what you say you believe, then you really don’t believe it. I think culturally, we’re raised to say I believe this. We can say, “Oh I love that.” We love everything. But there’s no real movement of love toward that thing. We’re allowed to say things that are not true, and that’s allowed to be called truth, as long as we say it. So maybe in some way, in a greater level or more academic level or whatever you want to say, maybe that’s what you mean.
But for me, what you also said, you said, look. I’m not the image of self-realization here. I have things I haven’t done that I would like to do. And to me, the quote from Pressfield, and the whole book on The War of Art, is really about that. It’s sort of a very practical, grounded, what is it that you keep putting off that you’re afraid of, and how do you get over that fear? Or what is the thing that you keep throwing out excuses for, and yet still keeps you up at night?
And so for me, I identify with that. I have some friction that I’m learning how to overcome. And I guess you see it every year at New Year’s Day, where gyms around the country sell the most membership that they’re ever going to have, and then who follows up on that? Very few. I guess I would kick that back to you to say, that part that you can identify with, which, maybe it would be worth restating for you, which is just what is unrealized for you, and is there a reason for not realizing that?
Tony: Yeah, that helps a lot. And not to veer too long into the philosophical or abstract, but yeah, there’s always this tension. What’s the basis of your identity? Is it your essence? Some inner kind of almost eternal, untouched self? Or is it your existence, like the actual acts you perform? It’s like the existential philosophers say, existence precedes essence. You only know who you are — almost on reflection — after a series of acts or projects. And that’s how you become you. Your identity doesn’t precede what you do. I didn’t have the language for that before, but that’s always been kind of a thing, for me, I think.
I think a lot of it’s probably because my background. I didn’t have the language for thinking about these things when I was developing my impulses. Not to dwell too much, but: first generation college student; my parents were day and night custodians at my elementary school (my mother and my adoptive father, as my biological father was not in the picture). I grew up in a series of trailer parks and worked at a pickle factory after graduating high school. There wasn’t really books or culture as we would recognize it at home. The idea of being an artist or being anything like that, it never entered into my consciousness until I was about 18 or 19.
There was a convergence. I started taking classes at a community college. I took my first creative writing class and discovered I had a facility there. I was really into grunge music. I grew up outside of Seattle in a small town. And then Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs came out, and I felt this connection with Quentin Tarantino’s work. But he also came up from nothing. So there was this idea that you didn’t have to come from a cultured, rich family in order to be an artist. And then I also started being exposed to books. Like all the books I was assigned in junior high and high school, I thought were freakin’ terrible and told me that books are not for me. And then I got to community college and read Kafka for the first time, or Kurt Vonnegut or Flannery O’Connor. I was like, oh, there’s books that actually have life to them or are interesting to me or are funny in weird ways.
Being creative, being artistic, it was not on my radar at all as even a possibility. It would be like being in a trailer park and saying, “I want to be ambassador for the UN.” There was no path there. So for me, the resistance is never internal. Once the light came on, I realized that art, literature, movies, music — I realized that I connected with them more than I did with my family or the people I was around. They seemed to understand me more than my family did, or the people I was growing up around. This was actually my real family, in kind of a spiritual sense. My family was artists, even if I didn’t know them.
Once that clicked for me, about 18 and 19, it’s been pretty nonstop. Other than when I go on vacation with my family, I don’t know if there’s a day that I’m not creating something. Because something came alive in me. I stopped being depressed. I lost like 70 pounds. And I just turned into a different person because all of a sudden I had a foothold in the world. So the question, then, was not turning on something inside me, because something got turned on inside me that I couldn’t turn off. It became, what are my practical paths in order to have a creative life? How to pay the bills? Because I was on my own financially from the time I was about 18. Also, how to gain access to capital, financing, relationships, connections, arenas in which a creative life makes sense. I guess maybe then the resistance for me has never been, so far, knock on wood, internal. I’ve never had writer’s block. I’ve never been able to turn it off. But there’s been lots of external resistance that I’ve faced, and that’s been more the negotiation for me, as opposed to something internal.
Matt: Do you roll your eyes at the notion of writer’s block? Like when you hear other writers talk about maybe not feeling inspired or something like that?
Tony: It’s a foreign thing to me. I try not to be an asshole about it. But I’m fully capable of that, also. But if people ask me, well don’t you get writer’s block? And I’m like, yeah, no. I just lower my standards. I just tell myself, if I’m blocked on a scene, even if I have to say out loud, “Okay, Tony. Write the terrible version of this scene.” I give myself permission, and I write a terrible version of the scene. Or I write the bad version of the poem. I give myself permission and a decent thing comes out of it. Or if it doesn’t, at least it leads me to something that does become good. It’s like in the same way that I don’t have any kind of specialness in terms of the process or writing ritual.
I wrote my second book of poetry while working as a barista and as a traffic counter in Chapel Hill. So I would just develop methods by which, while I was making coffee, I would give myself prompts and I would internally be writing poems. Between customers, I would write down a line on a notecard, put it back in my pocket, and make some more lattes. I’d do crap like that. Or I would put little notebooks in different places, like in my car, at home, and stuff. So any time I took a dump, I had to write a line. Not all of those lines made it into the book, but some did. And so it’s almost like a technical problem more to me than an internal problem.
I almost try to have a philosophy and create conditions in which writer’s block or disruption of ritual doesn’t even come into the picture. I did that in the world of poetry, because I started working fast food when I was like 15. I had a bunch of different jobs. I’ve mentioned a pickle factory. I also worked cleaning condos, worked at a drugstore, worked as a night man at a hotel. On almost all of those, once the faucet turned on for me at 18, I would find ways to write while on the job.
So that practice from the world of poetry worked well for me, because when I carried over to becoming a TV writer, you always have to be working on scripts. You don’t have time to have writer’s block when you’re working in TV because you have to get pages out for the next day for filming, or else the whole multi-million dollar operation shuts down. So you have to be writing in the location-scouting van, or on set between set-ups. In a lot of ways, in the world of TV, the production schedule almost makes it impossible to have writer’s block. It’s simply not much of an option, unless you’re a recognized genius like David Milch or Aaron Sorkin where the whole production is built around your personality. I’m not one of those types. I see myself more as an artisan worker type than the maestro in the middle of the orchestra.
Matt: Do you think that part of the mindset that you’re talking about stems from your background? Like you said, I didn’t even have an imagination to be an artist, because that wasn’t around or familiar. Do you think that one informs the other?
Tony: Yeah, I think so. I think I have the attitude of, put on your little work uniform and go to work and do your job. To me, it’s a vocation. I mean, it’s a passion too and it’s an obsession. Also, I was a terrible athlete. Not terrible. I was a mediocre athlete. But growing up, I played lots of sports. It’s the same kind of mindset. You’re not going to improve your jump shot through introspection or self-examination. You’re going to do it by going out and doing it and missing a bunch of shots, working on your form, getting feedback, and figuring out what you need to do better.
I think my personality, my character, my relationship to how I see myself: I guess the best term is “operational perspective.” How I solve problems is just that. I don’t think about myself. I just jump in to try to fix things. That has its strengths and weaknesses but it’s kind of held me in pretty good stead. I do think it came from my first real sense of self, which was my capacity for work at a young age. As I grew up, I had lots of tasks around the house, but also for my grandparents. Chopping wood, mowing their lawn. Plus my great aunt and my great-grandma. They all lived on the same block in this abandoned mining town. I was the one available free laborer for this family collective.
Then we moved to a trailer park and I was the park’s maintenance worker and doing garbage and landscaping at like 14, 15. And then I started working at Burger King at 15 ½ when it was legal. My capacity for just doing work and being a good worker was something I took pride in. It gave me a sense of identity and positive feedback and a sense of purpose. And that became my primary lens on the world. But then that lens just happened to shift gradually from manual work to creative work. I don’t think there was too much of a qualitative change from one to the other, simply in terms of how I think about the task before me.
Matt: We haven’t gotten in the weeds at all, but you dive into television. There’s Longmire, then Damnation, then The Terror. Were there points in between or before, or even now, where, like writing in Hollywood or writing in entertainment seems like such a competitive thing? I would just think that maybe, what do you do in moments when it’s just rejection and there’s nothing active? Is the drive just still there, at the same levels? Yeah, I guess I wonder sort of the rain or sun sort of approach.
Tony: Yeah, well I think we can have a conversation about why it took me so long. I wanted to be come a writer-director when I was 18, 19 when Pulp Fiction came out, and when Spike Lee’s Clockers and stuff came out. That’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t actually pursue screenwriting until I was 35, so it’s not like I recognized a passion and I jumped right in. I took a roundabout path.
My working life as a TV writer, screenwriter, aspiring writer-director, is full of failures and disappointments. I go up for jobs, and I don’t get them. I just spent a year, a year and a half developing a TV show and pitched it around town. I’m lucky that two of the 13 places that I pitched to want to buy it. That’s batting under 200, but that’s actually a pretty good outcome, and hopefully we’re closing a deal to make that show. But I’ve also spent months developing my pitch for a feature project, and going through different levels, competing against one or two other writers, and then at the last stage, hearing “no, sorry, we’re going with this other person.” So months of work is just, you’ve got to kind of toss it out.
I have a pretty healthy self-esteem, so my first reaction to rejection is, “Oh, that was dumb of them. They don’t know what they’re missing.” And then secondly, it’s just to go write my own thing. I’ve always got a couple projects that are just for me, that I’m just working on for myself, that I can just jump right into. So I don’t spend time ruminating over what could have been. I’m just like, "okay, I missed out, that sucks. Maybe I’ll have three glasses of wine tonight and marinate in my bitterness for 12 hours. And then when I get up tomorrow, I’ll just work on whatever’s exciting me.
I don’t know, it could be self-deception, but that’s been kind of my thing. Damnation was my first show to create. When we got our first bad reviews — the reviews were mixed, a little bit more positive than negative — but there were definitely some negative ones. And my wife was curious, when the first bad review came out, how I was going to react. I read it and she kind of looked at me, and I was like, “oh, they’re wrong. They’re totally wrong on that review. They just didn’t get it.” And she was like, “Oh yeah, that sounds like the guy I married. You’re going to be fine.” Whether that’s self deception or not, it’s just believing, just trusting my inner voice.
It’s not like I have any kind of extra grit or anything. There’s a little bit of my worker self that comes into play, but there was also this whole interim in which I was a poet. Poets, culturally, are thought of as sensitive, flighty people, and they probably are to a degree. But you’ve also got to be resilient as hell, because there’s no writing life that has less external validation than poetry. Nobody cares about poetry in our culture. You can’t make money at it. A best-selling poetry book is like selling three or four thousand copies. It’s not like you can get rich off of it. You’re not going to get famous off of it. Most people think it’s an art form that should have died a hundred and fifty years ago. But if you’re compelled by it, and the actual creativity itself and the process itself and being invested in an artistic tradition is where you find sustenance, that takes a certain amount of character or inner resilience. Maybe I didn’t have enough of that to stay with poetry for my whole life. But developing my creative, artistic self in the world of poetry, which is so kind of marginalized — you so have to do it yourself, and you so have to find your own reasons for sticking with it, because the world doesn’t offer you very many.
I did want to be the next Orson Welles or Paul Thomas Anderson and make some great movie at 25, instead of waiting until I was 35 to actually try to write a script for the first time. But in a lot of ways, I’ve been lucky that my TV screenwriting career got a relatively later start. Because that interim of just being a worker, and then being a poet, and then being academic — I think that forced me to build up some inner resources, where now I’m just playing with house money. My biggest failure in the TV or screenwriting world is more appealing to me on many levels than my bigger successes I had as a fast food worker, or as a poet, or as an academic. And so if that’s the cost of admission to play this game, I’ll take these failures every year. I’m still kind of stunned that I kind of parachuted into this world.
I think I’m lucky. I don’t think I would have had the kind of psychological or emotional resilience to pursue this line of work in my twenties. I think I was much too erratic. I was too self destructive. And I was too impractical. I think coming to it a little later has helped me overcome some of my own weaknesses that would have otherwise torpedoed the ship right away, in my twenties.
Matt: Is there an identifiable creative struggle for you right now? Because it sounds like, you say, yep, I have no problem with internal drive. Nope, I’ve got thick skin. Nope, I’ve got plenty of belief. No, fear is really not a thing. So I guess I wonder, is there kind of something there, or do you say, I just feel like I’m really healthy and in stride?
Tony: Well to say that I’m really healthy and in stride would sound kind of delusional, but –
Matt: I’m not trying to set you up to sound –
Tony: No, no, but it’s a good thing. Because I don’t want to be falsely modest about stuff. So let’s say, I’ve wanted, since I was a teenager, to be a writer-director making films. I have not yet made a film. So I mean I can’t go strutting around, saying look at me, total artistic fulfillment, when I haven’t done the main thing I want to do. I’m 45 years old now. But I am in the process of, hopefully, if the financing turns out, I’ll be able to actually make a film that I wrote. I’ve got the cast together. I’ve got my producer. I’m doing lots of prep. So if things turn out, which I’m not in total control of, perhaps I actually get to make a film.
For me, there’s been an impulse towards creativity from the get go. If I had to pick one way of expressing that, it would be as a writer-director in films. And I have not yet done that. But when I was in my teens and twenties, I played in some sloppy bands, and I pursued poetry. And then I went and got a PhD in English and wrote a book about Johnny Cash, and then I went and wrote for TV for ten years. And it took me maybe about 7 years into my TV writing career to even say out loud that I wanted to direct. And that I wanted to write and direct films.
So yeah, I think maybe part of it is that I didn’t feel entitled to it. It’s not so much that I was afraid of it. I thought I could do it. I didn’t feel like I was in a position, where I stood, that there was a viable, realistic, pragmatic step forward. To go from being a poet and a poetry professor to writing and directing a film, that was just too big of a leap. And I don’t think I would have even made the jump into trying to write for TV if a friend of mine, if I hadn’t seen him just do it, because his novel got optioned and he was a professor in Indiana, and he wrote some scripts.
Matt: That’s Nic, right?
Tony: Yeah, Nic Pizzolatto, who went on to do True Detective. And we did our MFA program together. Nic comes from a pretty working-class background in Louisiana. We did our MFA together at the University of Arkansas. I was poetry, he was fiction. We were drinking buddies. We hung out. Then we were both in North Carolina at the same time. We would talk about how great TV is and how great The Sopranos and Deadwood and The Wire were, and that TV’s actually where a modern Faulkner — even though Faulkner did go to Hollywood — it’s where a modern Faulkner could have some creative control because the quality was so good. And Nic wrote a novel that got optioned, and he was like, I’d like to write the script for this. And the agents said, well you have to have some sample scripts.
So he went off, wrote like 6 scripts in a month. One of them was the True Detective pilot. And he sent them to the agents, and they were like, holy shit. This guy is brilliant. So he jumped in from being a creative writing professor at a small school in Indiana, and a couple months later, he’s a staff writer on The Killing on AMC. All based on just the quality of his work. He didn’t have to know somebody’s dad. He didn’t have to network or anything like that. He wrote a great script, was lucky to put it in the right hands, and all of a sudden, he’s got this TV writing career.
So I was hanging out with him, having drinks, doing our usual thing, and he’s like, you know, if you want to write some scripts, I could hand them to the agents, tell them you’re a good guy, and see if anything happens for you. So I was like, okay. This was when I was finishing up my PhD. I had just gotten hired as a creative writing professor, but I hadn’t started yet. So I took a couple of months, wrote a couple scripts, he passed them along to his agents, they really really liked my scripts, and they flew me out to LA. I was living in Seattle at the time. I flew out to LA for like a week and a half of meetings and got a job writing for Longmire and sold three pilots to three different studios. So, I quit my professor job. All of a sudden, I was a TV writer.
I didn’t know that was even possible until I saw Nic do it. So you could say there was inner resistance, but I didn’t even know enough for there to be inner resistance. I just thought, yeah of course I’m not going to be a TV writer, just like I’m not going to be an astronaut. It would just be self-delusion to think that’s a path for somebody like me. Kind of in the same way, I had to work my way up in TV. I started as a freelancer at Longmire, became a staff writer, then a producer, then I created and sold my own show, and I was a showrunner. It’s not exactly directing, but it’s a lot of the work of the director, because you’re doing a lot of prep. You’re overseeing post-production, editing, you’re asking for re-shoots. You’re not in the director’s chair on set, but you’re spending a lot of time on set. It’s about as close to being an auteurish director as you can be without being an auteurish director.
So after five years on Longmire, and then one year on Damnation of running that show, and then being a higher level writer/producer on The Terror: Infamy — by this point I had broken in writing features for different production companies and studios and stuff. So I knew the feature form. It was after the combination of these experiences that it seemed like a logical next step is to write and direct my own project. Because I’ve now kind of proven to myself and to some others in the industry that I can write a strong feature. I’ve gone through prep, production, and post. I know those pretty well. Those are all skills that would carry over to directing.
So now finally I am at a point where it wouldn’t be delusional to myself or to others to say my next ambition is to write and direct my own film. So that’s where I am now. Whatever I’m working on kind of branches into what I’ll do next. I’m a little bit restless. I’ve done lots of creative things. But I think it’s all been kind of heading in this direction. If I go through my whole artistic life and I never get to write and direct a film, I’ll be disappointed. But I’ve been pretty happy with what I’ve done so far, also.
This is just kind of free-associating, but yeah. That’s kind of how I’ve seen it. In a daily practice, I’m always being creative or writing or making things. To me, it’s not much different from when I was in my 20s and I was writing poems and editing an online magazine and writing reviews and doing all those types of things. It was an all-encompassing daily practice. Now it’s just kind of shifted over closer to where my kind of teenage dreams were, and I’m just kind of trusting that process. And then if I hit walls where I just can’t support my family or I can’t find traction, then I wouldn’t be surprised if I pivot again. Hollywood careers don’t last forever. I’ve already been doing it 10 years, which is a pretty long. It’s like how professional athletes have a short window. Unless you’re Aaron Sorkin or David Fincher, your career can be kind of constricted, because it’s such a youth-focused industry.
So when this all inevitably dries up — hopefully later than sooner — I’m sure I’ll just carry over the same practice to probably writing fiction or writing plays or doing podcasts or whatever compels me. So that’s, just as long as I’m constantly in a spot where I have the material conditions and the time and the energy and the health to be creative, I think I’m pretty happy. I mean, this right now is definitely the happiest I’ve been as a creative person.