# The Creative Mind

You have to actually write a book to get better at writing books.

Stop focusing on all the things you haven't done, and start focusing on the things you have.

How do you trick yourself into believing that you can still do it? That you should keep going even if you know deep down in your soul you’re not going to “win” anymore?

We argue because our art form, screenwriting, is different from so many other types of writing. In screenwriting, form literally follows function.

Say no to life more. This is not the month to live, it’s the month to write.

Oh, how differently this "Thank you" reads from the one earlier—how bitter, how nostalgic. And truly, who can’t feel the dejection in that pitiful send-off "best of luck"?

That’s what “write what you know” really means. It means you should take a feeling, or a unique experience you’ve lived through—something that is quintessentially you—and put it on the page.

I was creating something so this skin could move through the world like a phantom. Something that would protect me as I hid beneath the surface of whatever I’ve become.

Writer’s lives are not clickbait, and they are not a work of fiction to be dramatized for effect.

Drawing didn’t heal me. Risk taking did.

I think, for the first time, I bled in the Goldilocks Zone.

Sadness is inherent to every seed. When the flowers come, they'll be for graves or grace. No one knows.

In proportion to every dolphin that she earned as a pet in Roblox, she produced one less poem, song, or picture in real life.

Do you give yourself "the talk"—that you're wasting your time, that you'll never be good enough, that your script will embarrass you, that you'll disappoint the people who read it?

Having a psychologist in the family, I've long been aware of the tremendous impact one's environment has on everything from morale and mental wellbeing to the quality of one's work.