# The Creative Mind

There’s not a single writer I know worth their professional bona fides who doesn’t get regular visits from The Dream Police. And no. It’s not because we’re snowflake whack-jobs wrecked in a constant state of low self-esteem.

I still find it baffling when I get into a heated discussion over a plot point or dialogue with my child.

Am I the only one who finds it a wee bit unhealthy we are expected to lay bare our most intimate struggles just to force a bunch of strangers to feel something?

As the screenwriter, as an artist in general, all I’ve come to do is trust the process. Trust that if I’m incredibly efficient, if I display range and depth ... this will win out in the end.

Procrastination. The scoundrel’s got a rather sullied rep, wouldn’t you agree? His very name is synonymous in most minds with laziness and lethargy.

But love does leave a mark. It makes a trail. You can follow it and revisit it, whenever you need it, and it will light a path leading you to your true voice.

He was never quite able to pin the magnificent, ethereal creature inside his head to paper, and that fact consumed him.

I don’t know if she ever approved of me for who I truly was.

You have to find something, anything to latch onto—anything to keep you going.

Here’s your homework: get to thinking. And seeing. And separating you from yourself so the two can finally meet.

When we’re on the brink of losing it all, we find out who we really are and what we’re made of.

When I open the pages, I am no longer me. It is the opposite of social media. And it takes practice to read, and to write as though you have read.

We don’t need to pursue things we once wanted just because we once wanted them. We don’t need to hang out with assholes just because we randomly met them.

How are you going to make something that’s going to change the world when you’re too busy to experience the world you’re trying to change?

These barriers are often of our own making, created by way of excuses to get out of doing the dirty work.