The cure is to go back to the drawing board and figure out where you screwed the story up. The way forward could be as simple as introducing another character or as difficult as re-outlining the current story arc.
My screenwriting goes in spurts. 7-10 pages a day for a few days, then rest for a day or two, maybe a week. I hit a wall in the screenplay I was basing on Enron + Robin Hood. Just around the Act I to Act II turn.
After two weeks, I got a print out of the last 10 pages, a pen and some highlighters for color coding, and figure out what was wrong. A couple sections in the wrong places. A dangling paragraph or thought. One afternoon, about 2 hours, and then it all felt right again. Went back to the routine and got it wrapped up.
that GRRM doesn't really like his options from where he is in the story
If anything, most pop/rock musicians do their best work on their first records, when there's not any audience yet. It's the rarer beasts, like Beatles, etc that improve with later releases (this doesn't usually apply to jazz and classical, where maturity and experience matters more).
Besides, the idea of an artists having a writer's block because they have to follow a large hit, or feel pressured by their huge audience and the demands that entails, is so common it's almost a cliche.
Its interesting to note that a lot of people parallel The Beatles with U2. U2 was always ahead of the curve in terms of music they were making. They were using EDM in their music as early as 1993 - years before other bands even began experimenting with it. Their Zooropa album had themes of electronic over stimulation and it was the start of them breaking away from their traditional sound - something they would continue doing until 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind.
It depends on the artist, IMO. Some people are charged up by a large consumer base waiting for more work, some don't care, and some are frozen by it.
Best if you don't care -- per HR's discussion of Miles Davis. Sometimes Miles left his audience behind, but that was OK because he was being true to himself and his vision for his work.
EDIT: guys, it says "From a conversation with Brandon Stosuy" at the top. There was clearly an interviewer whose words were omitted, this isn't an excerpt from his spoken word or an essay he wrote himself. (it'd be funnier if it was)
Henry Rollins has a spoken word presence that is not to be missed, in my opinion. He gets up on stage with a microphone, takes a fairly aggressive and active physical stance, and just goes... for hours. When I saw him for his first stop on one of his tours, there was a bottle of water near the base of the mic stand that remained untouched for the entirety of the show.
While it may seem a bit jarring to read him going on, at length, it's sort of what he does these days.
"Knowledge without mileage equals bullshit."
The guy lives a very interesting lifestyle and a great deal of what he practices and preaches is highly applicable to the entrepreneurial spirit and existence. Pretty stoked to see him on Hacker News.
But also about moral integrity and fostering a community. E.g. Fugazi would reject venues (and a headlining Lollapalooza slot) if ticket prices where higher than $10-$15 (IIRC $5 was the target) or when minors are not allowed. They refused interviews with Rolling Stone unless they agreed to printing an issue without alcohol/tobacco ads.
They took "don't be evil" to their hearts and stuck with it.
The DC scene can be a big inspiration for running your own business without betraying your ideals.
I grew up in the punk/hardcore scene in the D.C. area many years ago and this statement definitely held true. One thing I noticed was that most of the kids I used to hang out with ended up being fairly high-achieving adults. Most everyone has their undergrad degree and many of them actually work in software engineering. Now when we talk, we talk about Linux, Python and C++ in addition to recalling old shows at 9:30 Club, Wust, and the Safari Club.
It's had me thinking because I've already had people bring up medicating my 4 year old son, and he's not even difficult, just an active boy.
here's the clip - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOqSQ4xuFdc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL-3wqN_YCE
Edit: Looks like this must come from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIMjkMr3N8M .
The points he makes and the relevance to anything creative makes this worth your time a x100 over.
Also, Kevin Smith really hammered this home in one of his recent Q&As, but I can't remember which one. It was really encouraging and beautiful, though.
Favorite spoken word album: Human Butt
Favorite Rollins Band album: Turned On (live)
Favorite book: Black Coffee Blues
Favorite flag with henry singing: My War
All his spoken word albums released on Quarterstick records in the early 90s were great, and I regret losing them.
The great thing about Rollins and Mackaye is that they have always cared deeply about fans. When Fugazi played my hometown, it was 5 bucks, compared to 15-20 for other shows. When I saw Rollins do a spoken word concert at UNC chapel hill, he hung out in the lobby afterwards and talked to every single fan and signed my copy of black coffee blues. When I wrote to dischord to ask them about a dag nasty reissue, they wrote me a letter back. Looking back, how many kids like me were there? must have been a ton. and yet.
Sorry this is kinda rambly but I'm obviously a huge fan still.
Rollins did a book of poetry in the 90s called "See a Grown Man Cry"...had a profound impact on me, and I've never run across anyone else who read it.
https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/ian-mackaye-and-br...
(TCI is a side-project launched by Kickstarter)
One point of context that's worth mentioning: In the early 1980s he was part of one of the most prolific small teams that ever existed in the music industry: Black Flag (Rollins, guitarist Ginn, drummer Bill Stevenson and bassist Kira Roessler) and their producer "Spot." From 1984-85 they released four full-length albums and toured incessantly. Even after the band broke up the individual members continued to produce, produce, produce. Rollins started Rollins Band and did poetry books and spoken word tours as well. Ginn ran SST records and did some other bands. There's a documentary about Bill Stevenson which shows how he kept up this crazy pace with ALL and Descendents and other recording projects to the present day. Roessler was part of a sound editing team that won an Oscar for their work on Mad Max: Fury Road. These people are incredibly prolific and creative in their own right, and when they came together it was a very intense period of output.
Anyone who is interested in the history of Black Flag and other seminal creative teams of the alternative/underground music scene of the 1980s (Minor Threat, Mission of Burma, The Replacements, Fugazi, Minutemen, Big Black, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Butthole Surfers ...) should read Michael Azzerad's "Our Band Could Be Your Life." He conducted some solid research and got many of the key players to talk to him, and the book is a great read. He made an observation that these bands were in many respects entrepreneurial ventures, albeit operating with only creative capital and bootstrapped energy. Quoting from his interview with The Paris Review (1):
The most lasting significance of the eighties American indie scene might have been the way these bands conducted their careers. The point wasn’t to play loud and fast; the point was to make the music they wanted to make, without compromise, to find and cultivate an audience for it, and to live within their means so they could continue to do exactly what they wanted to do and not be beholden to anyone but themselves. That’s really what the best indie bands today are emulating.
Also, much of what the bands in this book did was to make very unconventional music that attracted unconventional people—or maybe even showed conventional people a different mode of thinking. Not necessarily because of anything in the lyrics, but just because of how challenging and unorthodox the music was.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/05/19/michael-azerr...
When I turned 18 I moved to Los Angeles with nothing but a phone number in my pocket and the ambition to work in the music business. I landed a job at a recording studio aligning tape machines, setting up mics, and fetching coffee. I worked my way up quickly to being the head recording engineer there. One day I came into work and guess who was slated to be on that session that day? Mr. Henry Rollins. Will forever be one of the coolest days of my life. He was very smart, very kind, and had more energy than anyone I've met since. He took me out to dinner and I got to hear a ton of seriously cool stories about his punk rock days with Black Flag. I didn't tell him how much his writing meant to me. He wouldn't have wanted to hear it anyways.
I have long moved on from that career path (turns out that programming is more lucrative than working in the music business...) but I'll never forgot that day. It showed me that hard work and courage go a long way. Say yes and take chances wherever you can. Your heroes are just people like you and some day you might get a chance to meet them and work with them.
Those are two themes he touches on repeatedly and I've found a lot of what he says helpful, but his output is so voluminous that I've probably only heard a tenth of what he's published.
