Jordan Peele’s greatest piece of writing advice
For many people in Hollywood, the act of creating is often an uphill battle.
Some days, the ideas flow, and you feel great about what you’re making, while other days, you struggle for hours on end with a good idea in sight. The process leaves you in a constantly fluctuating emotional state, flinging you between great highs as you finally crack the ending to a screenplay or deep lows as you struggle to muster a single word over days, weeks and sometimes months.
There are many Hollywood screenwriters who have spoken about their individual struggles with writer’s block, discussing the troubling moments in which you believe the entire story will fall apart and the great ones as you realise the end is in sight.
Some days, you think your work is complete genius, while other days you think you are the biggest and most talentless piece of trash on the planet. This is a plight not unfamiliar to Jordan Peele, who, like many other artists, has struggled with writer’s block and shared his best advice for getting out of a slump.
After penning one of the greatest screenplays of the 21st century after the creation of Get Out, Peele became the most in-demand horror director in the business, with nuanced and complex stories that are both unsettling and rich in their thematic subtext. The director continued working within this branch of horror, with films like Us and Nope exploring wider issues through the lens of fear, making him one of the most revolutionary directors working today.
But while he might be an indisputable genius, Peele shared his own struggles with writing and the many doubts that plague him throughout the creative process, sharing his number one piece of advice for getting out of a rough patch with a project.
The filmmaker and writer said, “If you’re not having fun writing, you’re doing it wrong. I can’t worry about this movie getting made, I have to write my favourite movie that doesn’t exist. And it wasn’t like every night I was [struggling] for five years, I allowed it to be my hobby. I allowed it to be the project that I would go to instead of watching television that would be the most fun thing I could do with my time. The whole purpose of it was to help me get better as a writer”.
Adding: “I know that from Key and Peele that when you’re having fun writing, that’s when you get the east west bullshit, you know, where it just works. Fun works. Any writer or artist dealing with writer’s block, which we all deal with, follow the fun”.
It’s a profoundly helpful piece of advice that immediately helps you regain focus, guiding you towards the ultimate purpose of making, which is, to do it because you love it. While it can be easy to get lost in the logistics of it and worry about whether it will ever come to life, the most important thing is that you need to enjoy it, because if you don’t, how can you expect your audiences to do the same?
