PROCRASTINATION...

I used to know a budding screenwriter — I’ll call him Henry. We’d grab lunch, talk movies, and especially talk about writing movies. I’d tell him the storylines of whatever script I was wrestling with, and he’d tell me his idea for a screenplay.

Did you catch that? His idea.

Henry always had the same one. And it never existed in screenplay form — not a page, not a scene, not even a rough outline. Just an idea he carried around like a lucky coin. This went on for more than a year.

Eventually I asked him, “It sounds like you’ve got a pretty good concept. So why aren’t you writing it?”

He had a whole menu of excuses, but the one he served most often was, “I’m doing research.”

Since then, I’ve met plenty of writers — screenwriters, novelists, you name it — who lean on the same line. And look, I’m not anti‑research. Research is great. Research is useful. But at some point you have to stop researching and actually write the thing.

Personally, I do very little research before I start a project. Most of my stories don’t require much. (There was one exception back in 2008: I was hired to write a script that sent me to El Salvador for a week of on‑the‑ground research. Then I came back to L.A. and spent three months on a submission draft.) But generally, if I hit a moment in a script where I don’t know the mechanics of something, I just fake it with something plausible and leave myself a note: DO RESEARCH.

My only goal in the early stages is to get a first draft done — to make sure the story works from fade in to fade out. I can always go back and fill in the blanks.

And that’s really the point: don’t let research become the thing that keeps you from writing. It can feel productive, but it can also kill your momentum. Burn enough time “preparing,” and you’ll be exhausted before you’ve even finished your first act.

At some point, you have to stop gathering information and start telling the story.

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