What to Do When Your Brain Keeps Handing You the Wrong Script

Gavin Gaitan (who we've written about before) is a Los Angeles writer/producer/director with three self-financed features to his name. His most recent, Down Town, is a 24-hour absurdist crime comedy set in downtown Los Angeles. (It won Best in Fest at Sherman Oaks 2024 and is now streaming on Prime Video.)

To be honest, Gaitan talks like someone who just finished a feature and is still bruised from it, which makes sense because it's really hard. Before you get to set, the writing is hard, too, another thing he talks about here. There's getting over roadblocks and trying to craft the strongest draft you can, even when notes don't make sense. Also, learn why he needs four uninterrupted hours to write 21 minutes' worth of material.

His answers about feedback, writing routines, and the tangent-script that saved him from a stagnant week lead to advice more useful than the usual writing platitudes.

Check out the conversation below.

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Follow the Tangent

There will probably be times when you're on assignment. You take a writing gig, and you're hopefully excited about it.

But in other cases, when an assignment is totally self-imposed, there's no reason to stick with something if it's not flowing. In Gaitan's case, he was trying to break a new comedy script, spent a week getting nowhere, and had a completely different idea nagging at him the whole time.

"I was trying to write a new action comedy, and I spent a week just biting my knuckle, thinking I just had nothing. I was coming up with a couple of scenes, an idea for a character. I was just spending hours just kind of trying to brainstorm this thing, but it wasn't clicking then. But the whole time I had this other idea for an erotic thriller, an entirely different film that kept popping up in my mind for some reason, and I kept being like, 'Go away, go away. I'm trying to write this action comedy right now. I don't have time for you.' And then, after a week, I barely had an outline, and I was like, 'Okay, let me start. Let me just get a couple of these other notes down from this erotic thriller that's like been bothering me.' And then, pen to paper, six weeks later, I have a full feature for that thing."

One thing writers often beat themselves up about is grinding on something that seemingly goes nowhere. But even if you write the first act of a script that you never finish, that's still a workout for your writing muscles. You wouldn't say, "Oh, I only walked one mile, not five, so I didn't exercise." Because you did.

For Gaitan, sitting at the desk was what made room for the other script to arrive.

This ties into the Zeigarnik effect, where your subconscious keeps grinding on unfinished business even after you've stepped away. The trick I covered before is that when you hit a wall, stop that scene and just keep moving.

Gaitan's version is bigger, obviously. The action comedy wasn't ready, and his subconscious was telling him so by handing him a completely different movie every time he tried to concentrate.

If you're stuck and feel like you don't have a nagging second idea, we've also put together 100 prompts and exercises designed to break a block.

Whose Feedback Matters?

I recently found myself in a notes session I didn't know was going to be a notes session. I was meeting actors who had a couple of questions, and it turned into something else. And that's totally fine. You take out your laptop, you take the notes. Then you filter what's useful later.

For Gaitan, taste matters when he's getting feedback.

"If I think you've got really extraordinary taste in music and you're really intelligent when it comes to perceiving art, and we align, then your feedback is going to be incredibly valuable to me. If you read it and you're just like, 'I just don't really like these kinds of movies.' Okay. Irrelevant. You know, I don't care really what you think. You're not really my audience."

You'll run into that plenty. Hopefully a reader can still be objective even if they don't operate in your genre. But if the notes don't vibe with your goals, it's okay to disregard. Either way, look for the note behind the note.

And even if you might not initially agree, try to see where a note might have value, and interpret it in your own way.

Gaitan tells a story about coming off a difficult drama, and how he wanted Down Town to be pure absurdist comedy, with no emotional throughline. His early readers didn't get it and pushed him.

"I don't want you to care about these characters," he said at first. "This thing's just funny. Just gags every 90 seconds. Just something absurd happens. I gave the script to people, and they were like, 'This is interesting. You've got to have some kind of story here to tell characters that I actually want to watch for 90 minutes.'"

Even though it wasn't what he set out to do at first, he added some drama, he said, "as an afterthought."

"But then when I finished the film, people were coming up to me, and they were like, 'Oh my god, that dramatic scene, it hit so hard. It was so powerful, so profound.' And I'm like, 'What? Really?'"

Your resistance to a note is not evidence the note is wrong. Sometimes you have to hear hard things about your work and figure out how to make it even just a little bit better.

Write for Four Hours

Writing is hard and takes enormous dedication.

Gaitan will set an arbitrary deadline… then find a reason to skip it. Monday becomes Tuesday because of an appointment. Tuesday becomes the weekend. The weekend becomes next Monday, and now a full week is gone. Every screenwriter knows the feeling.

He fixes the problem by blocking off time.

"I need, like, four hours. I need four hours straight. Sometimes I'll do an hour, and then maybe I'll like give up because I really am not getting anything. But I need a four-hour space where I sit at my desk, don't get up, don't do anything. Just like sit there, and that's four hours. That might be 21 minutes of writing, you know, over the course of four whole hours."

You don't win on output. Four hours and 21 productive minutes might mean one page or 10 pages. Showing up matters and builds the habit. Check out six more habits of successful writers.