Writing: The Knuckleball

Based on a quick discussion among writers -- what's your knuckleball? The little trick you use that seems to have made life easier, smoothes your process, but as far as you know isn't widespread.

For me, it's The Overwrite. For a long time, I outlined in a two column system on yellow pads. I still do, when roughing the ideas out and brainstorming.

But when I have something approaching a movie or episodic plot and is time to get down to the beat sheet, I fire up the screenwriting software and type the numbered beats (each no more than a sentence or two each, usually) directly into the blank script. Separating the four segments of the movie, or 8 sequences depending if The Monarch swings that way, and renumbering each cleanly.

Then, I overwrite the beat sheet. As the script progresses and real scenes get written, the document transforms into a Frankenstein hybrid of script and outline. But ... for whatever reason, this is a powerful psychological tool for me; I never write a script into the vast void of the blank page, rarely face the grind of that mocking drop-off. I'm just detailing out the movie as it already exists in rough form, the physicality of the single combined document somehow making a subtle, purely arbitrary difference from a blank script screen to the right of me and a scrawled outline to the left.

Your mileage may vary. In the Comments, please, your knuckleballs.