Colors

Apparently I'm both green and blue. Abudee Abudi.

According to the True Colors (Personality Test), I'm a walking contradiction. A stereotypical Blue profile says that I’m “highly emotional and irrational”; as a Green, I’m “the cool, investigative, brainy” type. That explains the mood swings.

I think it's interesting though that I display the polar opposites of "emotion" vs "logic" -- and I commonly use both those sides of my personality when I'm creating. The "Blue" part of myself lends creativity, relationship intuition and emotions into my writing; the "Green" part helps me edit the mushy blob into something people can understand.

The actual act of creativity needs to be uninhibited by logic, preconceptions, or worry about feasibility (Blue). In order to make the idea possible, however, logic and method need to take their turn. (Green)

A lot of writers feel that structure - outlines, formatting, or page-by-page planning like in Blake Snyder's Save The Cat - take away from an artist's freedom and inspiration. So, they pour their soul onto the paper, using every ounce of inspiration and emotion in them. Their output is immensely personal, abstract, and jumbled. Unstructured creativity creates it's own restrictions by being too wild and unwieldy to work with.

With a logical, tried and true procedure, format, or structure, the writer has unlimited freedom within those bounds. (Don't worry, good formatting doesn't stop you from being able to sell your soul to Hollywood. You can still go ahead and do that. Have fun. Send me postcards.)

Some of the best moments in film come from the need to improvise because of restrictions. You can't afford to build a ten-story high mammoth with beaded fur and dreadlocks? Substitute it with a mouse wearing burmuda shorts. Or better yet, just take that part out of the script. Your film still may not have any great moments, but at least it won't suck so bad.

(Disclaimer: If any of you have/are writing a script about a mouse in burmuda shorts or a hippy mammoth, I'm sure it's amazing. Go get em, tiger.)

This is a link for the true colors test. For maximum irritation, play the "True Colors" song while you're filling it out, set on repeat.


http://www.truecolorscareer.com/quiz.asp

Just remember, you need every shade of color to make up a person. Unless you're invisible.

If you're invisible, contact me here. Teach me your secrets...