Recently I finished reading Alan Alda's autobiography Never Have Your Dog Stuffed
It had been on my brother's bookshelf and, since he's lightening his possessions before moving house, I offered to take it away.
Alda is a comedian, so I figured it would be an entertaining read, but I also learned he's a scriptwriter and found his advice on dealing with writer's block to be interesting enough to want to share it here:
Norman Lear told me once about a way of working that had saved him from severe writer's block...
I dictated the scenes into a tape recorder and disciplined myself never to go back to change or even listen to what I had said earlier. I was working from an outline; so it became a kind of controlled improvisation, but it poured out.
[...]
Later, reading the transcript of what I had come up with. things that I couldn't even remember saying. I reworked the script many times before we shot it, but most of that draft... wound up in the picture.
