How To be Prolific: Ask ‘What Next?’

‘She knows the heat of a luxurious bed‘  is a great Shakespeare line by Claudio as he rejects his bride Hero for not being virginal. I still get surprised by the beauty, the poetry and the wit of Shakespeare, you act in one of his plays, luxuriate in the language and then forget what a cutting, funny & magical wordsmith he was.  The reason I fell in love with this line again was that I finally got around to watching Joss Whedon’s fantastic ‘Much Ado About Nothing’.

One reviewer had said that he had never had as much fun watching Shakespeare before  but still I have dragged my feet on this. I love Shakespeare but oftentimes film versions don’t work, made worse by the fact that I saw the trailer and the film is black and white. Plus Shakespearean iambic pentameter done in an American accent can kill it, I know I have been the meter murderer myself on occasion, for example playing Hippolyta in Midsummer Nights Dream.
Speeches such as ‘Four days will quickly steep themselves in night’ delivered in a New York accent was a choice by my director, that is my only defence….

What finally pushed me to watch Much Ado despite the fact that I love Joss Whedon’s work such as Buffy, Angel and Firefly was that I was reading an interview with Joss Whedon for Fast Company where Joss talked about using some of David Allen’s Getting Things Done principles to get the film made in a two week slot whilst he was mid edit of ‘The Avengers’.
Apparently Joss had been having Shakespeare read throughs at his home for a decade with many of his actors from Buffy & Angel, who are scattered through the film. Finally though he used David Allen’s question of ‘What next?’ to get the project moving and out there with great award winning success.

It is a great question, asking ‘what next?’, what is the next physical action you can take to move a project forward, what phone call, contact, venue booking is the next step? Asking ‘what next’ stops the crazy thought process of ‘I need to dream up, write, hone, learn to play the trumpet, film, market, make a poster, no one will see me for years and I will lose all my friends’ thinking that often stop us creatives moving forward with our many ideas.
In the myriad of ideas that comes to us we can get caught up by the scariness of the work ahead in big picture thinking, the next commissioned job or the next project we have said yes to helping out on and thus never get our own dream projects moving.

I am currently endeavouring to implement David Allen’s GTD system into my life so I can use my mind for thinking as he argues our brains are bad filing systems. His frame of reference is that our brains don’t differentiate between ‘buy cat food, learn the guitar, return that call’ and it will constantly bombard us with reminders. Far better to get all ideas out of our heads and into a system we trust and then use our creative brains to imagine, create and dream.
If you think the same thought twice you need to get it down on paper or smart phone in a place you can find it.

This process clearly makes business people more productive but promises also to give us creatives more clarity.
However trawling through my 10,000 old emails to decide to action, delete or reference is taking a lot of time. Still I am feeling calmer and have had a few ideas pop up which I have quickly ‘captured’ to then look at and action.

Even sitting down writing on scraps of paper every single project idea I have was frightening even though some have been moved to the Someday/Maybe pile!
I have indeed about 80 projects and 150 things to do … this is normal apparently!

I have been using my quiet moments on set to process my email inbox – I am now down to 4000 emails and have been deleting things as soon as I see them.

David Allen’s ‘Two Minute Rule’ is also worth the price of admission; if the email, phone call or letter you have opened will take just two minutes then do it immediately as it will take that just to find and re-process later on.

So do watch Much Ado, in particular Joss Whedon did brilliantly with the comedy fool characters of the cops, it is almost a masterclass in why having a ‘fool’ in a play for comic relief has worked for centuries. Joss Whedon also used physical comedy very well especially on the Beatrice and Benedict hearing themselves being talked about.
I think even if you don’t like Shakespeare you will enjoy it. They have used the original text as well and for the most part comes ‘trippingly off the tongue’.

It made me think also of all the films based on Shakespeare’s plots, some of my favourites are

• ’10 Things I Hate About You’ with a heartbreakingly handsome and young Heath Ledger based on The Taming Of The Shrew’

• ‘She’s The Man’ with Channing Tatum based on ‘Twelfth Night’

• Warm Bodies based on Romeo and Juliet, the Zombie version.

Hmm I am aware of this shocking trend of teenage movies with beautiful young men in.., did Shakespeare realise he was creating teen movies back in 1600?

Can you think of a project and right now decide just to take the next step.

• Ask ‘what next’,

• do it

• then ask ‘what next’ again, all the way to completion of your project.

Also I would love to hear which are my readers Shakespearean plot based favourite films. Just comment below or send me an Tweet!

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