David Milch’s disembodied writing process
David Milch’s disembodied writing process
“I lie there on the floor and I talk and the words come up on the screen.”
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David Milch (b. 1945)
So far this year I’ve been writing about (or around) a way of working that the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once called “the flux.” He was describing what happened when he and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari tried writing together—it was, he said, “like two streams coming together to make a third stream, which I suppose was us.”
I really like this idea, and last time I proposed a method for—perhaps—creating “the flux” in an individual practice. For this issue—well, up until the end of last week I didn’t know what I was going to write about; I figured I’d move onto a new topic. But then an old friend emailed me out of the blue, and in our email exchange he mentioned Deadwood creator David Milch’s writing process, which involves him lying on the floor in a roomful of people and dictating to a typist.
I’ve never actually watched Deadwood—and I’ve maybe seen one or two episodes of NYPD Blue, the show that Milch worked on for seven seasons before that—but who could resist this image of the writer on the floor, dictating to a roomful of people? So I did some digging around, and wouldn’t you know it: Milch’s process actually feels like yet another expression of this idea of “the flux.”
Here’s how it worked on NYPD Blue and, later, Deadwood: Milch would lie on the floor in the middle of a room in the show’s writing trailer, with other writers and producers sitting in chairs around him. In front of Milch would be a computer monitor displaying the script in progress. On the other side of the monitor, a typist sat at a desk (with his or her own monitor), typing the script as Milch dictated it. These writing sessions thus came to resemble a kind of séance, with Milch summoning the voices of the characters, inventing their lines on the spot—and reciting variations of these lines over and over (and over and over) until he arrived at the exact right piece of dialogue.
In his 2022 memoir, Milch described it like this:
I find that I function most effectively when I sort of disembody myself. I lie there on the floor and I talk and the words come up on the screen and then I fix the words, but I never actually lay my hands on anything, a computer or a typewriter, none of that.
“I decided to time him once,” a Deadwood actor said in a behind-the-scenes video about the show. “It was a two-and-a-third-page scene. He spent five hours rewriting that scene. I swear, he would change a sentence twenty or thirty times.”
Why put his colleagues through this with him? For Milch, it is an adaptation born of necessity. He suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and being alone in a room—and especially operating a computer by himself—simply offers too many opportunities for getting derailed by repetitive behaviors. “I’ve come to recognize that the more isolated I am, the more disposed I am to obsessive processes,” Milch has said. “I find that by writing out in the open, I am less likely to, for example, begin to write the same sentence a thousand times, or hang upside-down like a bat in the corner of the room, you know, or smoke crack.”
He’s not joking about writing the same sentence a thousand times: Before he got involved in television, Milch had a book deal that he finally had to let lapse because, he said, “I went through a six-month period where every day I rewrote the same twelve pages almost word for word.”
(He’s not joking about smoking crack either: Milch has a long history or drug and alcohol abuse, though he finally got sober in 1999. I’m not sure if he’s joking about hanging upside-down like a bat.)
So the writing out loud, in a roomful of people, was a way of protecting himself against his worst impulses. But also—watching clips of Milch at work, it’s clear that this is fun for him. He enjoys having an audience, and he enjoys the high-wire act of it. (“It was an audience, but it was also a fellowship of the spirit,” Milch writes in his memoir.) In that behind-the-scenes video I mentioned, a writer-producer on Deadwood says:
I think he’s a genius because he’s solved a huge problem, which is that writing is really lonely. And it’s brutal to sit down and be by yourself and write. He eliminated it, first, by the dictation, by having the typist. And now he’s totally eliminated it by having a roomful of people. It’s a hell of a lot more fun than sitting alone in a room and feeling depressed.
Another key part of Milch’s process: When he’s not actually lying on the floor doing his dictation, he doesn’t think about the writing. He believes you should only write when you’re writing; otherwise you should put it out of your head entirely. “I try to consciously frustrate the impulse to think about a scene before I sit down to it,” Milch said in a 2005 New Yorker profile, before citing a saying attributed (in various formulations) to Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous: “You can’t think your way to right action; you can only act your way to right thinking.”
When I first encountered that saying, in a memoir, maybe fifteen years ago, it kind of blew my mind. I am continually trying to think my way to right action—trying to cajole or bully or pep-talk myself into accomplishing the tasks that I’ve set for myself. And it doesn’t work! Or it does work, but it requires an expenditure of willpower that is unreasonable and maybe impossible to sustain over the long haul. But acting your way to right thinking—how do you actually do that? I guess I’m interested in Milch, and Deleuze and Guattari, and Céline Sciamma, because they seem to offer examples of how to do it—how to act your way into, if not right thinking, then interesting thinking, unexpected connections, and the kind of solutions that you can’t come up with by sheer willpower, sitting alone in a room with just your own thoughts.
TWO VOICES, ONE AND TWO
Milch has a writing assignment that he likes to give to students, which he describes in his memoir:
For the next five days, find a time each day, preferably the same time, and sit down and write not less than twenty minutes and not more than fifty minutes. Five-zero. Don’t think about it, don’t set it up on the computer, don’t think about what you’re going to write before you do it. No exceptions. This means you. Two voices, one and two. No names. No description. No description. That means no description. Voice one and voice two. The setting—don’t say what the setting is. No description. Write for not less than twenty minutes with those two voices. Just follow, just hear what they say. Not more than fifty minutes. Put it in an envelope, seal the envelope, and shut up. Don’t talk about it. Don’t think about what it means. Don’t think about who they are.
The next day, preferably at the same time, sit down and do it again. They may be the same voices, they may be different voices, don’t worry about it. Whatever comes out is fine. Don’t think about it. Just do it.
Milch adds:
In the course of these exercises, the true categories of your imagination emerge, and they are absolutely different from what you think they are. What the exercises do is build certain neural pathways and shut down certain other neural pathways. It’s a physiological and a behavioral sequence that creates neurological changes. It is a way of habituating yourself in a different fashion, and you can’t fool around with it.
I’m super interested in this idea of “habituating yourself in a different fashion”—I think this is what my Daily Rituals books are about, too, at some level—so I’m going to try out this exercise and report back in the next issue. If anyone would like to join me, please feel free—I’d be curious to read about your experience in the comments next time.
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Sorry to be late to this, but just wanted to add that Milch's process reminds me of Brene Brown's. She has said that she finds the process of writing alone in a room absolutely torturous. Just contemplating it gives her total writer's block. So, in order to trick herself into writing, she invites a crew of folks to a house together and then she talks through the different sections of the book out loud, telling stories and making arguments. The group takes notes on everything she says (I don't know if it's dictation or just notes.). She then takes the notes, retreats to a room and types it all up herself in narrative form and then they do it all again until she's worked her way through the whole book.
“Act your way to right thinking”—reminds me of two related quotes: “Clarity comes not from thinking but ENGAGEMENT,” and “Don’t wait for inspiration to act. Inspiration comes when we take action.”