When Madness Feels Like Home

As we approach the holidays I’m thinking about the XMAS eve studio notes call that triggered a week of hell as I generated a page one pilot rewrite.

Your creative routine might look insane to everyone else, and that's totally cool. I spent much of the 2000s scribbling TV shows while selling spec scripts. My wife and kids wondered if I'd ever sleep normal hours. But every scribbler knows, a creative routine worth anything rarely resembles balance.

Sometimes it looks like obsession. Sometimes madness. But when you're locked into your story, your vision, your game, those long hours and weird rituals aren't punishment. They're home. I think the greats would agree —

Aaron Sorkin: Nose vs. Scene

Aaron Sorkin once broke his nose while scribbling The Newsroom. He smashed his face on a mirror while acting out a scene. Before heading to the hospital, he told a friend, "Read the scene, I think it's good."

He's admitted that if he could just slide scripts under the door and get meals slid back, he'd be perfectly content. From the outside, that's deranged. From the inside, it's heaven.

Shonda Rhimes: Living in the Hum

She calls it "the hum,” that crackling electricity when you're running multiple shows, scribbling 70 hours of TV a season, and still putting your kids to bed. To outsiders, it sounds like burnout. To her, it was being alive. "I was the hum and the hum was me," she said in her TED Talk.

Then one day, the hum just stopped. She had to rebuild her whole relationship with work. Her takeaway wasn't "slow down." It was "accept the trade-offs." If you're crushing at work, maybe home suffers. If you're rocking parenting, maybe the script takes a little longer. That tension isn't failure. It's the creative life.

Werner Herzog: Life or Death Filmmaking

While shooting Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog hauled a 320-ton steamship over a hill in the Peruvian jungle, no models, no special effects, just raw willpower. It nearly destroyed him, his crew, and the production. But he refused to quit. "If I abandon this project," he said, "I would be a man without dreams, and I don't want to live like that."

To him, filmmaking isn't a career. It's survival. Happiness isn't a goal. Work is the goal. From outside, it's lunacy. From the inside, it's purpose.

James Cameron: Until It's Right

He hates being called a perfectionist. "I'm not a perfectionist, I'm a rightist," he said. "I do something until it's right, and then I move on."

That mindset fuels marathon shoots, endless rewrites, and years of world-building. On The Abyss, he pushed so hard that some actors nearly walked off set from exhaustion. But he doesn't chase balance. He chases precision.

Eric Barone: Solo Dev in the Dark

Better known as ConcernedApe, Eric Barone spent about four years alone in his apartment creating Stardew Valley. He worked ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. No team, no funding, just him.

He calls it a labor of love, not self-destruction. His rule: you can choose to work yourself to the bone, but you can't force anyone else to. That "life-ruining obsessiveness" turned into one of the most beloved indie games ever made.

Masahiro Sakurai: IV Drip at the Desk

The creator of Super Smash Bros., he once kept working while hooked up to an IV drip after getting sick. "I guess I'm a hard worker?" he laughed. For him, that was normal.

He's taken as few as three days off in an entire year, not because he's forced to, because he can't stop building. Outsiders beg him to rest. He shrugs and keeps going. For Sakurai, the work isn't a problem, it's oxygen.

What This Means for Us Scribblers

The line between obsession and burnout is different for everyone. These creators found freedom in what others would call madness, but they all shared one thing: choice. They wanted it that way. Rhimes learned when to step back. Barone drew the line at dragging others into his grind.

Your version might look different. Maybe you scribble best in 15-minute bursts between carpool runs. Or you need three-day isolation binges. Maybe your flow shows up at 5 a.m., 2 a.m., or on lunch breaks at your day job.

The point isn't to copy their habits. It's to stop apologizing for yours. Find what feels like your flow, even if it looks like chaos to others. And… always be scribbling.