Box Your Clutter to Free Your Creativity
“The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.” M. Kondo
No trophies. No show posters. No key art, cast photos, or storyboards. Walk into my office and none of it’s on display. Emmys, Saturns, and other awards are in a Palmdale storage unit, collecting the kind of dust chunky metal is good at gathering.
Reasons You Won’t Let Go
Marie Kondo built a career asking: why do people hang onto things that no longer earn their space?
She blames two culprits —
— Attachment to the past. Fear of the future.
Now swap “hang onto things” for “hang onto tropes” and you’re describing every scribbler’s hard drive.
Moves That Worked Once
The reluctant hero needs a speech before the third act. The wisecracking partner exists so someone says the theme out loud, sparing the audience the work of feeling it themselves. Then there’s the twist in the last ten pages, showing up because the ending never got earned anywhere else in the script.
None of these are exactly wrong. They totally worked, and that’s totally the problem. A move that worked once gets treated like a law instead of a choice. You didn’t pick it because it served this story. You grabbed it because it served in the last one, and it was still hanging on your wall when you sat down to crank pages.
The Goldman rule, flipped — Nobody knows anything, but everybody’s got a trick that worked once and never got questioned again.
Put Those Trophies in Storage
I don’t keep any awards adjacent because I don’t want them casting a vote. A statue on a shelf votes every time you open a blank page, and it’s always voting for the choice that already worked.
The room where I scribble should belong to the creative person I am now, not the scribbler I was back in the day.
Box It Up Before It Boxes You In
Inventory your habits, your default scenes, joke rhythms, the ending you fall back on because it’s always been good enough.
Box that stuff up. Get it out of sight and arm’s reach. And your unencumbered spirit will be free to forge new creative pathways.