Full Disclosure: I’m a plotter. For one thing, my brain just can’t help but analyze everything to death. But possibly more significant? You can’t work in the movie business as long as I did without having a mastery of story structure beaten into you. It becomes part of your DNA.
Turns out, Henri Matisse suffered all through his life from panic attacks and insomnia. According to Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, “He was a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns.”
For example, I decided to get serious about my memoir at the tail end of a very difficult time. My family had gone through illness and death. I found myself living someplace where I didn’t know anybody. And of all things, I was fired from a job I didn’t even want in the first place.
