Broadbrush details

I have a day job. And as part of it I've spent two days on a project management course. Which I actually quite liked, this is not a bitch about work or vapid corporate training,

But what it did remind me of is the difference between people who care about detail and those who are about the broad sweep. I'm very very broad sweep. My life is a constant stream of small mistakes stemming from having no eye for detail. I've learnt how to manage it but there's no doubt that it's not my strength.

And I was wondering if writers are detail or sweep people. On one level you'd like to think that writers have a vast range of personalities and take all types.

But on the other hand, writing is a specific activity. One that you do generally on your own. I have found writing so much easier since I felt I was doing it as part of a team but even as a team most of the stuff you do is still on your own. If it's a team sport it's cricket not rugby.

And that means that I suspect that in working patterns, writers are people who value their own company. The level to which that seeps into the rest of their life will vary but if you need to talk to people as part of your work day, I suggest you don't try writing.

So presuming there are similarities, I'm going to suggest that writers are strategic which makes them unlike almost everyone else in film except the producer. Directors I feel I can't say either way.

If you are interested in every little detail then being a writer for the screen would drive you crazy. You don't get to decide what your characters look like, what they wear, their intonation. You don't get to decide how long each scene, how it looks, the tones and rhythms.

You're creating a blueprint and hoping others run with it. You can announce the key details of a character, a scene, a general look but you've got to let a lot of it go. So I reckon it helps from a negative point of view to be strategic. You're not in a position to be detailed in 90 sparsely written pages.

But moreover you do need to be strategic. You need to know how it fits together. You can craft the most wonderful scenes but unless it flows from a to b then it's no good. You have to have that overview of your world. How it connects to itself, its internal logic, what truths dictate how things pan out.

I have a feeling that I'll come back to this in a month and disagree with myself massively. Which is fine, you can never quote walt Whitman enough 'Do i contradict myself, very well i contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes'

Plus this is a broad sweep question I don't want to quibble over the details.