Stop, collaborate and listen.

Whoa. Maybe Eeyore wouldn't hate Tigger so much if he read this. I guess we don't always recognize the point of view of others.

Sometimes we all need to look at the world from a new angle. Take Vanilla Ice. Not really him, so much as his song. There's a faculty talent show coming up, but there's already a group doing a rap song so my dream of rapping on stage is dead. So I got a new dream - to revive "Ice Ice Baby" as a country song. This is not unlike the country version of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" or Ben Folds' stirring rendition of "Bitches Ain't Shit". It's all about reinventing the wheel while still following some basic rules. Our instrumentation? A guitar, a bongo drum and two bottles. And, of course, me and my street skills. That's how I roll.

Writing Partner and I have been struggling with some scenes in our pilot. There's a particular line of dialogue that he wrote and I have never understood. He explained it to me and I tried adding a few lines but it still didn't make a whole lot of sense. As we examined the notes we got from Partner's friend we started to see that the character who speaks the line, one Commander Graft, is the problem. We don't know who he is or why he's saying it. We fumbled around about how to change the line or rewrite the scene - can we give this line to somebody else? What if we move this to a different location?

But the problem wasn't the dialogue or even the scene. I was eating a sandwich and watching Friday Night Fights on ESPN2 when Partner called, very excited, to tell me that we should take Commander Graft out completely. We should take Lieutenant Alvarez out completely. We should take Beryl the secretary out completely. Then we can concentrate on the school in our story, which is the focus of the show, without getting caught up in another crime drama.

"Brilliant!" I said, and continued to eat my sandwich. And as I digested things immediately started to clear up. Ideas flowed through my brain and begot newer ideas and the script opened up like a porn star's legs. It's like those photopuzzle thingees. You know, where there's a picture there but you have to squint and roll your eyes back in your head or something to see it? Like in Mallrats? If you step back and look at it from a distance, sometimes the picture becomes obvious. So I'm told, anyway. I never see the damn things.