Monday 13 October 2008

Unfinished but not too far off...

Yesterday I was feeling pretty bad about the script as it was in kind of a mess. Next time I say things like ‘developed organically’ and ‘no planning’ remind me why that never works. Unfortunately this time I reminded myself when the strands of my story all came out at different places as I went into the 3rd act. Rubbish. Well, actually not rubbish because I think it was my lack of planning that helped me get on with it. Or rather, I kept putting off working on this script because I didn’t like the idea of going through the epic notes I’ve been making over the last few years to put together a half-decent structure. So I ran with it and while I’m slightly regretting it now I don’t think I’d even be working on this script if I had spent weeks planning the whole thing out.

So today I did the thing I should’ve done at the beginning and went through the epic notes. I rediscovered some cool ideas I’d forgotten to include and more importantly reminded myself what the story was about. Then I went through the draft and tweaked it a scene at a time to sort out my 2nd into 3rd act break. It’s still all kind of short hand so nothing’s perfect, but it did make me feel better about what I’d written Friday night. After my tweaking the script was 74 pages and I managed to get it to 81 by the time I was done. So I reckon one last session one evening this week should do it.

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