The last script I finished was a bit of an eye opener for me. The importance of structure finally penetrated my thick skull. Feedback on that script went from confused on the fourth draft to enthusiastic on the fifth draft. The difference between the two was that I finally found a structure for the story and in so doing, made everything else I'd written come alive. I was even confident enough to enter it in a screenwriting contest. Which was promptly canceled for lack of entries. Annoyingly, I'm told I might actually have won the contest if it had gone forward. So I'm getting somewhere.
The last week or so has been pretty difficult. Feedback I received through that contest has sent my brain whirring on how to elevate that script yet another level. The problem is that I want to focus on the new project. And as I've mentioned before, my brain isn't much for going in the directions I want it to. Excuse the pun, but it has a mind of its own. And it is determined to go back to that previous script.
So I've kind of stalled in the last week. Mentally, I'm very hard at work. On the page, a bit less so. It's the opposite of writer's block. There's lots there to write but I'm stubbornly trying to ignore what my brain is churning up so that I can keep working on the new script. By count, the new script is about thirty pages longer than when I last posted. That doesn't sound like a lot but I've done a lot of rewriting and re-ordering to give this thing a really tight structure. So while it isn't a whole lot longer, it is a whole lot better. I gave my wife the first four pages to read and she promptly got mad at me because I wasn't willing to give her more and the opening had her dying to know what comes next. I've never been so pleased to have her mad at me.
And should I ever sell this thing, I will fight like hell to get Bear McCreary as the composer because I've written almost all of it with his Battlestar Galactica scores blasting in my headphones.
I'll try not to wait a couple months to update again. No, really.
