Instincts

Recently, I was working on a project which required alittle bit of research. I had a great idea of how to present the idea and had orginally decideed to use that idea. However, my brain got the best of me and I talked my way out of using the idea.

Not always a good thing.

I tried to write something else with the idea but after a few pages I was stuck. Sure, the idea was intriguing and the pages seemed good, but yet my heart truly wasn't with this idea. I had allowed my head to get in the middle of what my gut already knew would work.

Instinct. As per wikipedia:

Instinct is the inherent disposition of a living organism toward a particular behavior. ..generally inherited patterns of responses or reactions to certain kinds of stimuli. ...which moves an organism to action, unless overridden by intelligence...

We all have it to a certain degree (however an old blind socialogy teach of mine from my college days had a good argument saying instinct had basically died with the Neandrathals.) As a writer once you have dealt with enough stories and such you're gonna have skill and smarts about how a story works etc.

But what seperates a good and a great writer I think is the instinct that drives the need to write. I could have easily written a mediocre idea and done something with it to make it work out. But, in the end, the story wouldn't be that good.

Falling back to my original idea opened the flood gates for me. As I paced my living room for about 5 minutes I had what i needed for the idea and I pounded out the rough draft for it in about an hour. It's just a short script so there wasn't alot of space to work with but I laughed at how easy it was.Easy because I allowed myself to write what I knew was the story. No thinking or analyzing or second guessing. That would all come later.

Three drafts later, the story has changed to a certain degree but the core is still there. On top of it, it's a comedy. I don't usually write straight out comedy, instead I put any dry wit I may have into my usually dark moody scripts. Comedy is hard and more times than not isn't very funny to most people.

I am glad though I allowed myself to go back what I really wanted to show and used it.

Now I can get back to my dark survival script of a couple trying to outrun a fire in the middle of the wilderness.

Lots of laughs there.

Lose a Job, Write a Script

Ran across an interesting thing at Simply Scripts website which I hadn't seen before. I see it's be around awhile so I am just out of loop but thought I'd put it out here for any one's attention. There was a contest to write a short script (under 15 pages) about a subject and it had to be done in a week. I unfortunately found it too late cause it had to be done by April 29th. They already had the submissions up and you could read them and leave comments in the forum. A few of them were good with a couple stinkers. The topic was about getting fired and having to explain it to the wife as a comedy script.

Check it out here. I hope they do again soon cause I'd love to try it out.