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.

Two Glorious Words

As I mentioned a few days ago I was trying to participate in the MoviePoet monthly short script contest for May.

A quick aside to Chris Messineo. Thanx for the reply comment and I look forward to the changes coming to Movie Poet in July. Again a great community of writers.

So...5 Pages. Not a problem. Right? Easy as riding a bike.

Hell yeah, riding a bike up Mount Everest. Give me a break though, K. I am used to at least 100 pages to tell a story. So, I listened to my Snow Patrol (damn they are the best) among other stuff and got 4 pages which seemed to going great. But I knew I had only a page to wrap it up and I still had a few ideas left to add. So I took what I had and eliminated a simple character which chopped of a good page, however it caused more issues because some of what I took out still had to shown which ended up coming out as on the nose dialogue and forced exposition.

So, I went back to square one. I edited the character back in and changed it up some. I also took some scenes and split them up so that some info came earlier so it didn't have to shown in more detail later.

The story is a cops and robbers idea with an interesting twist and something that had been thought up probably over 10 years ago but never got to the forefront of ideas I was working on.
The idea formulated over a simple idea of thinking that saving a child when they are young who ends up being something bad later in life. It changed a little and one of my sisters thought it sounded like an idea Stephen King might use.

After feverishly finishing the rewrite I got done with everything I wanted but had one last scene left and less than a 1/5 page left to stay within 5 pages. This was after cleaning the script up 2 more times. It was basically 10 pm on May 31st with 2 hours to add the one scene, then edit the script one more time down to the minimum convert it to a PDF and then upload it to MoviePoet.

That's where the decision came. I could edit down and maybe it would be weaker but it'd get on the site. So, I made the decision to continue with what I had and forgo posting to MoviePoet.

So, I'm gonna make it looks as pretty as it should and then I might slap it on Simply Scripts. Man, I got short script bug now.

A very bittersweet decision cause I was so looking forward to getting it on the site. In 4 days none the less. But, alas, I put what I wanted and ended with about 6 1/4 pages.

But then came the two glorious words I have ever known:

FADE OUT.

It's Not as Bad as It Looks

First, I want to give a big thanks to Don over at Simply Scripts for the mention on the homepage of their site. It was nice to have a generous spike in visits over the last week or so and hopefully a few of them decided they liked what they saw.

I had one anonymous comment from my post about the Simply Script contest held in April who mentioned a site called Movie Poet which runs a short script contest each month. This time I bit the bullet and have been working on the entry for May. I just checked the site out on Monday(May 28th) and the entry has to be in by midnight May 31st. Yeowza! It's only five pages so really what the prob right? I have a great idea which 3-4 pages just flowed easily from my brain to the keyboard but now I have wrap it up with basically one page. I made some changes to eliminate one of characters but I might end up ading her back in cause I was able to drop in some exposition in their conversation while they she was complaining to the main character about something else. In the re-write it has to be pulled out with another character and it just feels forced. I was hoping by eliminating this character and about a 1/2 page of dialogue it would help me but I might be back to square one.

So, this is a great exercise in restraint and I hope to be able to find the ability to finish it in time. I've read some of the prior scripts and there really is some great talent in this pool of writers. Great twists and good use of everything that can be fit on 5 pages.

Unfortunately, if you're reading this it probably is too late for this month. But there is always the next month.

The subject was open ended for May with the only requirement being the line "It's not as bad as it looks" has be somewhere in the script.

I'm gonna see if I can fit it in twice.

Wish me luck