The Writing Week Part 21

It's a hard thing to break out of a slump, and if you've read in between the lines of my past few posts, you'll know that's what I've been in recently. Onyx offered encouraging words, reminding me that I had written a lot in a very short amount of time, which is true. But the pace I was writing at is the one that I like to maintain, and I've just not been doing it lately.

However, I think that's attributable, primarily, not so much to a "burn-out" but to the fact that I'm in re-write mode (another "experiment" of sorts for me, because I hate re-writes). I said it before that in the next year, I want to polish drafts of 4 scripts I've been working on. Especially for me, that's no small feat, since I have a really difficult time with re-writes. I just never quite seem to know how to go about doing them - where to being, what to cut, when to begin a fresh draft, or how to distance myself enough from the original material. I read through my post-Apocalyptic spec again, and though I'm more ready to cut and change things now than I was before, I still really like it and am lukewarm about doing too much to it.

I don't know why the re-write process is such a deterrent to me. Perhaps it's that I relish new material so much more. Or maybe it's impatience on my part. Who knows, maybe it's ego. There are so many mediocre movies in the cinemas these days, I often feel that my first, rough drafts are just as good as half of what people pay $12.50 to go see on a Friday night. (That's a bit of an ego-trip, I know. But I'm sure that many of you out there can relate. It can be frustrating at times to think how much money gets poured into movies that, if the scripts were ever good, lost all of their substance in production.)

All that aside, I knwo that until people are spending their Fridays watching the movies I've written (and hopefully not wishing they'd decided to stay in and get take-out instead), I just have to keep working.