Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The Writing Week part 8


I hit act three! The home stretch. The end, finally, is in sight.

Act two was very difficult this time. I thought the page 60 wall I hit was going to be impossible to get around, but I managed. Actually, once I rolled past 70, I had a lot of fun. I’m sill not sure about everything that happens. I’ll have to read the script in its entirety to better judge that. And, frankly, one of my biggest concerns is something that I wrote two nights ago.

Act two ends with a bang, as it often should, an adrenaline pumping action scene that drives the characters into their final quest. And what did I do after that? I let the characters take a nap. Garh, it felt so boneheaded as I was doing it, and it’s probably boneheaded that I kept it in there. I mean, who follows up a huge fight scene with twenty winks? To be fair, the nap scene does materialize into something else, and, logically, it is something that I would probably have to address—the need for sleep, that is. However much it fails to work, though, I’m going to keep it in for now. Now, I want to finish the draft. Then I’ll worry about mistakes like that.

It’s a great feeling to look down and see page 89 or 95 or 100 looking back up at you after only two months ago staring at that completely blank page 1. It’s a sense of accomplishment, regardless of whether you FADE OUT on 89, 95, 100, or whatever. Making something last that long, going that far and having more story yet to tell is quite a feeling. I remember my first semesters of college where the prospect of writing a 30 page (can you believ it? Thirty whole pages!) final project was daunting. I remember struggling sometimes with the five page assignments I had. Nowadays, some of my colleagues in the League have problems keeping their drafts under the standard 120 pages.

I guess I’m just amazed by how much things can change in a matter of four or five years. I certainly feel my writing has improved drastically (for my parents’ sake, I hope it has; otherwise, that was a big waste of cash). When I think my initial thoughts on new projects, I tend to try to map out at least the tent pole scenes and act breaks if they don’t instantly become clear to me.

The first time I finished a feature length draft, there was a sense of, “Wow, I actually did it.” I like that I still feel that now.