Friday, April 04, 2008

Silence broken


After a little over two grueling weeks of keeping tight-lipped, my characters have to decided to start speaking again. Tonight has been the first time I've been able to sit down in front of Final Draft and actually feel like I'm getting anywhere. It's not to say that I haven't been writing, but my various side projects just haven't had that exhilarating feeling my main script does.

This is the first major roadblock I've hit with this one, and I guess it was about time. Once I hit pages in the 50s, I just lost the ability to write dialogue that had been coming naturally up to that point. Now I'm walking away from a session and I feel like I may've gotten the ball rolling again. (About time, heh.)

Writing done for the evening, file saved. Time to crack a beer.

Whole New Worlds


Maybe it’s just Spring. April showers, May flowers, and burgeoning… feelings. But I feel as though there are a number of worlds, a number of things, deeper understandings and worlds, opening up to me at the moment.

Ok, I’ll start with the most clichéd. It’s disgustingly sappy, so you’ll have to forgive me. I’m talking about love. I’m not saying I’ve fallen in love. Rather, I think, for the first time really, I’ve begun to understand it. I haven’t really bought into it before; that’s not to say that I don’t believe it exists or is felt every day. I do. Just not by me. But I recently returned home for a weekend and saw a friend of mine—she was always the last one we’d expect to be in a relationship, and even the relationships she was in were defined by her wild independence and seeming reluctance to let anyone in—clinging off of a guy she recently started dating again. I’ve never seen her act the way she did, walking over to a guy in the middle of a party just to give him a peck on the cheek and walk away. I’ve seen other people do similar things, but seeing her do it really jolted me. It got me thinking; if this is what that looks like, if she can do it (and I had always felt a kindred spirit in her because I have acted the same way in past “relationships”), then maybe there’s hope for me yet. World 1.

Next is the world created of starting a new script. Jumping ahead a bit to what would be in the next Writing Week. I began a new script last night, one that I didn’t outline or anything (more thoughts on that later). But I’m so excited about it. I feel like I’m in elementary school again and counting down the hours until school ends so that I can run home and play with my new toy. I just want to dive back into the script as soon as possible. I hope this feeling doesn’t die down (the first act is often the most invigorating for me) any time soon.

Finally, is a world of revelation. I tend to do these things, which I kick myself constantly for. Who doesn’t do things they get pissed about, I know. But I linger on the small things like nothing else, and often let big issues just get swept under the rug. At any rate, I find myself in situations where I say or do something stupid or inadvertently act inappropriately—completely accidentally mind you—and then spend the next week berating myself. Well, that sort of happened again two nights ago. Now, nothing bad really came out of it (that I know of), but I found that once again, I turned inward to the worlds that I create for my scripts. I am safe in those worlds. I am in control of them. My characters might not be, but there, I cannot be harmed. Perhaps that’s why I’ve taken so much to writing; it’s my safe haven. No matter the body count or the number of broken hearts in my scripts and plays, I am unaffected. The world could (and nearly has) come to an end in something I write, yet I manage to always make it out unscathed. More than that, everyone in those pages is my friend, no matter how diabolical. Because they’re all of me, of somewhere inside my mind. It might not be the healthiest of mindsets, in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not, but it’s something I’ve realized.

Why, you ask, am I revealing this here? It’s been on my mind and, well, maybe it doesn’t matter outside of the type on the page, at least for as long as it takes me to write this.