After close to a month of working on rewrites, I finally popped a revised draft of my post-Apocalyptic spec into an email addressed to the manager and producer who optioned it and hit the ‘send’ button. Cause for celebration? I sure hope so.
In the first draft of the script – in which a bounty hunter has to track someone in a post-Armageddon type world – the different story elements were loosely connected, at best (see last week’s post on the unifying factor). Now, though, everything is much more firmly connected. In addition to providing the script with a solid back bone, the changes also bring a deeper level of meaning to the script. There were a lot of themes I had hoped to touch on, but they were often times lost to moments of more superficial action. I’ve figured out a way to explore those and other themes more thoroughly with this new draft in a way that doesn’t compromise any of the action.
That said, I’m not 100% sure how I feel about the rewrites. Yes, I like them. I think that when they’re totally polished, they could work wonders. I just don’t know if they’re there yet. Onyx has continued to help me brainstorm a lot of ideas. And the more we talk, the bigger the scope of certain parts gets. It’s not unmanageable, but I did have a lot of trouble determining if I’d integrated everything effectively. Certain bits of information show up potentially too late. Others might need more explanation. Characters’ reasoning might be off at time. I’m just not sure. (Then again, I’m never sure when I hit send. That little voice of doubt is hard for me to shake.)
Yesterday, after wracking my brain and trying to determine if I’d answered everything, I realized that the best thing to do was send it off to the producer. After all, we’re supposed to be working on this together, and I keep us both from doing that by withholding pages. Hopefully, my concerns are unfounded. Sure, I expect to have to edit/iron some things out, and I certainly don’t want to give her anything before it’s ready. I think it’s close; now we just have to drive it home.
In the first draft of the script – in which a bounty hunter has to track someone in a post-Armageddon type world – the different story elements were loosely connected, at best (see last week’s post on the unifying factor). Now, though, everything is much more firmly connected. In addition to providing the script with a solid back bone, the changes also bring a deeper level of meaning to the script. There were a lot of themes I had hoped to touch on, but they were often times lost to moments of more superficial action. I’ve figured out a way to explore those and other themes more thoroughly with this new draft in a way that doesn’t compromise any of the action.
That said, I’m not 100% sure how I feel about the rewrites. Yes, I like them. I think that when they’re totally polished, they could work wonders. I just don’t know if they’re there yet. Onyx has continued to help me brainstorm a lot of ideas. And the more we talk, the bigger the scope of certain parts gets. It’s not unmanageable, but I did have a lot of trouble determining if I’d integrated everything effectively. Certain bits of information show up potentially too late. Others might need more explanation. Characters’ reasoning might be off at time. I’m just not sure. (Then again, I’m never sure when I hit send. That little voice of doubt is hard for me to shake.)
Yesterday, after wracking my brain and trying to determine if I’d answered everything, I realized that the best thing to do was send it off to the producer. After all, we’re supposed to be working on this together, and I keep us both from doing that by withholding pages. Hopefully, my concerns are unfounded. Sure, I expect to have to edit/iron some things out, and I certainly don’t want to give her anything before it’s ready. I think it’s close; now we just have to drive it home.
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