Sunday morning, 10am - I meet with a friend in the publishing industry to ask her about what my next steps and considerations should be for my children's book. She tells me that she's moving upstate in two hours. "What? Do you even have time to do this today?" She says she does, so while we wait in line for our bagels and coffee, I tell her I've decided to pursue getting it out there sooner rather than later, that I'm jazzed about it now and want to see if I can make anything happen with it. I give her the pitch and find myself sounding 100% like the token writer I've always tried to avoid being, "I'm really excited about the book. I believe in it and think that it can be great. No, I haven't thought much about the marketing yet, but I kind of thought that the idea itself would be the big grab."
Oy.
I dial it back a bit. My friend - who, by the way, came to our breakfast meeting with the names of agents she thinks might be a good fit - tells me I should come up with some followup book ideas. Of course! How dumb of me not to have considered this. When in school, the head of our department told my friends and I not to begin pitching to agents and managers until we had at least three projects we could talk about. No rep wants a one-time only client. They want someone who can become a franchise and a more guaranteed sell. D'uh. Silly me. Good to think on.
We part. She - to go move. I immediately head into my apartment and email her the book. That night, she reads it. The following day (her birthday), she texts me that she's read it, that she loves it and thinks it's fantastic. Notes forthcoming.
Groovy.
So I set that pot on the backburner for the time being. Meanwhile, I need to get the current, and hopefully final (before sending to our representatives) draft of the sci-fi spec to my writing partner, W.A. He cautioned me earlier this week to take my time, to make sure that I've done a solid dialogue and action pass before giving it to him. We want to be able to send this incarnation to our producer and representatives soon, to essentially make this version the one we go out with. Sure, we're open to edits still, but we've identified everything we want the movie to be, and our hope is that we'll have nailed all of that in this draft.
I spend a few weeks doing edits. Along the way, I trim dialogue and descriptions, but the main legwork is done on scenes and sequences, excising the fat, cutting what's no longer relevant, adding in scenes to fill in the gaps, and trimming back gratuitous elements. The script drops five pages.
Before I send it to W.A., I pull up a PDF of the script on my iPad Mini, open Adobe Reader (a great, free app for editing PDFs), and spend two nights doing a thorough dialogue and action pass. I trim. Boy, how I trim. If there's a block of text that ends with one lone word on its own line, I reword the paragraph to cut that hanging line. Redundant dialogue goes. Description gets pared down, consolidated, clarified, and, when possible, nixed. The script drops four more pages.
Finally, I do a second dialogue-only pass. I use this to find further redundancies and to track the science in the script - how do the characters refer to everything, and where are the anomalies? I find a few instances that need edits. All that remains, now, is one tiny, though important, beat wherein the protagonist has to realize something. I know what he finds out; I just have to plant something that helps him discover it. The options to do this are manifold, yet I haven't settled on the right one. Once I do, the script goes out to W.A. for his approval. Perhaps, just perhaps, we'll get new eyes on it then.
Every writer has tools and practices idiosyncratic to his or her work. For those of us who write, or aspire to write, these particularities are fun to talk about in an extremely nerdy way - much like page count or formatting issues. Recently, I've been expanding my toolbox, and I think you might find some of these instruments helpful to your process, as well.
Last week, I talked a lot about the environmental toll that my writing is beginning to take. Draft after draft after draft, I feel compelled to print out a script so that I can scribble all over it when going through the rewrite process. I find it incredibly hard to sit down in front of Final Draft (a new toy for me, as it has replaced Movie Magic as my current writing software), pass Go, and collect my $200 when doing edits. I need to have a physical script in front of me that I can labor and sweat over, a page that I can leaden with ink and scratch marks, where I can triple strike out words and scenes that need to go and scrawl thoughts, dialogue, and proposed revisions in the margins. I can't do any of that to my liking on the computer, and so I felt compelled to print out 120 pages (or more) with each subsequent draft. I thought that the most ecologically sound option I had was to do that on recycled paper, printing on the clean side of used sheets.
I discovered I had been remiss in my green detective work. There are a number of apps out there specifically made for annotating pdfs on iPads (mini and regular), Kindles, and other tablets. (Apologies in advance if this post seems more marketing driven than any of my others; I'm not supported by any of the below vendors. I just happen to really like the programs and services they provide, which make my writing easier.) Beyond saving paper, using the app to annotate a pdf of my script is also just less unwieldy than working with over a hundred sheets of loose-leaf.
I started off with the PDF Master app for my iPad mini. Initially, I love it. You can highlight text, strike out, insert notes and/or text, free draw, and change the opacity and color of all of the above. There are also features that allow the user to add stamps and signatures, but I used neither of those. After I sung the app's praises to a couple writer friends and League members, I was confronted with the program's limitations. For one, there's a three-document limit, which I discovered when trying to import my producer's marked up pdf. I had to delete the app's instruction document in order to work around that. More seriously, though, the app seems to have some saving issues. Like, major saving issues. Thankfully, I emailed the document to myself the second night I used it (always email your work to yourself, friends), because it neglected to save about 30 pages of progress I made. I had to re-import from the email in order to continue where I left off. Then, on the last day, it just stopped saving after a certain point. I would mark up one page, scroll to the next, and then notice that none of my previous annotations were saved. Then, they began to disappear from the page I was working on at that time, immediately after I made them. Very concerning.
To fix that, I took my father's suggestion (he's a bit of a tech guy and uses similar tools at work) and switched to the Adobe Reader App. I wound up completing my annotations in the ironically named PDF Master, but Adobe's product offers the same features, plus you can type in a specific page you want to access, rather than scroll through the entire document, which Master required, coupled with what I assume will be more product stability. Adobe's not small time in the PDF world, so I can only hope that their product will be more stable.
As I made my annotations, it became apparent that a finger, even one as narrow and pointy as mine, isn't as precise as annotating a PDF document on a tablet requires. Perhaps that's intrinsic to working with the faulty PDF Master (half the time I struck out the wrong text and had to hit undo), but I wanted more precision. So, I started looking into stylus pens. There are a number of them out there, but the reviews I read (and I read a lot of them), indicated that the amPen was the best. I haven't used it yet - I'll have it Friday - but it sounds as if the rubber tip with a conductor layer makes for the most seamless, efficient tracking on the tablet screen. Plus, the pen will give the added feature of feeling more like marking up a paper script, which might make the transition to digital editing smoother.
If all goes as I hope, then I won't have to do much script printing going forward. Except, maybe, for the final version, because sometimes there's nothing more rewarding than seeing and holding the fruits of your months or years of labor.
