Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Bit more rewriting

And a bit of a mea culpa re focus - kept trying to decide whether to cut my session short to go see a film in the Film Festival. (Yes, I know, pretty dumb. Went to the movie in the end. No, not worth it.) Tweaked two scenes and rewrote a third. So, hmm, not that productive in terms of quantity. Should've got up insanely early in order to have a full length writing session if I really wanted to go to a movie. Note for next time.

However, was able to get some work done despite only being half there - I think yesterday I kind of cracked the relationship dynamic I'm working on, so today I knew pretty much where I was going. Even though not terribly inspired. In terms of the major scene I rewrote, it was mostly cutting - even though I'm just going through fixing up a subplot, it was like doing a second draft, in terms of having a new perspective when you revisit scenes. I realised that my characters were yap yap yapping about who they were and what their moral code was, basically - cos I was figuring it out myself at the time. Now that I pretty much know where those characters are coming from, I just cut all that out. So now the beats in that scene are just the essential ones to move the story along. Which feels much better. I realise that half the reason the dialogue in that scene wasn't working too well was that it simply didn't need to be there at all. It wasn't the characters talking, it was me talking, trying to figure them out.

It's possible some of that stuff will need to go back in later - but I kind of doubt it.

By the way - my (half finished) script is now three pages shorter than it was when I started rewriting.

So. Will be back at it tomorrow, full steam ahead, no split focus, I swear!

Lesson learned!

1 comment:

blofeld said...

Hi there.

Just to inform y'all that i am racing foward to that chockie fish and am up to page 42.

Looking back, there are striking similarities occuring between what the daily screenwriter was feeling about their script and what i am feeling about my script at the same stage.

It is quite encouraging.