Brain Buzz
I don't know what it is about anthology meetings. We finish. We stand up. We walk out. We chat. And as soon as I get into my car my brain goes into overload. I remember at least two or three things I meant to say during the meeting as well as another couple that I forgot to write in my notes. I then spend the fifteen minute drive home trying to keep as many of these things in mind as possible. It never occurs to me to just stop and write them down. As soon as I get home I brain dump into a notepad and make a to do list for the next ten minutes. I then spend the next two hours doing everything I shouldn't and nothing that I should. By the time I get around to doing any work it's 11pm and I've not ticked off everything on my list yet. I wonder if this is what people mean when they say you should pace yourself.
The fact that I'm more than happy with my first proper mark has probably contributed a fair bit as well...
Onward! This is a good buzz.
A Note on Influence
I think you can find influence in anything... But I sometimes if it's possible to be influenced in advance. Now the story I'm currently working on is a bit of fantasy. It's probably also going to be really bad. But hey it's for reading out loud and no one can "see" the prose. It's also the one idea I feel most confident about writing right now. Anyway so it turns out it's a bit of a mash up of two Neil Gaiman stories. The first being Stardust (saw the it for the first time this weekend) and the second being Preludes and Nocturnes (which I also re-read this weekend). I planned this story out over the last three weeks. Go figure. Over-active imagination or some kind of pre-cognitive ability? You decide!
New Eyes, Disconnection
The way I watch TV and films has changed again. It happened before and I never quite recovered that time. When I attended those first two writing courses a few years back I learned things. I got better in my own writing and for a time at least I found my voice. The way I saw other people's work began to change too. I saw more and less. I felt more able to criticise and to understand why certain things had been done certain ways. The problem is that knowing these things gives me distance from the medium. I'm less immersed and that means I enjoy things less.
So yeah. It's happened again. Except this time it's worse. I've only been doing the MA for one term and I'm already picking holes in things. I can't help but feel that in learning these things I've irreversibly disconnected myself from something I used to enjoy. Worse I don't think I've a right to be passing this kind of judgement on things that have been deemed worthy enough for filming or publication.
Oh sure I'm protected a little if the book or movie is excellent or if it's a series I'm already heavily invested in. But for the most part there's just this sense of disconnection. Maybe all this means is that my standards have been raised, which I guess may not be such a bad thing. We shall see...
The Step Outline
Disclaimer: Okay this may read like stupidly obvious advice. A step outline may just seem like any other set of notes. For me I think it's more a case of my writing mentality adjusting.
I feel compelled to talk a little more about the step outline. We were introduced to them as a stage in the screenwriting process. I'm finding I use them increasingly often in any and all my writings. Even before I begin I have ideas for the story I want to tell. These ideas are more often than not scattered throughout the whole and there are gaping chasms that need filling before any of it will hold together. The step outline allows me to get around that. It gives me permission to write less. By this I mean I can summarise rather than get lost in prose. I can sketch out the entire piece before getting bogged down in the details.
This is a bit of a departure for me. In the past I'd been taught to free write and been a great advocate of free writing in general. There's still something attractive about plowing into a story and letting it unfold itself. But here's the thing: There's always something nagging away when I free write. I feel like I'm on the crest of a wave of words and any minute it's going to break and I'll be left unable to continue. It's because I don't know what's going to happen next. At all. A step outline lets me avoid that. I can still free write a scene and if it's strong enough it may alter the outline but I know how things are supposed to fit together. And that helps.
So yeah. Obvious advice. But useful... for me anyway.
Happy New Year!
It was! It is! It will be!
Resolutions...
- Strangely enough... write more.
- Eat less fat and sugar.
- Be more dedicated and organised.
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She Raged, She Blustered
My prose tends to contain a lot of implied action. When it works this is a good thing since it saves me having to waste words, while still catering to the lowest common denominator. Does that sound arrogant? Whatever. It's something I'm working on. But it's different in screenwriting. I want my script to describe exactly what is happening in a given scene. This tends to result in a hell of a lot of sentences that begin with "He curled", "she did", "he shot", one after another. It feels like I'm reeling off a shopping list of actions. It feels artificial. It feels as if it lacks drama. And we all know I like my drama.
There's also the whole word count issue. I mean script is meant to be minimal. It's meant to convey the action in a concise and efficient manner. I know prose is meant to do this too, but with script you're crystalising. I wonder if this is an intermediate stage. I mean I'm learning another form of writing, pretty much from scratch. Perhaps at some future point my scripts will grow from bulleted lists to nicely flowing scenes. We shall see.
I think it's time to dig out some examples and see how the experts do it. All I can do is observe and practise.