Having taken a good week out of my writing time to work on a personal project that I’m hoping will bring me some much needed extra income (enough to fund the first first movie? Hope so!), I’ve spent the past three evenings writing solid. In longhand. Much to my wife’s chagrin as I got ink all over the nice runner on the dining room table. Oops.
Anyhow, inspired by the likes of Neil Gaiman and Robert Rankin, I’m trying to get to at least the end of the first draft without recourse to a PC. This is a bit tricky as, being a Dramatica fan, means a little time at the keyboard. But once that Storyform’s fixed, I’m outta there.
I’m finding the experience quite liberating, especially for brainstorming as I find it quite easy to write down a long stream of consciousness in which I pose, discuss and answer my own questions. Odd, but fun.
I started the brainstorming, trusty Parker Fountain Pen (as used by Robert Rankin to sign my copy of the Antipope!*) in hand, on Friday night as I really wasn’t happy with the way the new draft of the sci-fi script was going. It was fine and I was enjoying the Iambic Pentametered dialogue, but the story itself was lacking… I don’t know… soul, I guess. It just didn’t feel right.
So I started thinking about why that was, and I realised I still had too much going on and the story was trying to pull in two different directions.
Then I started thinking about ‘genre’ and ‘tone’ – what sort of film was I really trying to write here and boiled it down to two answers, a love story with a bit of a murder mystery and an action adventure movie.
I think to myself; ‘Right, which one do I want to write. Which one would I want to go and see at the cinema? Ummm… Both? No, try harder… The first one? Right then do that and stop fannying about.’
So I spend the next fifteen pages of A4 thinking about it, writing down all the ideas I have and why they would and wouldn’t work. Exciting stuff. Then I realise that somewhere along the way I’ve actually ended up with a half decent pitch and a reasonable synopsis of the story… that doesn’t resemble anything that I’ve done so far! Well it does, similar characters, similar backstory, just a very different handling of it.
Then it was back to Dramatica to get the right story settings (took some time but I got there), print it out and now I’m… knackered and ready for bed.
* He didn’t like it – it wasn’t a Biro.