Now that the demands of production on the short are dwindling and until such times (like next week) that I have more footage to edit, I’ve thrown myself back into writing, or rather rewriting, for a while, trying to crack out a second draft of Architurus. It’s been bugging me for a while that I never really finished the first draft to my satisfaction.

Having learnt much over the past few months about the noble art of storytelling, I’ve come to the conclusion that, while there are some good ideas the first draft, it ultimately fails because there is too much going on. Before I thought I could fix this by stripping out some of the story, to be reused later. But this didn’t work, as the bits I’d kept now felt dishonest. People’s motives had suddenly become confused and blurred.

Also, in Dramatica terms, I realised I’d possibly got the wrong person as the Impact Character, which meant the story never quite got to the end in a fashion I was happy with.

Having spent some time thinking about it over the past few weeks, the solution is fairly simple and obvious; change the Impact Character. However, I was scared that this woud ruin the story completely. As it turns out, it does, making much of what I’ve written redundant – but the key point is the realisation that it’s probably not a bad thing. The core themes are good, I just haven’t dealt with them very well.

It’s actually made storyforming the new draft considerably easier, because I wasn’t having to constantly justify in my mind why characters had to hold on to certain roles to perform certain functions and get clever plotting convoluted twists to justify my faulty logic.

I, in my youthful, inexperienced enthusiasm, wanted to tell a rich and complex tale, but ended up with a bit of a mess with no real soul. This time round things ‘feel’ a lot different, I care more for the characters already as they are operating on more fundamental level, with basic desires which make it a) easier for me to grasp, b) (hopefully) easier for the actors to get into and c) a lot easier for the audience to understand.

Into the abyss we go…