There is a screenplay I have felt the desire to write for probably 11 years now. For the longest time I forbade myself to do it, declaring that I would keep it germinating in my brain until I had the a) distance, and b) talent, to make it something more than a big pile of self-indulgence.
Now, to be fair, there is a certain school of wisdom that says a big pile of self-indulgence could have a very unique magic to it, but that is not generally how I roll.
Last summer, Adam actively encouraged me to work on something that had direct and clear personal meaning to me (instead of spelunking for meaning inside all these spec script-friendly stories in which I submerge myself.) And I found myself looking at the informal list of ideas I’d built up over the years for this story, and started going to work on it.
It suddenly felt so thoroughly natural – sorting out the major characters, the big sequences, the little detail flourishes. I am a well-designed refinery for story material now, and I had ample raw stuff with which to work. But at the top of my brainstorming document, I wrote in all caps:
“DO NOT BLOCK OUT SCENE ORDER”.
This was my way of spiting technique. For so long I’ve held to a discipline of drafting the actual script in order. Once the outlining is done, I do not let myself skip ahead, but proceed from Page One to the end, so as not to cheat my way around the hard stuff. I really cannot tell you if it’s a good way of doing things, but I’ve kept to it for all major projects since basically my third screenplay. But this time I decided to resist. Instead I would just write scenes – meet the characters there, watch what they do, and start finding the shape of the story that way. I don’t know what will come of it, but I am very curious to find out.
Then things got very, very bad financially (as they regularly do in my life), so I tried to focus on the things that were either making me money at that moment, or stood a greater-than-zero chance of making me money in the next year.
Lately things have improved financially, and I’ve been re-embracing the philosophy that working on multiple projects simultaneously is not so bad – because if you sit down to write and don’t work on the thing you intended, at least you didn’t write NOTHING.
And so, from time to time in the last few weeks, I’ve tinkered with the brainstorming list; adding and embellishing and choosing, assigning names to characters. Then, on Sunday, a scene sprang into my head. It was not an opening scene or an ending, just something that revealed an aspect of a character to me, something that was true, and involving, and fit into the evolution of a storyline. And suddenly it was absolutely, positively, unbearable that I had not written this scene.
Tonight I wrote it. Eleven years of waiting; two pages tonight.
Now I’ve gone and started something…