It has been a strange experiment, essentially working with the 25-year-old version of myself as a collaborator. I think I’ve mentioned before that several years ago, I started writing a sci-fi script on a whim – no outline, no sureness of direction, just an image that came into my head during the morning commute through the Sepulveda Pass, and refused to go unwritten. I generated over 40 pages just following that initial inspiration, with only the fuzziest ideas of where it was going to end up, and then hit a brick wall.
At least twice a year I would dig those pages out, realize yet again how strong they seemed, and once again try and fail to add to them. I think a grand total of two people have ever even read them. One of them is Adam, and he thinks they might be the best screenwriting I have ever done. So there’s that.
Last year I had a breakthrough and cracked what I thought the ending should be. But I was deep in those long doldrums of not finishing anything substantial, and I felt like I needed to harness all my screenwriting mojo for that comedy I just finally completed.
There’s a gig I am chasing that may yet require all my attention, but for the moment I have done enough writing that is career-focused. While a couple of different initiatives play out, I have a window wherein I can screenwrite what I damn well please. So I’m playing with a couple of different projects right now, adding bits to each depending on the mood of the evening. But I am settling into a pattern where, if I go out with the purpose of writing in mind, that no matter what I do, I am going to add a page to this sci-fi thing first. And so, finally, I have taken the ball from the 25-year-old me and, trusting that he did his job with the first 40-50% of the script, I am starting to carry it the rest of the way. I’ve written about 7-8 pages so far, and they don’t feel like something he would have written. But they feel good. They feel right for the project. Maybe that’s why it took so long to find the next part of the story – I had to grow into it.