Scripting Life

Life can be really exciting when you put your mind to it!

I’m taking a short little break from editing my rough treatment to work on a 3min short. I’ll be submitting it to a competition where all other entries will have the exact same 6 lines of dialogue but different genres and ideas.

The schedule is tight as I only found out about it a week ago, but could really work. Can’t wait to see the final production!

xTeenie

Interesting article on how to make your hero strong and connect to all other characters in the story.

Woot woot! I have a treatment, well a 1st draft. It’s great to suddenly know what the whole story is and not just a couple of scenes. Writing the treatment was quite quick and relatively painless, but now I’m filled with questions:

• Are the characters and the story strong enough?
• Does it have enough of a build-up and is the climax really a turning point?
• Most importantly, does it grab anyone’s attention from the start?

I think that at the moment the characters are a bit neutral. I need people to either love them or hate them passionately, but at the moment they seem to just sit on the fence. You really don’t care if their end is happy or tragic, and I need you to care. As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s a melodrama, so if people aren’t pouring their eyes out, or at least suppressing some tears, then I’ve failed.

xxTeenie

So I’m gearing up to sit down and brainstorm, get the treatment sorted. In the process I’ve been doing some reading. Really I shouldn’t have done. It’s like being told by a doctor that you have X disease and the Googling it - suddenly what was a mild rash becomes a life threatening ailment!

I’ve read some great pieces with some great advices which have really got me thinking, but that’s all I’ve been doing now. Maybe this should all be done the other way around. Stop procrastinating, write write write, no pause, no reviews, no thinking. Then, and only then, start researching about genre and styles and what an attention grabbing plot should feel like, from there I can then re-write, polish, re-write, and so on.

My genre at the moment is drama, miserable, wrist-slashing, cry your heart out drama, but I do want to make it watchable and enjoyable and lighter than it could be.

Lucy V Hay’s blog (aka BANG2WRITE), has a good article filled with tips on this, and in fact, any genre.

Have I mentioned this is based on a true story?

Right, write!

xTeenie

I have a confession to make: since starting this blog I haven’t added a word to the script I’m currently working on.

I have however done some thinking on where to take it, and have realised that I need to sit down and do a much better treatment than the pathetic two paragraph one that I have. 

Once that’s done, it should be a lot easier to add the scenes and dialogue to the script.

Whilst thinking about the script though, I’ve dug up my old notebook where I used to throw around ideas for possible scripts and am quite liking a few of them, so am already excited and looking forward to writing some more.

I’m loving all this non-children related mind exercise, although I do need to find a compromise and make sure I’m not in dreamland for too long.