Again I’m awake. But this time it’s 4:30 AM. Three and a half hours of sleep after two hours of TRIATHLON training at the gym!
Why did I get to bed so late?
Well, last night I went through some script notes by a trusted online friend that ripped one of my scripts apart. It’s been about four years since I last read them – maybe more. But boy, was it harsh (in a constructive way) and totally on the money. He picked through all the holes and focused on everything he didn’t like in the script. First prefacing the critique with his opinion and respect for me as a writer and then going for my throat. It’s what I asked him to do. I told him to tear it apart. It was THE BEST analysis of the script I’ve ever received. It wasn’t sugar coated, it wasn’t just an overall view, it was a detailed dissection of the script and everything that DID NOT work. He did point out the things he liked but really didn’t focus on them. Everything else worked… it was what he pointed out that didn’t - and he pointed out a lot.
I think that’s one reason I put the script aside. It was just too much work
I recently read the script. It’s okay. It’s doable. It’s simple and if someone wanted to shoot it, it’s probably ready to go. But its not as good as it should be.
Two different parties have shown interest in it this year. Yet I have yet to get motivated to start on the rewrite passing the script off as ‘good enough.’ Well… it isn’t. So after reading the critique once again it made me feel like Charlie Kaufman in “Adaptation” where he utters his mantra, “I am fat, I am old, I am bald, I am repulsive, I can’t write.”
Except I’m not bald.
Last night I sat through and rewrote for two and a half hours making it to page 36 of the 100+ page feature. It felt good. It felt right. It felt different to be eight years removed from the original 1998 Chesterfield Fellowship Semi-Finalist script - which I wrote at age thirty - to be thirty eight years old and really seeing the characters in a completely different light. Instead of writing the characters to meet my age, social status, career and view of the future, I’m able to push them back to College years where finishing college is a very important goal, the future is not career but passing a class, and true love is still a concept. Along the way you find love, you suffer from heartbreak and you see your best friends start their future. It makes the characters more identifiable to more people. They are less set in their ways and more spontaneous, love sick, romantic and desperate. It felt good. It made me want to stay home and write – which I haven’t been inclined to do lately.
So the writing will continue.
I feel like a writer once again.
=GLENN=
