the saga so far (part 2)

after outlining and lots of time staring at cards and post-its tacked to the massive corkboard in the kitchen (if you think that's nerdy, wait til you hear that sometimes we switch the corkboard out with an equally huge whiteboard), i had enough of a plan to start filling in dialogue. this is the fun part--seeing and hearing the characters.

at first, it's insanely easy--i'm cranking through scene after scene (of course, i've already seen them all as i hacked through the outline) and thinking everyone should outline--what fools we are for attempting free-form writing of any sort.

then my paid-work workload goes into overdrive and i completely stall out. this is last july--my first inklings of this script were in january, so six months have passed. i've written enough full-length plays to realize that crashing with two-thirds of a script is pretty typical for me, not at all the death of the project, and that it's usually well after a year has passed since my first crack at character work. so i'm not doing so badly.

in late summer i start up with a great writing group--playwrights mostly--and get the chance to hear the first 45 pages of my script out loud. boy, is it rough.

in the fall i rustle up the energy to rewrite what i have so far and completely gut a subplot, replacing it with a more energetic through-line.

in october i write a fluffy short about abby, a supporting role in the feature. in theory, i'm writing a short a month, always starring one of the characters in sky, but on a tangent so i can do character work outside of the outlined scenes. (november's short was for another project--more on that in another post--which will probably take up the rest of december, too. but january should get me a short for daniel, another supporting role.)

there was some more editing and headway in november, but there were also two vacations, a nasty sinus infection, an intense tech writing gig, a family visit, a couple of days of marathon xmas shopping, and then a new laptop, which i'm still moving into slowly.

which brings us to today. i've got 2/3 of a feature that i need to sit down and re-read, and then re-write.

should be doing that now, really.