Cut, Cut, Cut

So when last heard from, I was trying to cut 148 pages down to 100ish pages. Special thanks to Emily Blake for the progress bar info, which adds some snazziness (oh yeah, it’s a word).

I thought at first that I was going to have to cut huge chunks out of some of my favorite scenes, which kind of run a little long. However, I discovered that I can probably just go through and tighten them all up and still come out significantly shorter. The real cutting is in my connecting scenes between the set-pieces, which tend to be horribly extended by pleasant but irrelevant dialogue.

So I had all kinds of fun last night writing an eight-page replacement for a 20-page sequence. In the process I got to take it out of the realm of People Talking In Rooms and make it fun, with snappier dialogue and physical abuse. Great stuff.

So that’s all. Nothing else too exciting, just working away. I hope to be done with all of this rewrite by February 28, when I go see this girl

Polishing the Jet Engine

At 5:08 a.m. EST, I finally finished this damn draft. Absolutely unbelievable, how much that thing grew in the writing. I already wrote it once! And it still wanted to get bigger when I wrote it the second time.

I sound bitter, but I’m not. I’m just not as excited as probably some people (including me) are when they finish a rough draft, because this rough draft is actually also a second draft. It should have been smoother and quicker and resulted in something much more finished-looking than this.

Now, there are good reasons why this is not the case. The first draft had kind of a pathetic plot, necessitating pretty much a page one rewrite. So as noted in my previous post, the is the jet engine to the first draft’s steam engine.

But still. It took a long freakin’ time. This is the kind of script that should be 100 pages. It’s 148 pages. I have to cut a third of this thing. And most of it feels important.

I know, I know, everyone thinks all of his material is important. I get that. But unlike some other writers (the ones I call “bad”), I actually try to make all my scenes mean something, not just be fun or funny or exciting. Probably that’s because without some sort of character development, I wouldn’t be able to make most of it fun or funny or exciting.

So I now have to cut probably at least 30 pages of story that I think actually matters.

Plus, I kind of have the feeling that one reason it’s so long is my paragraph structures. I break paragraphs often. My action is all diced up into little manageable chunks, often one sentence long.

This makes for some really long scenes, purely from a page-count standpoint.

I’m not sure what to do about that. I have a feeling if you actually shot this movie, it would come in closer to 120 minutes than 148 minutes.

But readers and managers and agents and producers like thin scripts. Thus, I must keep the pages down.

So my rewrite now commences. I need a progress bar like Emily, so I can show how I reach my goal of being done with major rewrites by February 22.

How do I find one of those? Anyone know?

Building the Jet Engine

I know my two faithful readers have been wondering what happened to me, and here’s my explanation, but I warn you: you won’t like it.

Here it comes …

Ready?

You know you want it …

Okay then, fine! The explanation is:

I’ve been working my ass off.

That’s right, I’ve now become the thing that all blogging writers hate: someone who, when offered extra time to blog, chooses to actually write instead. You know it, baby.

I would love to follow up on The Explanation by saying that all that dedication has paid off with a finely-crafted and ready-for-querying script, but the fact is that it’s only gotten me a very, very rough and not-even-quite-finished rough draft.

I did finish the ending to my own current satisfaction, but I went right back to work on the beginning I’d never quite gotten to work how I wanted, so it doesn’t count.

But hopefully this week is the week. Or tonight the night, who knows?

Anyway, there’s this Alex Epstein quote that I’m too lazy to look up, but I can remember it enough to make the point. It goes: “You don’t want to be left polishing an old steam engine when you could have a brand new, dirty, smelly jet engine instead.”

And that’s how I feel right now. I’m almost done building my jet engine. Sending it to the detailing crew for cleanup and paint is a mere anticlimax away.

So stretch ye the metaphors as you will—I’m going to be over here, working away.

He postures and poses, he listens to Keane/He rants and he raves like a man in a dream

Remember when I wrote some time back about how I love rewrites and think they’re the greatest time in the worldest?

I take it back.

Since then I’ve written a great grand seven pages. That’s right. Seven. In two weeks.

Now, as usual, I’m going to go ahead and blame work conditions. I also have a new excuse for your enjoyment: Winter.

That’s right, as an unforeseen byproduct of the third shift schedule, the longer times of darkness (not to be confused with Dark Times) are causing my body to send me sleep signals at an alarming rate, even when I’ve already had plenty of sleep.

But even with these excuses, seven pages in 14 days is pretty lame. I’m disappointed in me.

Despite Emily’s exhortation to go ahead and write standing on my head, smoking a cigar if that’s how I really crank it up, I’ve had some trouble making dents in the almost-page-one rewrite of my neo-screwball comedy.

And now The Fear is back in the form of Greg, freshly home from China. Jerk wants to meet again, so I better come up with something to validate my own existence.

Fortunately, I have at least produced a reasonable one-fifth-of-the-movie long sequence, and tonight I may well do even more. If I can kick-start my imagination hard enough to cough and sputter it’s steam-powered way along the story development superhighway like the Model-A clunker that it is.

I keep looking forward to the time when writing this comedy will be over and I can go back to drama, but damned if I didn’t just have another great idea for a comedy that will now nag at me with the persistence of a four-years-engaged woman tired of her fiancé’s feet-dragging and his over-used hyphenation.

Maybe I’ll just keep it back for a rainy-day pitch. Because we all know I meet with producers next to nonstop.

I’ll see you cats in another two weeks.

Unpaid Me Will Rock Your Overpaid Development World

I like knowing Greg, because he’s hooked up to the world of film, and sometimes he gives me unproduced scripts to read. I read two of them this week, and I realized something:

I’m a better writer than most people.

I know you’re all surprised to hear that a screenwriter thinks himself better at the craft than other people who are actually making money (screenwriters are usually such humble people), but it’s true, I tell you. Every single one of these scripts has had quite obvious flaws to which I am pretty sure I have simple solutions.

Of course, no producers are paying me to develop these ideas, so this helps me not at all, in a practical sense.

But for encouragement, there’s nothing like it.

I managed an hour-and-a-half-ish of writing tonight before exhaustion overcame me, and I brought the page count up to 20 on the rewrite. More importantly, I summitted a minor story hill I’d been climbing all week, leaving the path open for some solid progress next time I write.

And what’s even better, most of it is feeling at least mildly funny, and much of it very funny. This may not sound like a big deal to all you other comedic geniuses, but for me it’s bloody amazing.

From now on, only dramas. Comedy is stressful.

Glorious Rewrite

Rewrite time is a fun time. I forgot how much fun it is.

Draft time is a fun time. In fact, it’s probably the most fun time. But it comes with all these pressures. Namely, the pressure to create something new, and the pressure to create at lightning-quick speed.

I subscribe (at least up until recently) to the idea that a first draft should be pounded out as quickly as possible, with as little thinking as posssible.

Outline, outline, outline. Then first draft. Fast first draft. No tweaking, no going back, no second guessing.

This means that I can knock out a draft in a couple weeks or less, to the envy of all my other writer friend(s). But it also means that sometimes those drafts are less than I hoped. I suppose this to be a fairly common problem among screenwriters, but I wish to eradicate it.

When I was in elementary school, junior high, senior high and college, I wrote things at a nice, deliberate pace. My first drafts were like third drafts. It was wonderful.

When I became a screenwriter everyone said that I should write first drafts like first drafts. And certainly this helps them to come out fast.

But while draft time is definitely better than the maddening limbo of outline time, rewrite time is probably my favorite time. Granted, this is only my second time there, but the last time (almost a year ago) was all kinds of fun, and so far this time is too.

Rewrite gives you that chance to really make the script the way you wanted it to be. I can obsess and finesse and tweak and adjust and do over to my perfectionistic heart’s content.

In the current case, the rewrite really is almost a complete rewrite, so it has all that magical aura of a first draft with the freedom and reward of a rewrite. It’s beautiful.

I have 17 pages of rewrite so far. Because I can, I will probably remove a couple of those pages, but even so, I’m pretty proud.

I’d be making a lot more progress, but things have been absolutely insane at work, with violence, non-compliance and anger on every side. I’m not even exaggerating.

So my actual “work” work takes me much longer every night, decreasing the writing time available. And my days tend to last longer, which means I get less sleep and then can’t stay awake enough to produce anything good.

I’m not really into the “suffering writer” thing. It doesn’t really help my creativity as much as you’d think. So let’s hope this is over soon.

In only slightly related news, I watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s tonight while doing paperwork. I’m trying to dredge my memory to a certain extent, but I think this may be the original “falls in love with his best friend” movie. Anyone?

Making a Plot to Slay the Agents

I’m not a plot guy.

Some people can take an idea and go nuts with it. Tell them something you came up with, and they’ll tell you ten other things that could go along with it and are probably better ideas anyway.

Greg is one of these people. I hate that jerk.

My friend Shawn is even more one of those people. Of course, I hate him less because he’s not a writer, and therefore does not make me feel quite as bad about myself.

I am not one of those people. Show me an idea, and I’ll say to you, “That’s an idea, right there.”

I mean, I’d dress it up more and so forth, but at the time, I’ll have nothing to add.

I will then spend six weeks thinking about it, and if I’m lucky, I’ll have a storyline for you to tear apart and tell me to rethink.

But it’s a hella-long process, making a plot.

Now, fortunately for me, there are other things about writing that I am good at. This tends to redeem me in my own eyes.

But plot is hard.

And that is why I was overjoyed today when both Greg and myself deemed my current storyline good enough to at least start rewriting.

Because, while I get a kick out of making progress on a plot, and I do get that giddy writer feeling, too often the outlining process is full of very frustrating roadblocks.

Whereas draft time goes by so fast. It’s the most fun, and I fly pretty well at it. It makes me happy.

This is only the second time I’ve tried to rewrite a script. So I’m looking forward to seeing how it comes out when I rewrite a concept that actually has high saleability.

If I’m lucky and work hard, I hope to have a ready-to-pitch script in a couple months’ time.

And that’s a very frightening idea, indeed.

If Only I Practiced

My girlfriend is going to be a fashion designer.

Hold on … I said that wrong. Do over.

My girlfriend is a fashion designer.

How do I know she is a fashion designer? Well gee, apart from the fact that she talks about fashion all the time, sighs every time we pass a shop with a badly-laid-out window, checks out scads of books on fashion from the library, comments on the clothes first with regard to everything she sees on TV, and—hell— the fact that she told me she was a fashion designer, the main reason I know it is that that’s what she actually does.

She shames me, really. Last night I asked her why she stayed up until two instead of going to sleep, and she admitted, in a surprisingly shamefaced manner, that she had been drawing.

So instead of sleeping or catching up on all the coursework she has been procrastinating on for her entire semester, she just couldn’t resist practicing her craft.

Isn’t that sick?

It was sad for me to have to admit to her that I will do almost anything but write. And I love writing. It makes me giddy, at least when it’s going well. When it’s going badly, I tear my hair out.

But I don’t seize every spare moment, and then some extra moments to do it.

I clean my house.

I pay bills.

I look up things on wikipedia.

Now, in some mitigation, this may be partly because I have a job that allows me to write at work, and I try to do most of my writing there.

But still.

On a brighter note, I did in fact work on my script last night, and I’m two scenes away from a whole plot. Maybe tonight I’ll finish, and then next week I can start the rewrite.

So my girl isn’t showing me up.

Thoughts You Shouldn’t Think

I caught myself doing something alarming today.

See, I’m working on this comedy. I drafted it once. Now I’m rewriting it.

It’s kind of biting me on the ass at the moment. In a slow, deliberate, cud-chewing sort of way.

I don’t generally think of myself as a very funny person. Some people laugh at me. That may not always be by my choice. But often it is. Still, if anything, I’m more of a one-liner type of guy. Exploiting a situation to its limit isn’t really my bag, baby.

Of course, when writing a comedy, that is exactly what one is called upon to do.

To me, comedy is made up a two elements. I may have said this before. What you do is you get 1) some great quirky and outlandish characters, and then you think of 2) some crazy situations to happen to them. You throw 1 and 2 together, and that’s how you create comedy.

I think that comedy is so much harder than drama, which is why I’m always angry when the Oscars are over.

Anyway, I was thinking about how unlikely it is that I’ll be writing the next 40-Year-Old Virgin (which I think is the most recent truly original comedy). And even the odds of writing another movie like Wedding Crashers, which I didn’t think was very original but was definitely hilarious, are pretty low for me.

Then this sentence formed itself if my head:

“I really just need to write something that’s funny enough to get sold, and lots of extremely not-funny comedies are made every year, so selling one shouldn’t be that hard.”

Do you see the trap in that? The seductive but fatal lure? No?

It’s the Siren call of mediocrity, my friends. The belief attempting to take over in my mind that all I need to do is just be a tiny bit better than all the other trash out there.

Now, even if this was technically true (which is debatable), this is not at all the kind of artistic philosophy with which I am anything close to on board. This is anathema.

So even though I’m not very strong in the world of comedy, this script is going to have to be worked on and worked on and worked on and worked on until either I can’t possibly make it any funnier, or it really has reached the heights of excellence at which one wishes to aim.

But if someone offered to buy it from me tomorrow for a reasonable price, I wouldn’t say no.

Now that’s some good philosophy.