Indelible Freckles

After threatening to, I followed through.

Ah, Mr Hilton. I really should’ve taken the hint when you wrote:

I finished a first draft last week. It’s what I call a working first draft - a partially muscled skeleton of a script that I don’t show anyone for fear of their never reading my scripts again. I think one of William Goldman’s Screentrade Adventures - or was it Stephen King’s On Writing? - had a name for it. Can’t find the reference. Anyway:

• I have completed a draft;
• it has a beginning, middle and end;
• and I’m still excited by the idea behind it.

While I was typing out the epilogue, I found I had a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye - touching reminders of why I’m so attached to the story. It was great. If When I have that effect on the reader a few drafts from now, I’ll be pretty effin’ stoked.

The current draft is a pretty measly 85 pages long. The story’s a 120 page kind of script. The missing pages are currently in the form of, at best -

- or, at worst -

This week is time-out from the script. I’ve got my work cut out for me.

And I can’t wait.

(Big-ass fedora-tips to Mr August and Nima Yousefi for making the above scrippets available.)

Okay. Alright.

So I blogged about a chicken - and a dead one at that - and tried to pass it off as being about supporting characters by bookending it with some weak-ass scriptwriting observations. It’s just that, in the aftermath of Wallace’s sudden departure, The Goddess said, If we’re like this over a chicken we’ve only known six months, we’re gonna be a mess when The Dog karks it.

And I looked at The Dog -

- and flashed on my earlier ramblings about her.

… Best not to think about it.

Anyway, I was going to post about the use/misuse/abuse/un-use of supporting characters but I ended up drafting something about finishing the first draft of a script.

Introducing new supporting characters to an existing narrative is a challenge: they have to have a good reason to join up; they have to add value; and they better be damned interesting.

That’s pretty much how I felt when The Goddess decided to get some chickens - real chickens - earlier in the year.

So.

• Good reason to join up? Because The Goddess said.
• Do they add value? They lay eggs, silly.
• Are they interesting? See below.

I never expected The Chickens to be interesting. They arrived stringy and without combs, and with the promise of egg-laying still a few months away.

As I struggled to adjust to a growing menagerie - there’s the beginnings of a post on the The Worm Farm somewhere on the hard-drive - an endless loop of Sesame Street’s what-comes-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg tormented me during my waking hours. I had to find a place - like a pigeonchicken-hole in My World for them. In a feeble attempt to describe our homestead as Fortress Mamea, having established The Dog as our Rapid Deployment Force and The Cat as a Spec/Black Ops unit, maybe the fowl were our CAP. But it never really fit.

As summer slushed to autumn, and autumn torrented into winter, specific personalities emerged from these creatures whose brains could not be larger than my thumb.

The Light Brown One was flighty from day one, and is still nervous to this day. ‘N.S.’ best describes this one.

The Dark Brown One was the demanding one - the one most likely to flutter up and get first dibs on what you had in your hand.

And the Mid-Brown One was the adventurous, curious one - the first to try a grasshopper, and the first to discover flight (ie., to the top of the fence that separated their ‘meadow’ from the rest of the property).

The Mid-Brown One - Wallace - was killed today. One of the neighbourhood dogs - a pure-bred mastiff - escaped his keep and the first we saw was him with a mouthful of very dead chicken. We’ve met the mastiff on a number of occasions: he’s a sweetie with an overabundance of slobber; and his owner is very conscientious about keeping his dog under control.

It was an accident: a dog got loose, saw something moving rapidly, gave chase, and that was all she wrote.

It’s shitty that it was the one with personality that got killed.

It’s ridiculous that I’m committing a post to a damned chicken that I was at pains not to get too close to.

But that’s how it is with supporting characters. Sometimes they get under your skin. You get to like them. And when they’re gone, you miss them and all their stupid little idiosyncrasies.

Having read Rod Hilton’s The Dark Knight - The Abridged Script, I am definitely leaving the cave to watch it on the big screen.

So - in my true spare time, of course - I’m exploring the lastest distraction idea which, on the face of it, seems to offer an intriguing (high-concept) premise within an achievable (ultra-low) budget.

Burning questions are sketched out: who is it about? what needs to happen? does it make sense?

  Yes - I know what it’s about.
  Yes - I know what happens.
  But it’s not making sense.

I try rushing the idea from one-sentence idea to one-page concept in a lazy attempt to resolve the nonsensicalness. Uh-uh. No matter how creative I try to be, one plus two plus three will not equal the five that I want.

I refuse to be cowed.

  The idea is nifty.
  The concept is almost there.
  The budget is appealing.

Time, I suppose, to approach this with the patience and persistence of water on stone a spoilt child whining for some parental attention.

Regular as clockwork: I’m two-thirds into a note- and aside-pepperedriddled first draft and bam! I’ve got an idea for another story.

I’m not worried about my current script because it’s moving.

Nor am I worried about being distracted - once I’ve racked up my minimum page-count for the day, I’m a free agent.

I think… I’m just glad I’m still getting ideas. I’m still getting turned on by the potential of new stories, and still loving it when the creative juices my writing mojo I can just make shit up.

(This post, I suspect, was brought to you by four straight days of no rain.)