‘Ve been out of town.
Got some catching up to do.
Back soon.
Fun with Email
You sweat over each word to remove all possible and potential misunderstandings.
And yet….
INT. EMAIL CORRESPONDENCE – OVER TIME
EMAILER
Hi, as discussed, attached are my scripts for your consideration. Look forward to hearing from you!
WRITER
Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, there were no attachments received with it.
EMAILER
Yes there are.
There’s a day’s delay as the Writer holds off from Replying with “NO THERE WERE NOT”.
WRITER
Please can you resend your scripts as we have been unable to access your attachments.
EMAILER
As requested, here are my scripts. Thanks for being so polite with your correspondence.
Another day’s delay as the Writer struggles with whether the Emailer is, reading between the lines, begging for their ARSE TO BE DROPKICKED.
Numerous drafts later --
WRITER
Your scripts have been received safely. Thank you.
Box Watch Update
With The Good Wife ending its first season just like it started (but OMG oh-so-different), the inhabitants of Fortress Mamea have been bracing themselves for the fact that this week is chocker with season finales of Nurse Jackie, Glee and (I’m on my own with this one) Justified. Winter 2010 threatens to be a bleak affair.
As if.
The second season of Fringe fell by the wayside earlier in the late last year but we can catch up with Dunham and co at our leisure now. Unless we’re already belatedly catching up with Dexter (about to start season three) and Burn Notice (couple of eps from the second season finale). Or (re)watching the first seasons of Scrubs and Green Wing.
It should only be for June and a bit of July: the fifth season of The Closer and the fourth season of Mad Men open next month.
Meantime The Goddess has Radar’s Patch to chuckle over while I have Treme all to myself.
We’ll get by.
Potayto, Potahto
The Goddess likes Urbis and Beekeeper Journal while I like Empire and mourn the limited availability of Guns & Ammo. She listens to Greg Johnson and Jacqueline du Pre while I like to crank up some Wu or Nina Simone. She has a soft spot for Miss Marple while I’ll re-up with McNulty and friends any time.
There is some common ground. Queen, Maisey Rika and Phoenix Foundation. Better Off Ted, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, The Good Wife and Mad Men. (Yes, these last coupla years have been big box-watching years.)
She likes relationship stories while I like kill-my-dog-and-I-shall-lay-waste-upon-the-land-until-vengeance-is-mine stories. Her viewing threshold is a lot lower than mine – q.v. The Cult – but my excuse is that all viewing is a learning experience.
So we like different things. So what.
Were it not for Her, I would not have had the pleasure of Grand Designs, the River Cottage series, Pieces of April, and King of Kong. And were it not for me, She would not have had the pleasure of Mad Men, The Good Wife, Lars and the Real Girl, and In Bruges.
I suppose it evens out in the end. And because I do like to quote the good doctor,
It is important to always try new things.
Origins
Sean Molloy recently posted about who he bases his characters on – on other people, on himself, on other characters, and a combination of all three.
As always his post is a much more polite and tactful explanation than mine:
If I had a dollar for every friend I snuck into a script, I’d be twelve dollars richer; and if I had a fifty cent piece for each line of dialogue I’ve ripped off those same friends, I’d be comfortably wealthy.
Reprezent
I have a propensity to have my scripts’ role calls be a bountiful colours of Benetton kind of experience. I believe it’s in reaction to exclusive vanilla television indoctrination for the first couple of decades of my life.
The universe may have recognised my small contribution: John August has posted about the Bechdel Test.
In your script:
1. Are there two or more female characters with names?
2. Do they talk to each other?
3. If they talk to each other, do they talk about something other than a man?
Amongst the comments on that post was this from American multihyphenate Kevin Arbouet:
1. How many scripts out there have two or more black characters with names?
2. Do they talk about something other than how white people put them down/The Black Experience?
3. Are they a judge?
All my scripts – television in particular – satisfy the first question of both the Bechdel and Arbouet tests (extending the latter test to all non-European* ethnicities).
Not so many of the feature scripts pass questions 2 and 3 of the Bechdel. I’d like to say in my defence that in relation to question 3, my female characters may be discussing a man but it’s never in any romantic context.
As for questions 2 and 3 of the Arbouet, none of my ethnic characters talk about their struggle in this White Man’s World, nor are any of them in a powerful and/or well-respected positions, but they’re representative of the New Zealand I see both firsthand and in the news.
And that’s all one can ask of a script’s cast of characters: that they be appropriate, realistic and representative of whatever world you’re offering your audience.
* ‘Non-European’ – that’s ‘non-white’ to American readers.
Every-damn-where
Any time a main character must make a literal or figurative journey to achieve a specific goal, you’ll find that journey peppered with obstacles literal and/or figurative, external and/or internal.
It makes for good drama.
There’s a parallel with life in Fortress Mamea. We’re a reasonable distance from civilisation so, after a good few years’ living here, we know almost to the minute the travel time between us and most of Auckland at any given time of the day.
Some observations:
Don’t Even Be a Minute Late
If we miss our official departure time by just a minute, what invariably happens after we leave the drawbridge behind us is that we almost immediately find ourselves behind a Slow Driver. Not a Townie Driver who doesn’t belong in our neck of the woods and is understandably unfamiliar with the roads. A Slow Driver: who taps/floors their brake for corners, distant hazards and imaginary noises, all the while travelling at ten kilometres below the official speed limit.
The fun doesn’t stop there. There is no point in getting angry or frustrated behind a Slow Driver because —
There Will Always Be an Even Slower Driver
Think the Hyundai Getz driven by someone with the eyesight of a mole is already excruciatingly slow? Give it time and even they will catch up to a Mazda MX5 driven by its One Very Careful Owner.
Which reminds me – what is it with —
Sports Cars Driven by Slow Drivers
What were they thinking when they bought their vehicle? Or if it was a gift, what in the gods’ names was the giver thinking? Why isn’t there some kind of reflex and/or psychological profile test salespeople can give prospective owners to determine ability and mental fitness?
Next time you’re writing a chase scene and your hero has already negotiated a reversing truck, a very bad run of traffic lights, numerous henchmen and their attendant vehicles, and randomly tossed-in-panicked-hysteria infants – and you stop to wonder if a gaggle of nuns might be a bit much… think about the world that we share.
And write what you know to be true.
Ummm
My maximum seven-day turn-around for posting on this blog passed two days ago.
In the first couple of years of blogging, I actually had a one- to two-month buffer of material. For the last couple of years I’ve been able to crank through ideas, writing each one out until I a). ran out of steam, b). realised I was going nowhere, or c). I somehow and/or eventually finished one.
Not this week.
The draft posts have either petered out or were ideas I couldn’t carry through.
Some projects can be like that. They make it through the conceptual stage and you whip up a document that tells any random but preferably connected reader that not only is what they’re holding a Damned Hot Property, it is Compleat.
Only it’s not. ‘Compleat’, that is. You know this because a). having had some sleep after your Ebullient Moment of Completion, the document you read the morning after is not the one you remembered from the night before, or b). one of your Trusted Readers has told you that your project is Tragically Flawed.
So you work it. Make notes about it. Play with it. Bulldoze it. Ignore it. Discuss it. Dream about it. Write bits of it. Share it. Lose sleep over it. And when nothing you do seems to have made it any better, you leave it —
— for another project. Where you go through the same shenanigans – likely in very different circumstances – but it can feel like you’re carrying some kind of figurative writers’ albatross, stalling/starving/killing each new or different project you turn to.
What do you do when the old quotes that once kept you pepped no longer ring true?
You keep writing. What else can you do? Whether it’s a project or a letter or a report or a blog – even if it’s about the process – it’s the act that’s important. You’re a writer.
Write.
Meh
Saw an ad in the local online arts community for a writer:
It was spellchecked – a rarity for ads calling for writers.
Then I saw another ad for the same project:
I did a double-take – and lo:
… Meh.
Why I Write 2010
I finished James Ellroy‘s The Big Nowhere a while back. I’ve read it a few times now. Don’t know if it’s my favourite of his “L.A. Quartet” but I do relish its quicksand plot, bastard cops, and Ellroy’s unremitting style. The end is so black that when I reach it, I immediately want to start over as maybe things will work out better for my favoured characters the next time around.
The same goes for whenever I rewatch films like The Constant Gardener or television shows like The Shield where the endings are not happy.
Why do I subject myself to this torture?
It’s the execution. It’s the characters. It’s being taken by the hand for a half-hour or hour or ninety-plus minutes or days and returning to the real world short of breath, my heart thundering in my chest and a lump in my throat.
This is not a new discovery. Romeo and Juliet will never grow old. Rick will always have Paris. Rachel and Deckard will never have certainty.
And I think to myself:
Someone wrote that shit.
I lapped that shit up and begged for more.
I want to write like that.