{"id":52,"date":"2007-05-09T19:09:07","date_gmt":"2007-05-09T07:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/09\/the-actual-writing-part-two\/"},"modified":"2012-07-27T16:31:58","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T04:31:58","slug":"the-actual-writing-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/the-actual-writing-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"The Actual Writing – Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

The moment of glibness having passed, I remembered James Cameron<\/a>‘s superb description of the process in the introduction to his 1993 scriptment<\/a> of Strange Days<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I find the writing follows a logarithmic curve. Plotted against time, the curve is almost flat at first, then curves upward until it is nearly vertical.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I offer this not as an excuse but as a possible explanation of how I write.<\/p>\n

I’d like to think I’m a regular kind of writer – y’know, bang out five\/ten\/whatever pages of script per day, no matter how long it takes, come family crisis or no. But try as I might, I’m not that kind of writer. (Nor would my family allow it.) I have to set aside a fixed number of hours per day to write. Sometimes they’re productive, sometimes they’re not. What’s important, for better or worse, is that I have the time to be creative. I need the discipline.<\/p>\n

My first feature script followed that curve for the most part. Well, it would if you saw it from the far end of the room; up close, the peaks and valleys leading up to The Big Upward Curve represented the failed attempts to turn it first into a novel, then a comic. It was a combination of extreme boredom and some depression that put me onto screenplays. Everything clicked<\/em>. It was game on<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

After missing a couple of self-imposed deadlines, and in the lead-up to a Meaningful Birthday, there was a blurry month – this was pre-Goddess – where full-time work took up a third of the day, and the remaining waking hours were spent hunched over a keyboard. And then, for the first time, I got to type in the magic words:<\/p>\n

Screenplay<\/strong><\/p>\n

by<\/strong><\/p>\n

D F Mamea<\/strong><\/p>\n

It felt good.<\/p>\n

Still does, each time I get there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The moment of glibness having passed, I remembered James Cameron‘s superb description of the process in the introduction to his 1993 scriptment of Strange Days: I find the writing follows a logarithmic curve. Plotted against time, the curve is almost flat at first, then curves upward until it is nearly vertical. I offer this not … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Actual Writing – Part Two”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[90,91,406],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scriptwriting","tag-james-cameron","tag-scriptment","tag-strange-days"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2748,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/2748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}