Enough Notes

I finally reached a breaking point with my notes yesterday. Normally, when I start a script, I feel like I have to write everything out and lay out all of the scenes just right in order to start it up. Well, last night, I just had my fill of writing notes because they became spread out over four or five different notebooks and became about five different Word documents. I figured, the notes were beginning to become all consuming, it was time to shut up and write.


And it felt great...

Now, let me summarize, I started a screenplay about six years ago about a third shift hospital transporter. At the time, I thought I had the story laid out exactly the way I wanted it to be. It would play out over the course of one night and over the course of the main character's third shift in the hospital, no flashbacks. I thought keeping it tight like that would increase the tension. Well, the tension worked, but the story didn't. You see, I wanted to get inside of his head and show a complete mental break that would show what would drive someone to want to commit suicide, but the course of one night just wasn't working. After letting a friend of mine read it, it became clear to me that it needed a breadth of more than one night.

So, I began to expand the time span that the story covered and soon, I found that I was free to portray the character's mental status with more vivid detail. Also, I was able to change his backstory and make the character not only something that would work for an actor that I have worked with recently, but something that became more personal.

In other words, I finally made the story personal...which is probably why it got lost in notes.

I wanted everything to be perfect, so I began laying the scenes out, trying to get a good flow for them. I had a good beginning, a good end and parts of a good middle. I knew where I needed to go, but for some reason, I couldn't make all of the parts fit in my notes. That's when it hit me, that I had reached the limit of how far my notes could take me. It was time to write out all of the thoughts I had formed in my head and let them play out as they needed. Besides, even though this is a re-write, it's still a rough draft and my old playwriting teacher used to say that good writing is in the re-writing. Finally feeling confident, I jumped into the old Movie Magic Screenwriting software last night and wrote. Wrote like crazy. In fact, I think this is the first time that I wrote a script where the first page only has one line of spoken dialog.

That gave me hope.

I was finally telling stories with visuals and not just dialog. I think I'm finally ready for this one to be seen. :)