Blog 13: Script Reflection

To be honest, when we first started this project, I was very excited about it. I had a good idea and I couldn't wait for it to come alive on the page. Now that it's done, I feel kind of bad about it because I had a lot of pages and then I lost half of them halfway through and lost my motivation as well. This caused me to pretty much stop writing because I was depressed and didn't have any ideas. I did not find the planning workbook to be very helpful in my endeavors as I knew most stuff in it already and it was structured in a way I didn't like. Also, the ridiculous amount of time we spent working on the planning workbook also pretty much exhausted my time limit for still being excited about the script. Probably mostly what I learned when doing this project was that on large projects it's important for me to feel like I can work at my own pace and feel rewarded for getting work done. My final script is like 10 pages because I lost work and gave up halfway through. In that sense I managed my time carelessly but I don't find writing to be a fun or rewarding exercise of creativity when doing it makes me feel frustrated and depressed. I think that pretty much all of my script is strong, good work as I spent a lot of time on what I did write. I am happy with it because I think the dialogue is very strong and it sounds like stuff people would actually say. I also think the description is sufficient to allow the script to come to life but still leave room for imagination. Its main weakness is it's length, as I did not even get to the part where the actual movie starts actually happening. If I had more time in the course, to be honest I would probably write a short story. That was what I was really looking forward to doing, and unfortunately that is not the way that it worked out this time. I might do it on my own time over the summer though :)

Blog 12- Scene Strengths and Weaknesses

After my peer review session, some stuff has come to light about my script. Everyone said I had strong dialogue, which I actually agree with. Some people commented that they liked my action notes as well. I think those are the main strengths of this part of my script. I especially like how I used Britishisms such as "snogging" which makes it seem more realistic that this scene is set in Britain.  The biggest weakness about this scene is probably that it is cliche. The eager man, the grumpy and reluctant woman. I would probably try to make the beginning of my script less cliche if I had the chance to write it again.

Previous Dialogue With Action/Description

(K walks into the door of the apartment to see M standing in the bedroom doorway. She has an almost shellshocked expression of wonderment on her face. In one hand she holds a positive pregnancy test. K's expression changes from happy to dismayed and M's face falls as well in response)

 

K

No. Oh no…

M

K? What… what’s wrong?

K

Not now, not already…

 

(K's face hardens and he walks towards her. M seems to shrink as her happy daze disappears completely)

M

But K, a child. Our child. You always said you wanted… K, be careful!

 

(K roughly pushes M aside as he strides purposefully into the bedroom, slamming her into the doorframe. Tears are beginning to glisten in her eyes.

K

Pack your things. We’re leaving.

 

(M's resolve also appears to harden as she rounds on K, still close to tears. Halfway through her statement her anger fades to reveal a desperate longing.)

M

What’s wrong with you? You’ve never acted like this… never treated me this way. And what  are you saying about leaving? I only just found you again… K!

K

(angrily) I told you to pack your things, now do it!

M

Tell me what’s going on!

K

Don’t question me. I’ll explain…I’ll explain later. Just do it, now, do you understand me?

 

(M complies and goes into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. The anger drains from K's face. He is a man in despair, desperate, his world crushed in that instant he saw his wife in the doorway. He picks up the phone and dials a number, his hands shaking. A muffled voice can be heard replying to him on the other end of the line.)

K

It’s happened. Already… what time? Alright, alright. Are you sure? I have to… yes. Goodbye

Dialogue That Moves the Story Forward

I apologize, this probably makes no sense without the action/description, which I will add later.

K

No. Oh no…

M

K? What… what’s wrong?

K

Not now, not already…

M

But K, a child. Our child. You always said you wanted… K, be careful!

K

Pack your things. We’re leaving.

M

What’s wrong with you? You’ve never acted like this… never treated me this way. And what  are you saying about leaving? I only just found you again… K!

K

I told you to pack your things, now do it!

M

Tell me what’s going on!

K

Don’t question me. I’ll explain…I’ll explain later. Just do it, now, do you understand me?

K

It’s happened. Already… what time? Alright, alright. Are you sure? I have to… yes. Goodbye.

Writing Effective Dialogue

-Say it to yourself-

 Make sure the dialogue sounds good out loud, make sure it flows. Act it out in whispers.

-Develop a Voice-

If your characters have a strong voice and mannerisms, a unique style of speaking, then their lines will come naturally. Every character shouldn't sound like you. This isn't Julia Roberts' acting career.

-Create Good Situations-

Tense situations, unusual situations, all spark better dialogue. The character's lives shouldn't be boring.

Elements of the Hollywood Formula I Need To Think About

The Opening- I’m using a “prologue” type opening and it is going to take a romanc-y sort of tone which is very different from the rest of the movie. I have what’ll happen in the prologue carefully planned out (it’ s actually the only part of the story that I am absolutely sure about). However, I need to find a way to convey the tone of the rest of the movie during this part so it doesn’t get off on the wrong foot, so to speak.

Having Fun and Getting to Know Your Characters- This part is going to be pretty difficult for me. First of all, it’s not exactly going to be about, per se, having fun. Basically, this is the period where the mother is starting to find out slowly what is going on with her husband and the children are growing older. This is a period of at least a decade spent in isolation and I have to find a way to make it interesting. In order to do this I will probably have to introduce a few other characters and add some intrigue, as well as some interesting tests for the children.

The Final Push- Again, I really have no idea how it’s all going to play out. Somewhere before this there will be a “big reveal” where the mother finds out everything. The end will not take place at  the secluded hideout, there is a cataclysm and they leave. We face off with the cult for the first time. I know who dies here but that’s about it. I also know that the twins will probably be just coming into adulthood, 18 maybe.

My Logline: Revised

So I made a few changes. I'm actually pleased with the way it turned out, I found a way to streamline it and add a reference to a major element I didn't have room for in the original. Ta-daaa!

A mother must protect her twin children from the influence of the father she still loves and the cult that made him believe  they are destined to kill him.  

My Logline

Well, I'm doing Script Frenzy so this is the logline for my screenplay. It's really hard to keep it short and I feel like it doesn't capture a lot of the nuances that make the concept good, but oh well. Here it is!

A mother must protect her twin children from their father, who believes they must kill him to come of age, but is hindered by her love for him.

 There's also a cult involved and martial arts action-y stuff and that kind of thing, but that's the essence of it. My main problem is that it could be interpreted to precede a very different film from the one I will write.

#2: Writing Goals

So apparently you're supposed to have these things called "goals" when writing something and it's against the rules to just write willy-nilly, writing a lot one day and nothing the next and moving nowhere towards nothing. At the same time, I don't want to set myself completely unattainable goals, like "write a novel this week." In English classes they ask about your "writing goals" a lot, and they're generally supposed to be things like not using too much passive voice, and using varied sentence structure, and finishing your essays before the bell. But I already do all those things, or at least I think I do, so what should my writing goals be? Up until now whenever I was asked "Did you move towards any of your writing goals in this piece?"and then the dreaded "Explain," my thought process was Ummmmmm ... what were my goals again? Um, hmmm, it was good I guess, whatever, "I moved toward my goals in this piece because it was good. What does that even mean?

But from now on, it's not going to be like that . From now on, I am going to have Goals. Goals, I tell you. GOALS. And my first goal is to write every day. I mean, that's not too hard, right? Just put mechanical pencil to lined paper every day and churn out something that isn't my math homework done two hours before it's due. Unproductive writing, writing that isn't going to be a crappy short story until I read it a few days later and go "Hey, this is crappy!" It'll probably be crappy anyway, but at least I won't be expecting it to become anything. My second goal is to write a story that isn't cliched. That one will, I anticipate, be considerably harder. I have some stuff in mind, and maybe one day it will be an official novel and I will be an official unpublished author. Maybe I can even self-publish an e-book and then beg people on the internet to buy it so I can afford corn flakes and kitty litter for my thirteen cats, which will all be named after long words. I'm a word afficionado, so I can name them things like Sussuration and Persnickity and call them Susie and Percy when I'm not feeling formal. But, I digress. My third and final goal is to stop insulting my own writing so much. By reading this post and the one previous you've probably figured out that I tend to have a rather self-depricating sense of humor. Hopefully, in a few months, this blog will be filled with announcements of my sheer awesomeness....awesomenitude.......whatever. Or at least I will have stopped talking about how much my writing sucks, ie, push myself into total denial. There I go doing it again.
Anyway, here's a picture of a kitten!

Velkommen

Hello, fellow Creative Writing students, teacher, and anyone else who may stumble across this blog and then hightail it out when they realize it's yet another one full of a highschooler's crappy writing. You may notice the fancy background, I chose it to give this blog a sense of weight and importance. It screams "The words set over me have something earthshaking to say!" But in reality, I just chose it in five seconds from Blogger's premade templates. But you can ignore what I just said. Go ahead and follow, and read the things that I post. You can get a friend and some popcorn, and laugh at how terrible they are, or perhaps make a somewhat Freudian analyisis of all the deep-seated psychological issues they demonstrate. Feel free to comment and speculate; if any of you have a sudden realization that I need to see a shrink before I snap and go on a murderous rampage, stabbing people in the eye with my mechanical pencils like the Joker, feel free to let me know. (Just as a side note, I watched The Dark Knight yesterday. It was enjoyable, especially if you like Christian Bale's chiseled biceps, as I do.) The knowledge will certainly be valuable, to save all of your lives.

Anyway, this blog was created for a Creative Writing class, so there will probably be some creative writing posted on it, to provide interludes between pictures of shirtless Christian Bale (not really). There will almost certainly be some short stories and little vignettes, with some poems and maybe a few fragments of script or screenplay thrown in. They're likely to have a surprising and almost unconscious turn of morbidity and black humor, much like this very post. My tendencies towards death and darkness are belied by the fact that I don't enjoy truly violent books and movies, unless of course they feature the omnipresent Christian Bale. (This is the last time I will mention Christian Bale in this blog post, I swear. Whoops, did it again. Christian Bale. Christian Bale. Ok, I'm done now. Really.) Lord of the Flies frankly disturbed me, as did the end of 1984. My creative musings tend not to feature that type of outright brutality so much as a few characters just having a happy day with the happy little trees in their own happy little world (I'm a fan of The Joy of Painting, with Bob Ross), and then suddenly someone cracks a joke about gouging out eyes with a melon baller. (In case you don't know, that's a thing you use to make balls of melon. Useful if you want a fruit salad. Yummy yummy.) So if that kind of thing disturbs you, you'd better run fast. I also may occasionaly make rants about something or other, probably politics. If you're offended by proponents of regulated capitalism and gay marraige, you'd better run fast. Actually, you'd just better run fast either way. I think I feel that nervous breakdown coming on, and my pencils are nice and sharp.