I've left my story "Bright
Freedom" unfinished for a long time. This week I took a stab at a
rewrite. I find that the rewrite is harder to do than the first draft.
My first attempt at this story was back in 2010 and early
2011. It was initially a movie script. I didn't plan to make the movie myself,
I thought it as more of a learning exercise.
In 2012 I decided to rewrite it as a novelette. My first
draft was largely a conversion of the screen play into a prose format. I finished
that in July, 2012. I intended to leave it for a few months and then do a
rewrite. It is now just a few days short of three years. A lot has happened in
my life since then and that affects the way I look at things.
Part of the reason I have struggled with this story is that
the main character is a woman of color. Those of you who know me are aware that
I have very little experience with being a woman or of color. I worry that I
will completely miss the essence of the character, and offend people with a
flat stereotype.
On the other hand, in my story "A Walk in the Snow" (http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/stories/a-walk-in-the-snow/),
the protagonist was a person of color who had immigrated to Canada . I had
some positive responses to that from people who had that experience.
Another challenge for me is that the protagonist is strongly
motivated to help victims of domestic abuse. That makes me uncomfortable. In my
story I use it as a device to motivate the protagonist rather than as a central
part of the theme. My story is a sort of action adventure and I worry that will
trivialize the problem. On the other hand, I think I portray the protagonist as
someone who work to stop it.
I will definitely need to get some feed back from people who
can identify with the protagonist and the problems she faces.
I focussed on the story outline/structure this week. For me,
the most important part of the writing is the outline. That, combined with
background information, should take up most of the time.
My first step was to create a new outline from the existing
text. It turned out that I had already done that some time ago, which saved me
some time. Over the last three years I have learned more about plotting a
story. I found that useful when I revised the outline. It was easier to see
when the story missed something, and where I had material I should cut.
The outline had 43 scenes to start with, and I ended up with
61. I moved some scenes around to where they made more sense. Some scenes will
need to be completely redone.
Another problem I noticed was that when I converted the
screenplay, I didn't change the tense. For example, the text says "She
sits down" when it should say "She sat down." I'll need to go
through the story and fix all of those.
Over the last three years I've written a fair number of
notes about changes I want to make to the story. Before I go too far, I will
want to review those in more detail.
All in all, I have my work cut out from me.
I could use some help to find some people to read a draft of
my story. Ideally I need a woman of color who immigrated to Canada and
works with domestic abuse victims. So far as I know, I don't know any.
If you can put me in touch with someone who fits this
description, I would appreciate it.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
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