Sunday, October 18, 2015

A New (Old) Transportation Planning Story

About 20 years ago I got an idea for a story about transportation planning. I've started and abandoned it several times. I think I'm finally on a track to get it done.

The initial inspiration for the story came from the book "The Wealthy Barber" by David Chilton. After several attempts, the story I have in mind now bears little resemblance to that book. I did use some of the ideas I developed in my movie "The Barrier".

The "story" will consist mainly of (hopefully) funny one liners. The plot is pretty rudimentary. There in lies the problem. With out a decent story line, it is very hard to place the jokes in any kind of order.

I read an article once about how to write comedy. The writer said that you write an interesting story, and only then do you go back and make it funny. I didn't do it that way, and I see now why that approach makes sense.

I developed the current approach back in 2010. While I generated a lot of one liners, I wasn't able to cobble them together. Last August I took a step back and developed a proper outline for the story. I still found it difficult to move forward with. It just seemed too intimidating.

This week I took another stab at it. I decided that I would break up the story into smaller sections and then work on each section one at a time. I thought that would make it less intimidating.

I got the first section done. After an initial slow start, it started to flow a bit easier. It could use some cleaning up, but over all I'm satisfied with it. I intended to move on to the next section right away, but then I got distracted by other things.

I'll try to get back on top of it next week.



This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

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