Slow return to Writing

Since my heart attack I have found it difficult to get back to my writing and film projects. I have started to make progress on a couple writing projects lately.

I joined a group of people who get together to talk and work on their writing. I found the writing exercises we do a good prod to start writing. I am working on a couple of projects that came out of discussions at the group.

Conspiracy Theory Story

The first story came out of an off-topic discussion we had at one session about conspiracy theories. I talked about a theory I made up a while back that I called “The First Person in Space”. One of the writers suggested it might make a good basis for a story. Over the last couple of months, I have played around with the idea.

I wrote a short script and have done a couple of rewrites. Initially I wanted to clarify just what the theory was. In the latest rewrite I tried to develop and differentiate the characters.

The script has three characters, a woman and two men. In the earlier drafts the two men were indistinguishable from each other. I developed some back story and motives for them, which helped me recognize which one should have which lines and how they would say them.

I haven’t done much about the woman character, other than show that she is smarter than the other two. She is the one who proposes the theory. I haven’t decided if she believes the theory or is just having some fun with it.

I felt good about the rewrites, but I think I can do mare to make the characters more interesting. The other problem I see is that I don’t have a good ending. I also struggle to determine what point I want to make with the story.

Another issue that concerns me is the danger I see in proposing a conspiracy theory. There are people who believe even the most absurd conspiracy theories. I don’t want anyone to believe my theory. I want to make it clear that it is a fiction. One challenge is that my theory is more plausible than some of the more popular theories. I’ll need to come up with ways to make it easy to debunk.

Election Story

The guy who runs the writing group suggested that we each write a short script about an election. Then we could review and discuss it at one of our sessions.

I kind of cheated. Years ago, I wrote a short story called "Hello, my Name is Bob", which is about an election. So, I reworked it as a script. That was straightforward for the most part. I had originally conceived it as a movie, so for the most part, all I had to do was reformat.

I had to give the minor characters names and descriptions. I tightened up the dialogue a little and cut most of the action descriptions.  The biggest change I made was to switch the order of a couple of the scenes. When I reread the story, it seemed so obvious that they were in the wrong order that I wondered why I wrote it that way.

I went through a couple of minor rewrites. I had thought in the past of maybe developing the story into a film, but never gave it much serious thought. Now that I’ve reworked it, I think that maybe I should go ahead and turn it into a film. I think it could be expanded into a longer film.

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