Bright Freedom Update 2012 July 22

I started to work on my revised Sharkbiter video, but then I decided to concentrate on Bright Freedom instead. The project started as a film script a couple years ago, so I am converting the script into a novella. I got another 5,600 words done. One more session and I am done the first draft. I hope.

It will need a lot more work before I have something I feel I can publish. I do need to do some more background research. It should be easier to identify what I need to find out if I have a draft of the story.

I just read The Joy of Writing by Pierre Berton. Although it is mostly about writing non-fiction, it got me to think differently about this story.

Berton’s rule number 16 is to always describe the people. My characters are fictional, but, in the past, I have sought out images that I can use to visualize them. I picked someone to be Bright Freedom. I won’t say who I picked, but she just jumped into my mind as soon as I started to ponder who I could use. I haven’t given as much thought to the other characters as I wrote, so it is harder to visualize them.

I think I have too many characters and maybe too many subplots. I eliminated one character so far. She only had one scene and was mentioned a couple of times in other scenes, so it wasn’t hard to cut her out. I did lose a scene I liked though.

I have several characters that only play a small part, so I think it may make sense to merge them into other characters. I think I’ll need to build up some of the characters so they contribute more to the story.

I have five plot lines now and thought I might add another. In a previous, failed, script I ran into a problem where I added so many side stories, that people who read the outline thought one of the subplots was the main plot. As an exercise, I thought that I might try to split off all of the subplots into separate stories. That should help me focus on the core story. I plan to reintegrate the subplots later.

The core of the story is composed of two of the plot lines and can’t be separated because they are so intertwined with each other. One of the subplots is almost nonexistent now, but I think I can integrate it into the main story line. The other subplots are really to show the internal conflict that Bright faces because what she does and says in those stories contrasts with what she does and says in the main story.

After I have this first draft done, I will leave it for a while. I already have ideas for additional scenes. There are structural changes I’d like to make. I can see that I’ll need at least one more draft to take care of those additions. Then I want to do a draft where I flesh out the story with descriptive detail. I’ll likely need to do another draft to clean up the wording.

I want to get some input from people when I reach that point. In particular, since the main character is a woman, I want to see how women feel about what I’ve done. If you're a woman and would like to help, please let me know.

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

A New Approach for my Blog

Monday last week, Stacy Parks of Film Specific put a post on her blog about blogging for filmmakers.

I made a comment about some of the challenges of writing a blog and she suggested that if your film has a particular target audience, that posts about their interests would be a good idea. As I commented back, I should have thought of that myself.

However, when I started to look at the projects I have underway, I realized that it isn’t always easy to follow that advice. In part, I find it difficult to articulate who my audience is, and what kind of posts would attract them.

I started to think over how I could approach this with some of my projects.

The Doorman’s Sacrifice

A man’s fascination in a series of books leads him to the dangerous cult like following that has grown up around them.

There many books, TV programs and movies that develop a cult following. Many of these people could be interested in a story like this. I haven’t been involved with this sort of thing myself, so I would need to learn more about it.

My Detective Story

A troubled police detective is targeted by a nasty villain.

This would be a problematic story to target. Not so much that there are not a lot of people who are interested in detective stories, but because there are so many other detective stories around for them to watch. I think I do have a unique perspective, but it is only revealed at the end. The initial premise isn’t distinguishable from a lot of other detective stories.

Bright Freedom

A young lawyer seeks justice for abused women, but then has to face a past she thought she left behind.

I see potential to explore aspects of the story in a series of blogs. Certainly I know that I need to know more about these issues if I want to create a good story. It would be too easy to go badly astray.

Then the Phone Rang

A politician threatened with blackmail struggles to save his relationship with his wife.

I don’t see anything that sets this story apart from many others of the same ilk. The story needs something more. I could develop the project to be more about how the private lives of politician affect their political careers.

The Crying Woman

A chance meeting between two people leads one of them to confide in the other.

I want this story to be about building trust and learning to listen. I am fascinated by the idea of putting one’s own interests aside and devote time to listen, and there by help, someone else. I’m sure that there are others who would find it interesting too.

I only have a preliminary outline for this story. I don’t think I am quite ready to write it. I did cannibalize parts of it for Then the Phone Rang, so I need to either scrap one of the two stories or come up with new elements of the story to replace the ones I used.

Transportation Planning Story

I spent a long career as a transportation planner, so if I “write what I know” that would be the subject. I wrote one short story, The Glencoe Project, about transportation planners. So far as I know, this is the only story about transportation planners ever written.

Most people I met over the years had strong opinions on transportation plans and planners. So I think that discussions of these issues and how I incorporate them into a story could attract a lot of interest.

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

First Draft of “Bright Freedom” Done

I finished the first draft of Bright Freedom yesterday. It came in at just under 68 pages, which is a couple pages shorter than the first drafts for Then the Phone Rang and My Detective Story. It is about a page longer than my first draft of The Doorman’s Sacrifice.

Before I started to write, I made estimates of how long each scene would be. I came up with 91 pages. In the first half of the script, my scenes were shorter than I estimated by about one third. In the second half, I was still short, but not by as much.

I took some time off between the first half and the second half to revise The Doorman’s Sacrifice for Amazon Studios and write the first draft of my Lester Dent style adventure story. I think those experiences helped improve my writing, which is why I had longer scenes. I read up on how to write dialog and that helped too.

I have a short description for the story now.

Throughout her legal career, Bright Freedom has helped the weak against the strong. One day she sees a face from a past she wanted to forget. While she struggles with two difficult cases and the problems of her assistant, Bright must risk her life to reconnect with those she left behind.

I need to do more research on the background to this story before I can finish it. I may use my draft to approach some people who can help me with background.

In the mean time, I want finish My Most Difficult Case and my Lester Dent style adventure story.

How Many Scripts Do You Have to Write Before You Learn How to Write a Script?

At the start of this year, I set a goal of writing three feature scripts by the end of the year. I’ve done two and am a little over half way through the third. I think I’ll get it (Bright Freedom) done this week.

The reason I picked three was that in Dov Ss Simens book From Reel to Deal he said you needed to do three. Or least I think he did, it’s been a while since I read it now.

This week I watched an interview with Robert McKee about script writing.

He says that you need to finish 10 scripts before you have mastered the art. He also says that part of that is a matter of maturing, which can take 10 years!

I felt discouraged about this, but then I have a lot of experience in other types of writing, which I hope will cut down the time I need to develop. In any event, I have had the attitude that I needed to learn more about the art of script writing. I know that I still have much to learn. I may need to write a few more scripts before I write one that really is good.

Another point McKee makes in the interview is that the writer should not expect that the dialog he writes would make it to the screen unchanged. That makes me feel better, because it is similar to what I said in my article How to Write a Feature Movie Script Part One.

Mad Dash to Finish “Bright Freedom”

I want to get back to work on my script Bright Freedom this week. I’m confident that I will meet my goal to finish three scripts this year.

The script sat idle for a month. I started to reread what I’ve done so far, and review the outline. It will take me a day or two to get back into the story. The script is almost half way through and is shorter than I want it to be. I won’t try to fix that in the first draft.

While I think I have a good story, I don’t plan to make the film and want to do it to learn more about writing. My experience tells me that I still need to learn more about plotting so that my stories don’t come out s short. Another area I need to focus on is dialog.

I found this video about dialog that I found helpful: http://www.ehow.com/video_2390566_write-dialogue-movie-script.html

When I read From Reel to Deal by Dov S-s Simens, he suggested that reading legal dispositions was a good way to learn how natural dialog looked. I haven’t done that. I’m not sure where you would find legal dispositions. I think there must be other sources for natural dialog, but I’m not sure where to find them either. I’ll have to get onto Google one of these days.

Along the same lines, I started to analyse the words I use in my writing. I worry that I over use some words, like anything, something and nothing. I did a word frequency count with the website: http://www.csgnetwork.com/documentanalystcalc.html . I compared some of what I wrote to the Doc Savage book Fear Cay. I noticed some differences, but some reflected that he wrote it in 1933. It might be a good idea to compare my writing to a more recent book, or script.

I want to have my characters use slightly different vocabularies, which is true of real people, so I need to be more aware of the words I use.

More Scenes or Longer Scenes?

I finished the outline for Bright Freedom last week, and wrote 14 of the 42 scenes I identified. I expected that I would have a 90-page script by the end, but the scenes are shorter than I thought they would be. I may only get a 50-page script. I’ve had similar problems with my earlier scripts, but this seems even worse.

I’ve asked myself should I try to make my scenes longer, or add more scenes? Do I add more events to the film, or to make the events bigger?

I’ve read that the average scene should be about 3 pages and a page typically translates into about one minute of screen time. My average scene is 1.4 pages, so I would need 65 scenes to get a 90-minute film.

I think that I should develop my scenes more. I tend to write scenes very focussed on plot and don’t make much effort to portray the characters. If I did that more often, my scenes would be longer. I hope it would make the characters more interesting to the audience.

When I did the rewrites for The Anger Trap, only about 20 per cent of the increased length of later drafts was due to adding scenes. The rest came from longer scenes.

Bright Freedom

I started on a new movie script this week. My other projects: My Most Difficult Case and Then the Phone Rang are hanging fire while I get some other people involved. I wanted to get to work on something, so I went back to a project, called Bright Freedom, which I’ve been playing with off and on for a long time.

I’ve been stalled on the story because I really need to do a lot of background research to do a proper job of it. I kept finding excuses to put off the research. I did manage to determine that the basic premise of the story is plausible. I decided that was good enough to start writing. I will still need to do more research before I can do a final version of the script. I think it may be easier to do the research once I have a draft of the script. I hope that doesn’t sound like famous last words.

I am not sure if I want to make Bright Freedom into film in the end. Right now, I see it as a development exercise. The more scripts you write, the easier it is to write. I also believe that the quality of my writing will improve. It will be a challenge because the protagonist is not only a woman, but is a woman from a very different culture than I’m familiar with. That is the reason why I expect that I will need to do more research to finish it. Either that, or find someone to collaborate with.

Someone told me I made my female characters more self confident, strong and independent than they should be. I’m not sure if that is true. The protagonist in this story isn’t someone to wait around for a big strong man to come save her. I’ve meet people like her, so I think that is realistic.

I got about halfway through the outline this week. I am doing a more detailed outline than I did for Then the Phone Rang, but less detailed than what I did for The Anger Trap or my detective story. I expect it to take longer to write. I am also confident that the first draft of the script will come in longer. Certainly closer to feature length than the other projects I’ve done.