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There was a reason I left the big yellow wall easy to get to when I moved in: I wanted a story wall. Today I’m using it to suss out this story once and for all.

So. This is the story as it currently stands. I’ve got a more or less complete story up on the wall but I’m not happy with it yet. Next time someone says I’ve got a great idea for a story, I plan to say well I had 126 ideas for a story on my third go at writing it and it still wasn’t enough.

This is a kickarse way of building a story from freewritten points. It’s awesome for random-access checking because it’s all laid out in front of you, it’s easy to change stuff around if it doesn’t work – just replace the card. And best of all, it doesn’t require a working internet connection, let alone a quick one. So that’s nice.

 

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The inner game of rewriting

Yesterday I hated the draft scriptment but I kept working at it. Today I realised one of the major story threads isn’t working and it’ll need rewriting – but I’m excited. It’s going to be great. I’m actually going to like the story more because the change makes the character so much clearer. It’s more archetypal and relatable. The list of stuff to fix is short but has wide-reaching ramifications.

The treatment’s around 10,700 words so far. That’s thirty-one pages double spaced. Production-wise, there’s about six different locations, maybe ten characters to build (five major, the rest are minor), forty-three scenes in total without a number of shots determined.

Do I need all of them to tell the story? Maybe. Even in this short film there’s two story threads colliding, with interesting associated themes coming along for the ride.

It’s definitely shaping up though – the draft is blossoming into something I can definitely work with. If I can get started boarding it by next week, I’ll be pretty happy with that indeed.

I was looking up what pi is in different bases today on the way home. It’s research. Honest.

And yet.. I’m starting to have second thoughts about the change now. I know the original isn’t great but thinking about it the new idea seems.. I dunno.. too obvious. A cliche? Maybe.

That’s the inner game of rewriting in progress, right there.