A Thousand Cups of Tea

I am rubbing my eyes and sipping coffee. I hope that my friends and companions that check this space regularly don’t feel like I have abandoned them. I have been so deeply immersed in the process of screenplay writing that I have not had time for any of the other stuff that I do.

We are just days away from having this thing ready to go out the door and look for a patron to fund it.

I have been counseled not to say any more than that by my esteemed colleague, the mad director from Britain.

Amazing how much more work it is writing a screenplay than even I, who made a living as a creative person playing drums for years, could even imagine. I think that writing is even more demanding than music as a way of making things that are ephemeral into something more tangible.

Writing narrative demands that the ideas flow in ways that are consistent with the way that we think. By that I mean this: If character A does this, then the audience member/reader needs to think that he would have done what character A did if he was in the same circumstances. Otherwise, he will disconnect from the narrative completely. (Or he will distance himself from it and become critical of it rather than a willing participant in the story.)

So there’s a lot of time where it would appear that actually no work is being done- two men sitting at a table with furrowed brows, one smoking and one drinking coffee and staring out of the window. What is happening there is that they are both thinking “What would a real person do in this situation, and how can I make this work out logically?” This kind of hypothetical thinking can be exhausting. Then one of them speaks and says “Well, what if…..?” and the other one grunts, and their brows furrow as they ponder the implications of that course of action.

I swear that if the mad director has not done this before and had he not done a tonne of research and brought to the table several texts explaining how this should work, I daresay that this process would have never happened at all. Respect.

But we are nearly all the way through it. The last bit is to get it all summarized into one short document that will serve to interest a producer enough to get the project funded.

whew.