Committed to Write (Bright Freedom)

I have a bunch of writing projects strewn about undone, so last week I set a goal that I would devote an hour per day writing. I managed to keep it until Thursday. I hope to do better this week.

I wanted to rewrite the Bright Freedom script I wrote into a novel, but hadn’t decided when I would do that. I started on it this week. I got about 2,800 words done. I think it will end up at about 28,000 words, which would make it a novella rather than a novel.

There are some problems with the story and it will need some rewrites. I find that my rewrite still sounds like script directions and not description. In a script you don’t normally describe what people look like, or dress, or behave. You leave that for the actors to develop. In a novella, you can use those descriptions to make the characters more real. It can also be used to create mood. In what I’ve done so far, I haven’t done much of that.

I still need to do some background research on the story. Are the characters believable? I don’t want them to be stereotypes, and, most assuredly, I don’t want them to be offensive stereotypes. I need to find people who have had similar life experiences and get their feedback. I thought that it would be easier if I had a story they could read.

The main character is a woman from a foreign country. I’ve never been a woman. I have visited other countries, but never emigrated to one. While I try to put myself in that mindset, it would be foolhardy of me to assume that I’ve got it right.

At my one hour a day pace, it would take me six weeks to finish the initial rewrite. I expect that I will hit the wall at some points where what I have in the script just isn’t what I want. Part of me wants to just do a straight conversion, while another part wants to rewrite as I go along.

We’ll see how it goes next week.

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.

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.