I’ve given my terrorist story a new name: “The Interrogation”. Although I didn’t feel that I was ready to write this story yet, I found myself slowly moving in that direction.
I have completed a treatment of the story and I’d like to get some feedback on it. If you are interested in reading it, get in touch with me.
Why this Story?
The story doesn’t really fit the kind of project I wanted to work on now. I wanted a story I could make in Nawmal. Most of this story could be done that way, but the last segment of the story involves a lot of action, which I don’t think I can do in Nawmal.
Part of the reason I got into this story was that I wanted to try out Scrivener for writing. I had a rough outline of the story in Word, so I imported that. As I experimented with the program, I found myself developing the story, so I continued to work on it.
The Treatment
I had started to sketch out ideas for characters and plot. I decided to go ahead and develop those into a treatment of the story. It came together quickly. It runs about 6 pages and has 15 scenes, although I do have a couple long scenes that I think I may want to split up into several separate scenes.
I’m not sure how long the final version would be. I felt it would be a short. Although one person who read a draft of the treatment thought it could be feature length.
One of the things I wanted to avoid was being too preachy. The story does reflect some strong opinions I have, so I felt that would creep in without my being aware. The feedback I have so far is that I haven’t fallen into that trap – yet.
Changes to the Story
I didn’t make many changes to the plot of the story. It was more a matter of adding details to the events rather than adding new events.
In my original concept, I left the nature of the terrorist group very vague. I decided to make them white supremacists. Maybe later I’ll give them a more specific, and fictional, identity. For me, the exact nature of the terrorist group isn’t that important to the story. Although I can see that the wrong choice could turn off some members of the potential the audience.
The other major change came when I realized that all my characters were men. I felt I should add some women to the mix. I only changed one so far, and don’t plan to change any others. For some characters I think this could wait until casting.
The decision to change my lead character to a woman turned out to fit in very well with the relationships I had already decided on. I have a conflict between her and her boss that makes more sense if she is a woman. Maybe at a subconscious level I was aware of that, which is why I picked her.
Further Plans
I don’t think this is a film that I really want to make. Nonetheless, I feel I need to carry the project all the way to a final script before I work on other projects. I need to prime the pump so to speak. That would make it easier for me to work on other projects.
I’ve written a few scripts that I later decided I wouldn’t pursue. With this one I feel I should try to get some wider distribution to get feedback. Who knows, maybe it will attract someone who will want to make it.
As for the story itself, one of comments I got was that the story could be done as a dark comedy. Certainly, one of my characters lends himself to a humorous interpretation. I’d prefer to stick to a more serious take on the story. That said, it seems that humorous aspects seem to crop up in my work. It isn’t because I am that have any skills at comedy.
Someone pointed out that I may want to change the names of the terrorists, because they allude to some Disney characters, and that could run into some copyright/trademark issues. I haven’t given any thought to what other names to use. I do want to have names that are clearly pseudonyms.
Scrivener
I haven’t decided yet if I will stick with Scrivener. I haven’t explored all that it can do yet. I still have a couple weeks on the trial version before I need to decide. So far, I do like it. It has some features I’ve seen in other programs – like a cork board view, but their version is much easier to use.
One thing I’d like to do, which I have found in other programs, is that when you change the name of a character in the character description file, it is automatically changed in the whole document. If Scrivener can do that, I haven’t worked out how.
That came up when I decided to change the name of a character from “Al” to “Howard”. I used a global replacement, and then realized that “al” is a common occurrence in many words.
