And four to go!

Had quite the productive night last night. Got six more pages of my movie script written. Only four more to go, which I hope to polish off this afternoon. The plot is advancing nicely. There’s a lot of things that need fixing but that can wait until the second draft.

First drafts are all about getting the damn thing written. Forward momentum is key – no looking back. Things can be fixed later. It’s not rocket science, it’s about puking out the words.

I’ve been enjoying the process. It’s a lot of work and there is a lot of struggling to get the words out, but it feels good to be so heavily engaged in something. Writing this screenplay is something capable of absorbing (almost) all of my considerable mental resources, and that leads to a happier, calmer me.

It’s kind of disturbing to imagine that one of the root causes of my depression/anxiety might be a lack of sufficiently mentally demanding activities. Even my beloved collectible card game styled video games don’t quite make the grade. It is still possible for me to need more, which is why I often listen to podcasts while I play them.

But writing can do it. Especially this new form of writing that I have never done in this kind of detail before. I’ve written skits, but mechanically speaking, a skit is mere tinker toys compare to writing a screenplay or a TV episode. Prose also seems simple to me now. In prose, you just write what is and that’s it. You don’t have to translate it much. If you can get it down in words, that’s enough for prose.

Admittedly, the translation is only hard because I apparently completely failed to pick up how certain things are done in a script from all the scripts I have read for class. I guess I was too absorbed in the story to pick up things like “Oh, so that’s how you do an intercut phone conversation” or “that’s how you describe a montage in a script”.

Things like format are largely invisible to me. I am totally not a detail oriented person, or at least, those kinds of details. I might obsess over minute elements of the plot or rework a line to be as smooth and natural and logically sound as possible, but to my mind, formatting is the packaging and I only care about the contents.

That doesn’t mean I consider the script formatting unimportant. I am far too self-aware and mature to go around thinking that whatever I don’t like doing is therefore unimportant. If I was a script reader I would throw out any script that was not even vaguely formatted correctly without reading any further, because I have a hundred scripts to read today and I don’t have time for scripts that are going to be considerably more irritating for me to read because the person doesn’t know the conventions at all.

It might be a wonderful script, but I’ll never know. I’d tolerate small irregularities, of course, like if the sluglines are supposed to be in italics and they’re bolded or whatever. That wouldn’t be a dealbreaker. But bigger stuff would make me hit the reject button right away.

So I get it. Format counts. Part of me wishes people could prioritize content over packaging and that if the script is good, people will be too invested in the story to care about formatting. But that’s a highly delusional and self-serving mode of thought. I am well past the point where I expect people to ignore the muddy footprints on my masterpieces just because that’s more convenient for me.

But I know I can only learn this stuff piece by piece. If I try to remember or learn it all at once, my brain will crash just like it did in Linguistics class and I will get nowhere. That was why I hated Format class so much back when I took it on Term 1. There’s just something about me and a certain type of thinking that spells brain pain overload.

Luckily, there are programs that do the basic formatting for me, and I can look up specific things on Google, and so I think I will be able to limp forward that way.

In order to get as far as I have in the script, I have also had to reach fairly deep into myself, and that’s a good thing too. I have a lot of garbage lurking in the depths of my psyche, and normally it comes up very slowly through glacial lifting. External things that prompt me to go deep and draw from the deep down darkness and bring that stuff up into the light speeds that process up considerably.

If only I could press a button and have all that shit drain from my brain all at once. One big mental evacuation that would be ten kinds of hell to go through, but afterwards I would be done.

I might be permanently insane, but at least I’d be insane and empty.

But no, it has to be done over a period of time. An annoying long one. The healthy part of me is very tired of putting up with the crazy part and wishes I could just pull myself together, stop fucking up, and get the fuck on with my life.

And that’s a great goal, but I won’t be getting there any time soon, methinks. I have traveled many miles to get where I am, and I have many more miles to do. All I can do is put one foot in front of the other and try not to pay any attention to how far I have to go before I reach the mountaintop, and instead think about how I am the closest I have ever been to do it, and every day brings me closer.

I don’t have class till Wednesday. I am going to use that time to catch up on all my homework. If only I always had this much time to get things done!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The word mines, that is. Black ink. Texas text.

Today has been a writing day for me. I have 25 pages of movie script due Monday afternoon, and when I got up this morning, I had 8.

But I am proud to say that, due to working literally all afternoon, I am up to 15! W00t w00t me.

Though it says something about screenwriting that it took me five hours to do seven pages. Admittedly, a lot of that time was spent either pondering the next move or chatting with the fuzzies, which is the activity I do to keep myself emotionally balanced when doing heavy stuff like writing.

The idea that I would go faster without it, while partially true, disregards the emotional stability factor. And with a screwloose creative type like me, that’s always a major factor.

I sometimes wonder whether or not I had a choice as to what I became. By that, I mean that I wonder if there was a chance that I would not become the walker between walls who seems to have one more dimension than the rest of humanity and is therefore incomprehensible to it. Was I always going to be a person who searched for the truth regardless of the consequences to himself? Was I born with this need to seek the truth no matter what, or was there something that set me on this path?

In some alternate universe, is there a version of me that grew up normal and happy within the paper-thin walls of social reality?

Maybe. Certainly it seems plausible to me that this bizarre nature of mine is the result of specific hardships in my life. For example, being too smart to be happy at school. I spent most of my educational life incredibly bored. Yet I am not the type to act up because of that. For the most part, I’m quite docile and if not precisely obedient then very agreeable, which amounts to the same thing.

Acting up never made any sense to me. So I didn’t do it. That suggests a serious problem in and of itself, because it show that I was exercising rational restraint at what is arguably too young an age. And the thing about rational restraint is that it kills nearly all the paths by which one might express one’s emotions. Especially the more boisterous and energetic ones.

After all, I was a child, not a Vulcan. And like a Vulcan, I have always taken pride in my restraint. Others might go off half cocked or act on emotion without thought to the consequences, but I, the rational reasonable restraint guy, would never do those sorts of things.

I’m too smart for that!

But the thing is, a child acting up out of boredom didn’t decide to do that. They are acting out of emotion and by doing so, express that emotion. They might get in more trouble and they might never get to pat themselves on the back for how much more in control of themselves they are than other kids, but they also accumulated far fewer suppressed emotions to weight them down too.

And at this point in my life, I’d trade.

I think, at the root of it, the problem began as an unintended consequence of the circumstances of my birth. Because I was the lost child who showed up uninvited, I ended up with the distinct impression that I was not allowed to be a child. I had to grow up fast and learn to behave and always check my behaviour before I committed the unthinkable acts of drawing attention to myself and forcing someone to actually look after me for a few moments.

That would have gotten me in trouble big time.

So I was, more or less, expected to look after myself from a very early age. Especially after I started going to school. That’s when the babysitter disappeared and I was truly on my own. I felt like no matter what happened, nobody cared, and the last thing that was allowed for me was to not be OK, let alone ask someone to MAKE it OK.

That’s where I got the ghost that still haunts me, the feeling that nobody really wants me around and that people would be happier if I had never showed up in the first place and that I was always just barely earning the right to be around people and that meant that if I made myself any more of a burden than the bare minimum, I would be ejected and abandoned.

The fact that I had no people my age around once I went to school was also a factor. All my role models were at least four years older than me. I had nobody to model normal childhood behaviour for me. So I thought I had to stop being a kid and catch up as fast as I could, or be left behind.

Being left behind might be my biggest fear ever.

So in a sense, I was never a kid in the emotional sense. I never tested the limits, never acted up just to see what happens, never learned to ask for things to get my needs met. And, most importantly to the actual point of this blog entry, I spent a lot of time in school bored bonkers.

So I retreated into my mind. In doing so, I became a thinker. A ponderer. A philosopher. I sought the truth of things, which I found via deduction and intuition based on the data I had. Instead of exploring the world I explored the world inside.

In other words, I figured shit out.

And so I always knew more than the other kids too, and I am not just talking about academic subjects. I understood more of the world, partly become of my constant deduction but also because of the sharp, deep input of my empathy. I figured out that people were often insincere and that people lied to protect their emotions at a very young age.

So could I have been a normal kid? Maybe. Maybe if I had lucked into connecting with the right kind of mentor who could put up with my sometimes difficult nature and provide actual guidance to me, I could have stayed more attached to the world instead of being sucked deeper and deeper into the world within, whereupon I learned strange truths and was changed by them.

Or maybe I would have turned out somewhat the same no matter what.

I guess we’ll never know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
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