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.