At sunrise the sky turned blue, the birds started to sing, the breeze was sweet,
and for a few moments it felt like Mexico.
There is no getting around the fact that I am almost two months behind schedule.
I hoped to have the step outline of the script finished by the end of October.
The whole point of taking time out to write this project was to solve some
fairly fundamental problems with the structure. The story has three time frames,
three protagonists and three major locations. Making that work in a way that is
still interesting, entertaining and meaningful is a bitch.
It proved impossible to do while I was still working full-time as a copywriter.
Even when I was working 50 hours a week I could manage 1500 words a day. I
got up at 6, hopped on a train, bought a coffee and wrote like crazy in the
Caffe Nero around the corner from the office. I left work at 6, or 7, or
sometimes 8, and, headed back to the same bar to hack out another page or so.
Some of those 1500 words were almost good enough...
But there were two overriding problems. First, I couldn't find enough brain
cells and time to revise the structure of the storytelling. It just made my
brain ache. And secondly, every holiday I took was spent in bed with antibiotics
and an interesting opportunistic infection. I would just be at the stage when I
could dress myself and crawl into sunlight when the holiday would end and I
would be back at my desk.
So, there I was, in September, with the miraculous support of Screen WM, able to
take a break from the salary trap and final sort the damn script out.
Looking back, a month was an absurdly short time to give myself. I suppose I had
spent so long wading through separate scenes, sections, sequences that I could
no longer see the who structure at all.
Every day I turned up at the keyboard and tried a new approach. Scratch pads,
flow diagrams, re-reading old drafts, research, long walks, reading other
scripts - even just making sure I wrote 6 pages every day...
I kept coming to the same spot in the script, and coming to a full stop - it
didn't work, I didn't believe any of it, and the patient was dead on the table.
Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, no matter what I did I woke up in the same
place the next morning....
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