a good end for 2023





Lessons

l dropped in on a webinar yesterday. A free Zoom thing for screenwriters suffering from Writer's Block. The guy was quick to let us know that in the screenwriting world, there was no such thing as writer's book, like three times in the first 5 minutes. I sighed, capped my fountain pen (I was serious about taking notes), and wandered off to do something. Anything.

Some minutes later I came back just in time for him to stop beating around the bush and get to the reason I set an alarm. Cynical much? I quote the man, but the light shone on the fact that I already knew these things. Self-evident. If there was more, I didn't want to know. This was plenty. 

"If you're losing interest in your story don't expect your reader to hang around." And "What's the structure of the story? What I see as a jigsaw puzzle. Knowing that finding the shape of it was something I used to do without laboring over it. 

Then, at some point, I started saying I was "building the story" as if the necessary elements were lying around like lumber and bricks. They aren't and I still can't separate characters, setting, action, and dialogue from the flow of scene and chapter. It has to happen all at once or it flies off, an orphan. And I don't get my writer's buzz. Writers, you know what I mean.

I'll be having an orphan fire sale in the coming days. "Where does this go and why?" has to be the weeding point.  

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