Stalemate!

Sounds like a good movie title, but unfortunately it's the label I've given my current thought process regarding moving forward with my script. I get myself all pumped up, thinking "okay, you've got four days off so just grab a coffee, sit down and let those fingers fly." Yeah! Heck yeah! Let's do this; let's knock this thing out! Right after I check Huffington Post. OMG, that Ashton Kutcher is such a jerk.

This is such an old song I'm singing here; it's pretty much the only way to update my blog, to harp on about the fact that I'm not writing anything. Boooooring! Yawn. This can't go on. Spur of the moment writing exercise (yuck...I hate saying "writing exercise." Sound so stupid). Anyway, here we go.

Best worst screenplay ideas I can think of right now on the spot:

1. Destination Anywhere. Story about two females who decide their lives are boring so they borrow their neighbor's car and embark on a cross country road trip. Oh, and one of them has cancer or something.

2. Happy Christkuanzaka. Movie about three friends from three different ethnic and religious backgrounds learning to accept each other's diversity during the holiday season.

3. Through A Child's Eyes. An abused, crippled orphan discovers a supernatural friend who give her the ability to walk, but only after the child carries out brutal and bloody errands. Spoiler alert: it's all in her head. Gasp!

4. Eenie Meenie. A scientist discovers time travel and seeks to right historical wrongs only to discover that cosmic decisions must be made using the age old method of random selection: eenie meenie minie moe.

5. I Am Al. A guy named Al is convinced that to gain world domination he must kill all the other Als in the world. The twist: he falls in love with a woman...named Al!

Wow, okay I have to stop. These aren't even good as spoofs. They're just worthless. Bleh.

I Just Can't Get This Thing Going

Writing a screenplay should be so simple. It's just answering a simple question: what's a movie I have never seen that I would really like to see? Then answering a series of more specific questions: what are some likable characters; what are some unlikeable characters; what are their respective goals and what relevant obstacles can I place in their way to try and prevent them from reaching those goals? Then bookend it with: where does it begin and how does it end? Then just start at the beginning, keep answering "and then what, and then what," and end at the end.

Easy.

Impossible! Literally, figuratively, metaphysically impossible! I want to do it, I try to do it, I've done it before, but due to forces unknown and unseen it just isn't happening. I'm wracking my brain to figure out why this is not happening, and I've narrowed it down to two possible conclusions: either I lack the necessary discipline or my story sucks.

And I know I don't lack discipline.

So why does my story suck? If I knew that, I'd fix it. Right? Wouldn't I fix it? I figured out my main character was blah, and I fixed that. So that's all I need to do, identify the problems and fix them. If I could just go through my screenplay and systematically pull out those aspects of the story that do not work and replace them with those that do I would be able to write this thing. I'd also be the greatest screenwriter of all time.

It's too hard. Not because I don't have good judgement - like most people I believe that I possess the greatest taste in movies, better than anyone else I know. It's because I am stubborn and I don't want to let go. The impetus to this whole script was this idea of wanting to write an alien movie that's scary and funny. I wanted the aliens to be microscopic instead of big, disappointing monsters and I wanted them to inhabit us like parasites and in so doing force on their host an eery kind of niceness. Then, for some reason, I liked the idea of a pregnant woman getting into a very bloody fight with one of these things.  This practically writes itself!

But then it got hard. The timeline doesn't make sense - a nine month timeline for an alien thriller? It should take place over mere days or even hours. And why do the aliens make everyone they inhabit act really nice; because they think their blending in, to throw people off, because they increase our levels of serotonin for some reason? And my defamed scientist who discovers what's going on, why if he's such a jerk would he be the one spearheading the movement to stop these things? What does he care? It just doesn't work.

And that's why after hours on hours on hours of sitting at my computer I am still stuck in the first act, making little progress and then erasing it because I know how bad it is. I'm so stubbornly committed to my initial ideas about this story that I've paralyzed my creative thinking and am unable to significantly change the circumstances of the plot. Part of me feels like scrapping the whole idea and just moving on to something totally different. But I don't think that's going to help, since the story itself may not be the problem. Maybe I'm the problem.

This in between stage is really annoying. I'm a good enough writer to know when something is just awful, but not good enough to know how to fix it. The option this leaves me is to try a bunch of different things hoping that at some point those ideas will stop sucking. This is not ideal. I hate it, in fact, and all the more because I know this will be a long, stupid stage of my writing life that won't soon be over but it will eventually lead me closer to becoming a better writer.

Aliens are going to make me a better writer? Yes.

A Lackluster Character Brings the Whole Thing Down

I was going to say "A Lackluster Main Character...," but really any lackluster character hurts your story, because people invariably feel the deficit of attention to detail and they focus on it. I got to page 16 of my script and hit a wall. I thought this was because I was rusty, then I thought it's because I'm a terrible writer (oh, woe is meeeee). Now I know: my main character is a bore.

For some reason I thought that a mopey, slightly depressed and perpetually stepped on individual would be stimulating. The idea was that through the whole alien incident she would find her backbone and arise a self aware, empowered woman. Good, right? No. Boring. I'm putting the audience through 45-60 minutes of pathetic pouting and downcast eyes in an alien movie! This does not work.

So here's the new idea: we replace this powerless and putrid HR drone with a poised and powerful analyst, hired by the company to basically fire people. On the outside, she is in control. On the inside, she's pregnant by a much younger, much stupider man/child, her parents are splitting up and she is now faced with a crazy scientist-type who is convinced there's an alien invasion going on. Her structured turns to chaos, chaos forces change and from that a new structure.

The idea of a seemingly confident woman being stripped of her control only to find a higher sense of all she pretended to be is infinitely more interesting than taking a puny, wet blanket and forcing her to be confident. It's just better.

I think it's better.

I Don't Write Too Good These Days

I considered committing the double grammatical offense of using "to" instead of "too," but you know what, I think you get it. Ugh, I can't explain my frustration with how rusty a writer I've become. While I was off getting a monetarily useful education, my part-time hobby/dream/someday possibly monetarily successful writing went underground in my brain and digging it up again has proved a little more difficult than I thought it might be.

Since Monday, I've written 15 pages and one long narrative outlining the entire story. Still, only 15 pages of actual script, and those were come by with great wailing and gnashing of teeth. And internet surfing. And Millionaire Matchmaker viewing (you know, cable is as much a curse as it is a wonderful, wonderful blessing).

There are a couple of things that I have done right, I think. The first was to write out a narrative of my screenplay, from beginning to end, as if it was already completed and I was giving a detailed account of the movie to someone else. This really exposed those weak areas of my story, as I could imagine what that other person would say at certain points, both flattering and not so much. The other thing about this is it forced me to make decisions I was putting off, and it also showed me when I was making a character do something that was outside the realm of belief for that character, which I then had to fix before moving on.

The other thing I did was I actually sat down and wrote the thing. No, seriously, it's astounding how much writing does get done when you sit down to actually write. And one of the most important principles to follow when writing is to press through. Don't leave the computer because you've suddenly hit a part of your story that is hard to figure out. Set a page goal, or word goal, and don't get up until it's met. Internet shopping? Fine. Check your email inbox? Sure. But you don't get to shut the computer down for the day until your goal is met.

So, to recap, keys to writing: write. Every day, if at all humanly possible. And don't give up.

Out of the Frying Pan, Now Suspended in that Dead Space Preceding the Fire

What have I been doing!? No post since February! And the last two not real posts, anyway. Taking a look back, I Graduated nursing school (hip-hip-hooray), sold a house, moved to another state and now I have a whole month before I start my residency/job. So of course, I'm going to write a screenplay. No, not write a screenplay, finish a screenplay. A first draft of a screenplay. Yeah. That sounds good.

But what to write? I have a really fleshed out alien rom/com (I may have mentioned it), however looking back at all my notes and my first 50 pages I realized that time and distance had given me something: insight. It's terrible. I'm a terrible writer. It's almost ridiculous how blind you can be to your own terribleness.

So what now? Rescue this pile of worn out plot points and two-dimensional characters from their mediocre imprisonment, or start anew? Start anew with what? It's been two years since I've fleshed out anything; is this going to be like riding a bike (easy peasy) or playing Moonlight Sonata on the piano (not a chance in hell).

It's so depressing to spend time and energy on something you're not proud of, and I'm afraid I have at least four more scripts like this before I really hit some kind of stride. Might as well add this alien thing to the body count. Seriously, a romantic comedy with aliens? When has that ever worked? Ever?

Regarding My Prediction That James Franco and Anne Hathaway's Oscar Night Co-Hosting Would Be "Good"

I was wrong.

Oscar Night Prediction Regarding the Performance of Anne Hathaway and James Franco As Hosts

It's going to be good.