Blogger ate my last 2 updates.

I’m moving house this weekend - but much to my surprise, I’m also making good progress on the treatment for The Limit. After nearly a week of being frustrated by writer’s block (or writer’s stalling, anyway), I started to crack open the conversation the hero and villain would have as they waited outside a house – and that’s led to a smooth-ish ride towards the end of Act 2.

The revisions that Andrew suggested last month make this into a far more entertainingly complex movie. I really feel sorry for the main villain now – something I never expected.

At the writing level, I’m also getting a lot of experience treating drama scenes as action scenes – a little dodge I wanted to try out because action is easy for me to write and visualise, whereas drama and emotions, quieter stuff, is opaque. So far it seems to be working. The quieter moments dotted throughout the mega-action scene that is Act 2 feel more intense. I guess we’ll see when I start to consolidate these notes for the new treatment into a rewrite.

Script-writing at this level, the major concerns are ‘plausible character motivations’ and making sure you understand the cumulative ‘emotional effect’ each scene is having on the audience. The result feels very pure and abstracted – the opposite of writing paragraphs for public consumption.

I’m also trying to enjoy the process of writing, not just focusing on achieving a goal. So there’s lots of listening to Bach, taking breaks, sitting in the sun when it’s sunny – and dabbling in a few other things:

Submitted a synopsis for another film to Daybreak Pacific…
Mulling over the backstory for the computer game I’m designing…
Writing up the Who Framed Roger Rabbit game I ran two weeks ago…
Trying to frame responses to the comments in this blog…

Which all reminds me.… Later, I should write about my bugbear – attempting to focus on completing one idea while I’m continually coming up with new (fresher) ideas …