My Other Career

You know, what the hell do I know? Not much, I’ll tell you that. My writer friend called me today. We hadn’t talked in a while (he was the best man at my wedding) and we needed to catch up. It was good to chat.

After the normal pleasantries were exchanged I was telling him about the progress on my script. He doesn’t know about the blog. I refer to him as my “writer friend” because I don’t want him to feel weird about me mentioning him on here. Some people don’t like that I and respect that.

So, we’re chatting, and I was telling him about how I was going back through act two and “fixing” a few things. He mentioned that he never goes back until after he’s done. Funny, where did I hear that before? Oh yeah, Syd said the same thing. I thought I justified my case pretty well when I explained why I was doing it, but he still said he doesn’t go back until he finishes a words on paper draft.

And here I am, looking over act two, and I find myself rewriting A TON more than I wanted to. This isn’t a rewrite. I didn’t intend for it to be a rewrite. But that’s what I’ve found myself doing. And I don’t want to be doing that right now. So I stopped.

I was worried that I would forget about the changes I wanted to make to act two. Then I realized that was dumb. I can just jot the changes down and when I come back to re-write I can integrate those back in. I’ve done that before. I should have followed my past track record.

As of now I’m going to move forward and onto chapter fifteen, ACT III: The Resolution. I need to move forward on this. I shouldn’t have touched act two when I got done with it. Now I know better. Writing is learning, right?

When I think about it, this just makes such better sense anyway. Who knows what I might come up with when I’m putting together Act 3? What other little tidbits I might work in? If I go back and work on act two, I’m going to spend time rewriting stuff that I might just have to rewrite again after act three. It’s not important that I make things work out right. What’s important is that I get this draft done.

I’m going to start the exercise for chapter fifteen tomorrow. The reality is it’s just writing act three. Nothing fancy. Just proper planning and some good old fashion trial and error. I’ll likely put together 14 index cards for the act. I’ve had an idea on how I want this to play out for a long time. So, if for nothing else, I want the cards just so I can look back on them and see how much I stray from my initial idea.

Until then, keep on digging…

Enjoy.
-Steve