My Other Career

I haven’t written anything since Friday. But that’s not to say I haven’t been working on the script. I’ve been really looking at Act 2 as I have is structured right now. Looking at the beats. What my scenes are accomplishing. What sort of impact certain situations are having. Whether or not I’m getting over story elements the way I want to. That sort of stuff.

I’m not looking at a complete rewrite like I did with act one, but I am looking at a good amount of changes. I’m pretty certain I like the mid point and plot point 2. I just really want to make sure that the lead up to each of those is exactly what they need to be.

Specifically I’m looking at the relationship of Tom and John. Act 1 doesn’t really get across how close the two of them are. Sure, there’s a mention of the “best friends” thing, but it’s not emphasized a whole bunch. So, if the mid point is going to work, I really need to make sure that their friendship is the main focus of the first half of act 2. If it isn’t, then the mid point won’t have any impact whatsoever.

Its a tough thing to do. To sit back and really take a critical eye to what you’ve written. If anything this showed me that I needed to do more prep work from the get go, but that was the point of this whole thing to begin with. To learn a new technique. And, when practicing it, learn what areas you needed to work harder on.

It’s like being in geography class. You get the final exam where you have to name all the countries. The first time you take it you can only name 75% of them, and you can see that you were really weak in Africa. However, you get to study up on Africa, and then take the exam again, hopefully getting a better score. It didn’t work that way in school, but it does in screenwriting. You always get to go back. Which, honestly, is the best thing about this. You can make as many mistakes as you want, because you can always go back. Always.

Enjoy.
-Steve