Ten Feet From The Finish Line

I don't usually write from an outline.  I've tried, it doesn't really work for me.  As a result, I never know exactly how anything is going to happen until it comes out of me.   I have a vague sense, maybe a rough order of events.  I always know how I want the story to feel when it's finished but I almost never know how I'm going to achieve it.

As I write today, I am about ten to fifteen pages away from finished with the first draft of a screenplay.  At this point in the story, more than any other, every line is a decision.  I'm sitting here looking at about six different ways it could end.  It's very exciting in one sense but, mostly, it's terrifying.  None of them feel right, which means none of them are right.

So.  I have six wrong ways to end it.  They are all very similar.  They all follow the same theme.  The same basic things happen, for the most part.   But in none of them do the right things happen in the right order.   Every option feels like a stretch too far in one direction or another.

The ending is hiding somewhere in the shadows and webs of these six wrong options.

I'm not worried about it.  The answer always comes to me.  I am, however, very impatient.  I want to finish this sucker.

It's at a point right now where, at any moment, I could do one thing and end it in two pages.  BAM.  I could be done. That's dangerous.   I was talking to my girlfriend about that aspect and she likened it to the conclusion of a bad paper in school, i.e. "And that's why I think Pride and Prejudice is a great book. The End."  

I've done so much work to get here that I owe it to myself and my story to make sure to take the time needed to get this right.

There is that old wisdom that just says, "get a draft out there" and I agree with it for the most part.   I don't agree with it, however, when it comes to the end of a script.  I think you have to get the end pretty close to right the first time. How can you stop typing otherwise?

Indeed, getting the end right helps me focus the revisions.  When I know I've hit the right chord at the end, I can go back and make sure the script leads to it appropriately*.

What am I going to do now?  I'm not sure.   I'll probably write some of these wrong endings just to see how they shake out.  Maybe the process of writing the wrong stuff will open up my thinking in a way that makes the answer clear.

Or I could go to sleep and hope it comes to me in a dream.  If only I had peyote...

*Which, by the way, it probably doesn't

General Finickyness

I wrote the play version of  BOMBS IN YOUR MOUTH in my old studio on 3rd street between C and D.   I slept in a loft bed and my desk was under the loft.   It was a wonderful place to write.  The loft was only about five feet high so the ceiling was low above my head as I typed.  The whole thing was very cramped but it kept the energy close to me.   I couldn't get very far away from the writing.  I couldn't stand up.

A friend of mine bought me some crayons and I used them to keep me sitting down.  When I didn't know what on earth I was supposed to do next, I would use the crayons to write something in the wood of the loft that surrounded me.  Some examples:

I'm stuck

This is a complicated problem

Rosie bought me crayons

Poofy Blue Coat

It is necessary to respect one's belief in God, but only in the same sense and to the extent that it is necessary to respect one's theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart

That last one took up almost an entire cross-board, with the handwriting getting smaller as it neared the end.

By writing in the wood around me, I was able to remain in the chair long enough to work through problems that may   have otherwise signaled the end of the day's writing.

How do we stay in the chair?

I miss smoking the most when I'm stuck in the middle of a script.   I used to take long drags of the cigarette while I stared at the screen.  I would stop with a problem and have a cigarette with it.  Staring at the blinking cursor while blowing smoke rings felt productive.   Yeah, I was stuck, but I was doing something.  

Now, without cigarettes, without my loft, I struggle for the discipline to stay in the chair.  I have, what would appear to be a much better setup, a whole room dedicated to the purpose of writing.  But it's too sunny and it's too hot and occasionally it smells like meat.  I've tried to replicate the writing on the loft with notecards but it feels forced.  The television is always calling my name.  I can't tell if I like my chair anymore.  I have new desk that I'm growing to hate.  I have severe desk envy.  Every desk I see looks like the desk I need to finish the script.

I am constantly thinking "If I only I had (insert anything), then I would be able to finish this sucker." 

Is this something everyone struggles with, or am I alone?  How do you work through it?

Music

I didn't always listen to music when I write but I do now.  When I was younger I was afraid it would affect the tone so I wrote without it, the sound of the keys the only rhythm.

I was a huge fan of Six Feet Under.  One day I saw an interview with Alan Ball about music.  He said music was an integral part of his writing because he always listened to it while he worked.  It seemed to me that he embraced any tonal influence that the music may bring.

I was living in a fifth floor walk-up on East 4th street, writing on the original iMac. Having  recently downloaded the first ever version of iTunes, I hadn't been getting too much writing done.  I spent most of my time in front of the computer importing my many cds and watching Visualizer, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world.

The guilt finally started to set in and I got back to writing.   Remembering the Alan Ball interview, I decided to give music a go.

It was a real problem at first.  I would type the lyrics of the song I was hearing, or I would get so into the music that I would stop typing.   

The hardest thing was when the songs gave me other ideas for stories besides the one I was working so hard to finish.  I was more superstitious about ideas back then and was afraid I might run out of them.  So every time the music brought me a new idea, I'd open another document and follow the ideas until I ran out of steam.  Soon, my desktop was cluttered with documents ranging from three sentences to as long as about fifteen pages.

The desktop got so cluttered that I could no longer write.  I had to organize!  And so the folder "wip" (for works in progress.  I didn't like the look of w.i.p. so I took license.  It is, after all, my folder) was born.  To this day, it is the home of all works before they are finished.  There are about fifteen abandoned plays in there.

Eventually, the music stopped running the show and I was able to let it move through me without distracting me.  Now I can't write without it.  In fact, some music becomes so much a part of what I'm writing at the time that I cannot listen to it when the project is done.  It makes me too sad. 

So.  Thank you, Alan Ball.  Thank  for Six Feet Under.  Thank you for wip.  Thank you for opening my mind to the idea of writing with music.  It has saved my writing.   I really hope True Blood doesn't suck.

Where does everyone else come down on writing or working with music?

The Deal

I'm struggling my way through the latter stages of screenplay.  Naturally, then, the first thing I did when I sat down to tackle my beast this morning was setup this blog.

After setting it up, I realized I didn't really have anything I really wanted to say.  Soon, guilt started to set in and I made the heroic first step of opening my screenplay on the desktop.

It stared at me.   I stared back.

"I better get some more coffee."

I left my beast to stare at my empty chair as I went into the kitchen and poured myself my toomanyieth cup of coffee.  When I returned, my beast had not moved.  Its gaze, unrelenting, bore into my soul.

Scared as hell, I began to work.  As my fingers moved along the keys, my beast started to give in ever so slightly.  Giving me just enough hope to keep at it, like a girl who gives you just the right look or calls you out of nowhere, my beast was daring me to keep at it.

So I stopped.

For the last three days I've been working up the guts to write the scene that stares at me now.  I've rewritten the lead in seven times to avoid actually writing the scene.  The lead in is finished.  It cannot be rewritten again.  I must write the scene today or walk away from the screenplay today.

Thus begins the blog, lost meanings.  In these posts, I will discuss how much I hate writing and invite anyone interested to do the same.  

I suppose I hope it will be a commiseration between writers and artists and anyone interested in the struggle to write and create art.

So, tell me your struggles in the comments, I'll tell you mine.  I'll post all the comments.  Let's see where this leads...