Fantastic Tales from the kiddie pool

Fairy Tales from a little frog trying to make it in a big pond.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Coffee Culture

It's so cliche'...hanging out in a coffee house all day long banging out a script. I used to think that those people were just trying to look like writers because all of the serious writers were at home or in offices at studios working. Maybe they are. I still don't know. I do know that I have friends who are successful writers who have offices....who need offices...to get their work done. But they have families and the standard excuse is that they had an office at home, but there were too many interruptions. Well I had an office at home, too. It consists of a chair, a table and an internet connection. I travel two feet from my bed and I'm working.

With all of the craziness around my apartment with the sanding and vacuuming and my cat screaming to get out because I've locked her in to protect her from the work chaos...I just couldn't take it. So for the past three weeks I have been keeping offices at a crepe shop and cafe near my place. And Now I'm one of them...one of the guys I would swear is doing nothing but surfing youtube all day and looking up facebook profiles.
In fact, I am writing. At first it was a lot of thinking and scribbling. Then it was two pages one day. Then three. Then for a week I averaged about five pages a day.

Last night I realized that it is going to take me five weeks to spit out even a rough draft of this script at that pace. That's a lot of crepes! So today I stepped it up...fifteen pages...many of them good ones (I anticipate an attrition rate of about 75 percent over the long haul, so getting the bad ones out of the way early is an important part of the purging process. At this pace, I'll have a rough draft by the middle of next week. I figure I'll slow up and speed up again so I'm guesstimating two weeks to hammer it out.)

Amazingly, the dialogue is tying in with the plot points I laid out so carefully in the blueprints. I love it when it comes together like that...from starting point into a dark fog, then softly dovetailing with a target that required a precision alignment...and it worked! Of course, I then blurt, go off point, redirect, then destroy (...er, edit)...but that's the process. It's awesome. What have I been doing with my brain for all these years? Clearly the coffee was not getting through.

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