Tuesday, 17 November 2009

confused

What not to do when you return to writing a script after several months of not writing:

Don't under any circumstances get over-excited by your own brilliance and show your script to other people. And definitely not to more than one person.

And if you are foolish enough to do these things, don't encourage people to give you advice or comments on what you've written, because they will inevitably provide contradictory and downright confusing advice along the lines of:

'I love your main character don't you think you should change the entire narrative arc because the ending doesn't work...'

AND/OR
'I love the narrative arc but why doesn't your character have a more distinctive voice?'

AND/OR
'Your main character has an amazingly distinctive voice but why don't you set it in Grantham?'

(I don't why I said the last one. Clearly it's not real. Who would give you this kind of advice? Unless, perhaps you were writing a script about the early life of Margeret Thatcher and thought it would be thrilling to set it on Mars in a brave stab at a kind of counter-historical/fantasy genre. In which case it might be sensible advice.)

So when you sensibly haven't shown your script to anyone, and haven't had the remains of your brain power utterly scrambled by bucket loads of advice, you presumably won't feel confused and unsure and generally a bit stuck about where to go next.

I imagine.

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