SECOND SCRIPT!!

Yes, that little box on the right is not in error: I've started a second script! I needed to, my first script is nearing completion, lately there's been a lot of rewriting and polishing on it and I need to check all the connections, but it's pretty much done.

So yesterday, Sunday, I needed to get a fresh breath of air into things. There's a place that I've been wanting to write about, but that alone doesn't make a film. As I mentioned before, I love shows like "RICK STEVE'S EUROPE" on PBS, but I'm not out to make a travel guide or show, I want to sell a spec script. I don't think someone is going to produce my script because it has breathtaking, scenic views and little or no content.

By the way, Rick's site is titled "Europe Through the Back Door". If there's been any lingering concepts concerning his orientation, this title doesn't help!!

The first, and hardest step, was figuring out the genre. Action was an easy choice, you can make an action film set just about anywhere, any country or place, underwater, in the sky. I have great respect for a scribe who can sell an action script, it's not as easy as one would think. Back in the 1970's you could do a big chase scene with muscle cars bounding hills, but there has to be more to it nowadays in order to sell such a script.

I noticed the NICHOLL AWARDS seem to love screenplays involving terrorists. I worry about them enough in real life, I'm not going to let the terrorists ruin my screenwriting experience.

It could be a drama, but I'm not in the mood for a downer. Lovely Wife watched "THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES" yesterday while I worked on the logline for the new script. I passed on the show, looked like it was heading down a trail of sad, and it did.

I started writing down ideas of things that could happen in the setting, imagining I was there, the feeling. Then it started talking to me: yes, my story started appearing in my eyes and I had the synopsis down and was cutting it up to acts in no time.

Then I took it to my Lovely Wife to see if it would check out. She had a few good questions, which gave me some more answers; the whole story was looking strong within an hour of inception and I already ran it through my "focus audience".

Sitting at my script editor, I took a stab at writing chronologically, typing:

INT. LYONS HOME - NIGHT

We see Steve..

and stared at that for about twenty minutes, what a waste of time. Writing in order is overrated, in my opinion. How can I build character on the first page if I don't know how this guy acts in page ten or twenty? It's like a baby, all you can do is sit there and wait for the kid to grow up and hope it does neat things in life. Talk to the kid thirty or fifty or seventy years later and then you've got an interesting story. Works for me.

So I jumped ahead about ten to twenty pages and knocked out six pages in a scene, it just flowed. Giving myself a sixty day limit on scripts, this one should be done by Thanksgiving. I've got a nearly completed screenplay, and a freshly born script...

with no sight of terrorists in the plot, just yet.