I am on blog entry #9, although should it be #10? I'm losing track of my weeks. Too many days are blurring together.
To my joy, with this absurd pilot, I wrote my tease and first act in 14 pages. The tease met a perfect five pages. There are a total of 39 scenes. And in these first 14 pages, 12 main characters are introduced. I would like to say, regardless of how strong this first run happens to be, that is a feat. My biggest concern is that with such tight writing that such a great deal of compression took place that I might not be screaming as much white as may need be. White as in page participles without words. Not some other white concept.
Over this fall break, my muse has been spouting off gold, so I've pushed myself to write further into the script than usual. I like to keep to deadlines and not go too far ahead because then I feel like I'm not appreciating the pages I should be focusing on. This time however, since the muse came knocking on the door, I decided I would just keep pushing forward until I tire myself out.
My future self will thank me when I realize that the more difficult action descriptions have already been mulled through. I want to keep bursting with creativity; whatever source it happens to be I want it to keep on flowing. Many of the variables of this pilot were already set in my mind long before thinking of the script's plots. I knew my characters and story world intimately. What's been fascinating for me is seeing how my mind develops an idea, then translating into an outline, and then translating into the script. This has been one of the better processes I've had in keeping all these different mental mediums together. I was pretty pleased with the outline, but now writing the script has this euphoric feel to it. I'm excited to get to the later acts when admittedly I found the tease and first act the weaker parts of the whole deal.
Clarity of vision here is helping me substantially. I think knowing the story in my mind in a deliberate, organized has allowed me to write, at least in this first attempt, with more ease. I think these past 2+ years in graduate school have served me well. I think they were perhaps what I wanted all along when I moved to Springfield.
I recently watched an interview with writer Amy Tan. There were some brilliant pieces of advice that she offered. One of the best was that creativity is a form of survival. She commented that through her painful situations it was creativity that was needed and that she began to explore her craft in more intensive of ways. I definitely think there is validity to this. A number of artists have attested to the same reason for creative energy. I don't entirely understand, and I don't recommend forcing a tragedy for results either. I think when we are suffering, more aware of death and the finiteness of life, we war against these terrors with as much beautiful thought as we can muster almost as to say death has no hold on us. Unfortunately, these more sour events can also distract us from actually committing to our work.
I think one of the obvious reasons why creativity is so helpful is it allows in some sense for the mind to process through whatever event has befallen. Personally, I think much of these underlife experiences for the writer don't always bleed out into the world they create. Perhaps with less developed writers this is more evident where it's easy to tell in a short story how it all connects to someone's fear of rejection, the death of a father, or some heinous crime. I think I could easily write a short story with a whirlpool of meaning about pigs playing poker and no one would know it's really about, as a figure of speech, how I've had a broken heart for several months. For me, that kind of writing is joyous. I don't expect that for all. And some stories may be great where the writer's tragedy is clear throughout the narrative. At the end of the day, before I get lost in the absurd, I think it's important to remember that there is a correlation between creativity and survival.
One last side note with story writing and craft, I saw Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes which is one of the bands I used to help me figure out the protagonist of this whole mess. I couldn't find Caden in writing. It was in innocence, music, and bizarre art that I've been able to piece this character because I haven't seen this in television or film yet. I could only hope that something as beautiful as what I'm envisioning for this character could be portrayed through my writing and beyond. I think seeing the Edward Sharpe band let me know that what I'm sensing in my gut for this character is right. I really felt like the 12 piece band I saw out in the middle of Kansas City on some cold night in fall -- is honestly the encapsulation of Caden. Cool.
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