Act III, Round 12

Jesec wants me to know that Finland is not considered part of Scandinavia, dammit. (Hey, I knew it was in the north, and cold, and, like, near Scandinavia...Isn't that good enough.)

Well, consider me chastised: Finland is not part of Scandinavia, therefore yesterday's subtitle is meaningless.

So I went over to Linda's house this morning and we exchanged pages. She finished reading way before I did. When I finished we started with hers, because she said she didn't have much to say about mine. We spent about 2 hours talking about hers, mostly about the motivations of the characters at various points.

My thing was, I thought the characters were acting a little irrationally at points. Why didn't the Bad Guy just kill them already? We've already established that he's a really, really Bad Guy, and he could get away with killing the heroines no problem.

We spent a long time hashing out why everyone was doing what they were doing toward the end.

One of the surprising things Linda said to me is that she didn't think it would dawn on anyone at that point in the movie that the logic wasn't working at that point. I didn't think it's good enough merely to have very exciting action happen--I think there's got to be a reason for it.

Then we got to my pages, and she thought they were very well written--great dialogue, great character stuff--but flat. Nothing surprising happened. That's kind of what I was expecting. We discussed killing off my Bad Guy and if it's going to happen, who should do it.

I've gone back and forth on this. It has to be your main character who does it, if anyone does it. And death is a lot more dramatically interesting than, say, getting arrested. (Cf. the least dramatic finale in movie history: Clear and Present Danger, in which everything gets wrapped up at...Senate hearings! Ooo, baby, don't I feel like everything's been resolved.) I don't particularly think that death is the best resolution, and I'm not at all sure that the Main Character of the Rewrite Script is particularly cut out for killing, but there may not be any other way to do it.

They'll bring in another writer to rewrite it anyhow. (This is our cynical answer to "Why can't I make this work?"--you don't have to, they'll bring in another writer anyhow.)

So I went home, rewrote Act III again (putting in some surprising things, and yes, I killed off the Bad Guy. I just can't face it again. I need to get distance from this story a second time. And the next time I rewrite it, I'll have a very clear ending in mind, dammit--I know the story really really well at this point.

I called Linda in the evening to tell her I finished again, and this was it, I wasn't doing it anymore, at least not anytime soon.

She told me that she'd written the scene we had spent so long discussing, and she'd done it the way I would do it--started with a fresh page and wrote the scene without consulting what she'd already done on previous versions of it. She said she did it in a page (instead of however long it had been before). And she got through it relatively painlessly.

My advice to Linda for a while has been, given how many things have changed about the story over time, that she open up a new file and begin at the beginning. She's not willing to do that, and I can understand that--you're committing yourself to a whole new set of 120 pages, and it's a tough road to hoe, even if you know where the story's going.

The problem with tweaking a script here and there instead of starting afresh is that artifacts remain from previous versions and you get attached to them--instead of realizing that the rationale for them has changed and that part of the story no longer makes sense. I do this, she does this, everybody does this. When you start new, you're just telling the story as you know it now, and the artifacts fall away.

Next time you're having trouble fixing something, try starting over.

Next time, I'm having my Act III completely worked out before I work out any other part of the story. Swear to God.

Pooks asked if I had any pix of me at the wedding. Well, this isn't the best pic (there's a better one, but I don't have a scanner, unfortunately):

Chuck (the best man), Deirdre, Greg, et Moi

I look like I've got a big butt there. I think it's the angle. I hope it's the angle.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics