Disclaimer: if you don't want to hear a sulking, self-indulgent story about a guy laying down his sorry trip - well if that IS your mindset you wouldn't be in this blog right now anyway, so just forget this disclaimer altogether, it's not necessary.
So I spent a fair amount of time during Spring Break working on my feature, the one I had been obsessively outlining. It wasn't as much time as I'd like, but there was effort put into it. Didn't get the whole first act, but got the first 20 pages in. Here's the thing with "the process": as you write it, it doesn't feel right, intuitively you know it's not working. Your characters don't sound like they speak like people, it's just words on the page. But you barrel on, convinced that that's the thing about a first draft. Then you reread it (and here the delusions begin) and you think "it's not as bad as all that". So you change a thing here, maybe switch a sentence from the passive voice to its active counterpart, maybe add a couple of adverbs. Then you re-read it again, this time it doesn't feel half-bad, hell it's almost good. Sure, there's a lot of work to be done, but you figure the idea's there and it works. But still there's that tiny little voice in the back of your head pushing the brakes. You muffled it.
Cut to:
Presented my screen pages in class today. It was horrible. Soapy melodrama: the people reading it couldn't say the lines with a straight face. It was bloody massacre, and I don't blame my classmates for spoofing the hell out of the reading. Fuck, that's the kind of treatment over the top nonsensical lines like the ones I just wrote deserve.
Which is not to say that it wasn't a huge dissappointment. Talked with the professor afterwards, because by the end of the workshop I didn't even feel like it was worth continuing with the damned script. "Don't be afraid of your own ambition" was all he said. What the fuck does that mean!!!! Sounds precisely like something you would tell a student who had just come up with a hideous, half-assed, half-baked, dead-end piece of writing. Suffice it to say that it wasn't a very healthy meeting for me. In fact, it's a wonder I still haven't burned the text.
So now what? I'll plough on with the script, I'll rewrite those first twenty pages this week. Do I have any options? It's not like I have any other ideas. Also: I'm working hard to keep the ego in check. What did I expect? A masterpiece on my first go? So it's back to the drawing board. That's writing: rewriting, taking in all the derision and flattened expectations and going back to rework it all... until it works.
Still, it was a terrible, sinking feeling the one I felt in class today. I hate that gurgling sound, you know, the bubbles a sinking paper boat makes... I guess it's the sound of failure.
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2 comments:
El "fracaso" siempre nos hace pensar hacia adentro. Nos podrá dejar atónitos por unos momentos (que parecerán años), pero nos obliga a indagar, auscultar, cavar, desenmarañar, desengarrafar. Ahora es que se pone buena la cosa.....
Aw, don't be so hard on yourself -- that's what first drafts are, skeletal structures. While Moldy thinks of himself as Yoda with his grandiose statements but is more like Master Yogurt from Spaceballs, he's right, you should keep going. My first 15 pages were something that could be compressed into seven, and your next pages had a good rhythm and you'll be happier for it.
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