Report from the Trenches, #4

 

What exactly am I doing as I reconceive/reconstruct/rewrite a project that I’m already eighteen months into, based on some pretty stark “do it over” notes from Shawn?

In the files I’m basically talking to myself. “What would happen if Manning didn’t know X in Chapter Seven, instead of the way I have it now where he does know? What would he do under these new circumstances?”

Then I’m writing scenes.

I’m spitballing sequences.

Ooh, a car chase! That might work. Manning chases Bad Guy X into New Environment Y and, in a twist at the end, the Bad Guy tells him “Q didn’t kill Z, H did.”

I like that.

That’s good.

Let’s keep going.

(In other words, I’m basically writing the whole damn thing over, twisting it this way and that in the hope that it’ll contort itself into what it really wants to be.)

When Shawn applies his Story Grid analysis to a completed manuscript that a writer has submitted to him, he goes scene-by-scene, like a movie or stage director. He asks of each scene, “What is the inciting incident? What are the progressive complications? What’s the climax?” He asks, like an actor, “What does Character X want in this scene? What obstacles stand in her way? What does Character Y want in this scene? Do X and Y clash? Do the scene’s stakes escalate? How has the story advanced, or twisted, from the beginning of this scene to the end?”

I was lazy the first time through this story.

I winged it too much.

I didn’t think hard enough.

I didn’t ask and answer all the questions I had to.

I settled for scenes and sequences that I felt in my bones weren’t working, or weren’t working well enough.

It’s hard to go back and do what you didn’t do the first time. It’s like you’re in a dark forest and you’ve just walked past the same tree for the third time.

Are we getting anywhere?

Or are we just getting more lost?

Nobody said this shit was easy.