Script Blitz: April 6

Okay, so I was pretty discouraged yesterday, but thanks to some good, healthy advice and encouragement from my friends, I was reminded of the importance of the meaning of this mission I'm on currently: To get myself to write. That is all.

I need to remind myself that while I should care about the quality of my work, and care a lot about the story I am telling, in order to improve I need to set those priorities and just write. Most importantly, not to be afraid to write bad material, but just to start typing words and let it flow from the gut. Hey, it's a first draft, they're supposed to be terrible, right? One thing I have learned about writing is that the first draft is usually the hardest part of the writing process, so it makes sense to get it out on to the page, even if it is the crappiest thing I've ever written. I'll rewrite it. And when I do, I'll come up with more ideas. That's how it works. And if you write from your gut, you open the door to the possibility of writing something really good that even you didn't expect to come out.

An Italian filmmaker named Bernardo Bertolucci said something of that sort that applies to ALL filmmaking, that you always have to find ways of leaving the door open, inviting the possibility of something genius to come walking in at a completely unexpected moment.

So that's the mindset I went in with last night, just to dive in, find a part of the story I was particularly interested in, and just start writing. For two and a half hours I wrote, and I ended up with 8 pages! Pretty much the entire ending of the movie, actually. And I even liked a good deal of it when I was done! So the experiment was a success.

I've learned that I need to continue to push myself to just write, without concerning myself with whether or not it will be good, and see what happens from there. At the very least, I'll end up with a crappy script, and I'll get to rewrite it. But who knows, maybe it will turn out okay, and maybe I might even discover some things I wasn't expecting to. At the very least, it will be an adventure.

So here's to adventures. A wise man once said, “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”