memoirs of a Jane Campion wannabee

A sixty-five year old student complained to me: 'No one ever told me that writing would be such hard physical work.'

I don't want to admit that I'm an old crock just yet, but she's got a point there.  Hours lashed to the computer, or more particularly, the laptop, is draining and takes its toll on my neck in particular.  I recently finished a week-long writing marathon, which spanned several locations -- Alice, Batchelor, Darwin, then Alice again (including most of Easter Monday spent in bed with a computer and a cat). I was trying to finish the all-but forgotten screenplay I started a year earlier, as part of a course designed to get more scripts developed in the Territory (esp about Territorian life).

The reason for this sudden burst of activity was that the year-long deadline for submission of scripts for a free written assessment was almost up.  It's marvellous what a difference a deadline can make: I wrote 25 pages in a week, which is a lot, considered that writing for film is (meant to be) highly distilled.  During my marathon, I went through various peaks and troughs of exhaustion: the pattern was almost a day of inspiration followed by a day of despair.  I was buoyed along by kind friends, who told me it was just a pattern, and tomorrow would be another day. I threw myself across the finishing line last Tuesday, then checked on legal and other details over dinner with three lawyers and an engineer on Weds night, and sent the script off on Thursday morning.  (Some of these people have been constantly plumbed for details from their legal and professional lives: the script couldn't have been written without them.)

I was aiming to hit 90 pages, the length of an average feature film. I didn't quite make it, coming in at 85 pages, which I felt was enough for a first draft.  I suspect the result, with its rushed 'third act', was literally half-baked: underdeveloped and over-written.  One of the interesting thing about having a rough page length was that it seemed to impose a certain form on the content.  This is a principle I've observed before: ask students to write a 600 wd short, short story or a 14-line poem, and the piece automatically takes on a shape of its own, pushing you to develop it along certain lines. With the screenplay, I tried to follow the conventional three-act script formula, and to present a protagonist with clear desires and a quest of her own.  (I'm not totally sure about the other characters, but that's probably what the second draft is for.)  I didn't have any intention of writing something impressionistic or 'postmodern' that might 'break the mold' (McKee, if I remember rightly, classifies these options as spin-offs from the three-act formula, in any case - mini-plot and anti-plot), which would probably have degenerated into unmitigated waffle in my case.  I also tried to observe an action/reaction dynamic, to ensure there was a chain of emotional causality throughout the film.  Early in the workshopping process, we were asked to write a step-by-step outline of the script.  I had about twenty-two steps, which I used as a mud-map.  The fact is that you're never going to follow an outline in its entirety, that the characters have to develop organically and that you never know quite how they're going to end up.  But it helped, somehow, to have a game-plan for my characters' meanderings across 90 pages.

One of the things that was really useful to me in the workshopping process was a session in which we had 'actors' (people I knew from around town in other incarnations) perform a scene from our scripts, which was filmed at the same time.  I found this highly revealing.  For one thing, I realised just how over-written my script was (you can't get away with a variation of the same joke in one scene).  And for another, I saw how having another person play a character you'd written could bring whole dimensions to the part that hadn't existed before: confronting for a control-freak writer but ennervating in giving me ideas for developing at least one character in new directions.  I also had to respond to the actors' interrogation of characters' motivations (rather than just other writers' quibbles, which one tends to brush off in the spirit of competitiveness), which challenged me to be a bit more practical and less whimsical about characterisation.

The session was conducted by an industry dinosaur (hereafter known as 'ID'), whom everyone paid out on for his strange combination of vague ditherings and endless namedropping.  Bizarrely, ID turned out to be just what I needed at the time.  I went to see him for a one-on-one consult the day before the workshop.  At the time, I had no idea what I was doing with the script anymore (indeed, hadn't touched it for about three months) and didn't really want to talk about myself or my writing.  I felt I should go, for networking purposes, even though I am crap at networking.  I told myself I was just going for my students: I would talk about what their future needs might be.

This conversation topic lasted for about five minutes, then ID made me talk about myself.  I did my general, 'Well, I think maybe my script is about this and maybe about that.'  (Lesbians, desert, native title, etc.) 

ID looked at me and said, 'You're trying to write another Brokeback Mountain? Films like that are hard to market.'

I said, 'No, not at all.  It's not meant to be a coming-out film.  It's just incidental that the main characters are gay.  It's meant to be part of the film's accepted reality -- that women fall in love with each other.  It's not a conversion narrative.'

'Well then, you need to make it clear in the very first scenes exactly what kind of film it is,' ID said, 'So the audience know how to receive it.  Look at Bridget Jones' Diary -- we know that it's about a fat girl trying to find love rightaway.'

It turned out that ID was into droopy romantic comedies of all forms. The man's favourite film was Clueless (I'll pay that).

I told him how previously when I'd had my script workshopped or read, people had wanted me to make more of the social justices issues and Indigenous themes ('you could make it about black and white as well as gay reconciliation', blah blah), whereas once again, I saw that stuff as incidental, simply part of the lives of the characters.  Mind you, other people had been saying, how are you going to pitch a romantic comedy about native title? (more accurately, involving native title, specifically 47B of the Native Title Act.)

ID had no interest in social justice issues whatsoever.  He said, 'Just make it clear what the story's about.'

After the session with the actors at the workshop, he turned to me and said, 'Look, it's just a simple love story.  Write it as that, and the other stuff will fall into line.'

Encouragingly, half the room including ID laughed at my dialogue (they laughed at exactly the same spots each time the scene was acted, often things I hadn't intended to be funny)...I suspect that if anything, I'd be more suited to writing sitcom rarther than film.  If I could be the Ricky Gervais of the desert, I would.  But his advice held good.  I was able to go from there and work out really what the story was about, for me, at least.

I'm still exhausted after my writing marathon, several days later.  (If my prose is a bit wobbly here, forgive me.)  But I'm pleased.  This is the first time I've finished the first draft of a creative work. And if the film ever gets made, it'll be my salute to the quirkiness of Territorian life.

And now, back to creative nonfiction and people-watching...

Comments

[Mikhela]

Do blog about the comments you get on it. It sounds intriguing.
If it's incidental that the lead character is gay, I bet she gets turned straight pretty quickly.

[tigtog]

I find the technical jargon involved here absolutely fascinating, never having formally studied Lit/Narrative structure of writing, etc. I have to read more about this stuff.

Break a leg on getting the rest of it done.

[Stephen Hill]

Trackback

http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/04/04/missing-link-daily-34/#more-5155

[elsewhere]

Yeah, thanks, peoples.

This workshopping series is the closest thing we have to formal scriptwriting teaching in the NT, apart from media studies classes at CDU.

Mikhela -- I wonder if it really will be a problem...I was actually consciously mimicking films like _Love and Other Catastrophes_ and _The Spanish Apartment_, which do have incidentally gay characters, tho they are part of ensemble casts.