Saturday, June 25, 2011

sit down by the fire

All right. I'm about to sink my teeth into editing the crap out of this script. What good is an off weekend if I don't get any writing done? After I do as much as I can without wanting to rip my fingernails out, I'm going to start tackling what shall be my side project and eventually my next script, which will hopefully be alot more straightforward and quicker to write than this present evil western which is slowly killing me. I picked too hard a story to tell, and my confidence as writer since school has been somewhat lacking. I think I'm always a little afraid to take myself seriously, and now that I don't have a network of people reading my stuff and bouncing ideas around with me and freaking taking ME seriously I just second-guess every writing decision I make. Which is the worst possible thing. I just get so concerned that I'm not doing a good job of it, which wouldn't be so terrible if I were writing some comedy or the like, but this story is so damn serious and what I want to say is so damn serious that I'm scared of just completely destroying it. Which would be dangerous, for such a serious subject.

Anyway, there's another serious Western I'd like to tackle, a Hamlet-esque sort of story set in North Dakota (I figure since I'm here I might as well), but I think I just have to take a break from all that and dig into the little, Garden-State-esque script I've been thinking of for a little while now. When I was working at the film office in LMU I heard one of my coworkers talking about the movie Tiny Furniture, about how autobiographical it was and how low budget and so on (a story about a girl just out of film school and back home, written and directed by a girl just out of film school and back home...), and I remember thinking, how straightforwardly wonderful. And fairly common/successful. After all, that's sort of what Zach Braff did anyway. So for a long time I was outlining what I thought would work pretty well, exploring a little fear I have of having to go home and live with my parents and sister and do the whole Texas thing again. But that got too depressing, and I couldn't bring any style to it. But NOW I'm definitely living a weird little post-grad life and I'm thinking of taking some of the work I've done on the old Texas script and just applying it to this one. There are so many great stories that I can tell now, from my greyhound experiences to just adjusting to life and the weird characters here. Old Terror. Working in a nursing home in general. Of course I'm going to have to conjure up some story structure, but I'm really drawing/ripping off of Garden State for that, I think. We shall see.

In other news, the sun came out today, and I don't have to work tonight. Beautiful.

There's this one road here that I like to take. It parallels the main highway, except that it's a "backroad" and goes through the farmland, dumping out in the downtown of dickinson. It's HWY10, the original highway of North Dakota, however if you refer to it as anything other than "Old Ten" people will look at you strangely. Anyway, it's a very hilly, generally solitary drive and on days like today it's so beautiful. It fills me with that mixed feeling of hope and nostalgia, except in my case it must be nostalgia for a time which I have never experienced. It is during drives like that, my windows rolled down, some authentic-happy-sounding-song playing, orange sunglasses on my head and my hair going crazy that I think, well. This is the way things are supposed to be.

At least for right now.

But enough procrastinating. Onward!

1 comment:

Erin said...

I love the thought of writing something small and autobiographical; honest.