... page 30 of my romcom. So that's eight pages today. Not bad going at all, seeing as I got waylaid with a load of fiddly accountancy-type stuff, such as putting together invoices for magazines and totting up expense receipts. This script is still feeling good, thankfully - even though I'm working from a pretty loose outline, that in itself is giving rise to some ideas which pop out of nowhere. And some average chaff, of course, which will be eradicated before anyone gets to read it. Still unsure how long the whole thing will turn out to be, though. 60 or maybe 90 minutes? Who can say, hmmmm?
Saw a great time-wasting, entertaining link on Mark Spencer's News Sluice: especially as I love badgers. Have a youself a look, why don'tcha?
4 comments:
Those are some nice badgers.
I'm probably going to be committing some sort of writerly crime that will expel me from my desired profession forever, but I don't like strict outlines.
I can hear McKee screaming from here. I really can. He lives in Cornwall when he’s not in LA.
I always have to work with some outline, but usually no more than a page or so, usually a line a scene. The rest I work out in my head, probably to the same level as a full treatment, but because nothing’s committed to paper, it doesn’t stagnate.
I've tried it twice, wrote full treatments for screenplays. Both screenplays came out so badly, I don't include them in my portfolio, even though the extra material would make it look more expansive. The stuff that I’ve outline loosely, I’m really proud of.
It may have just been bad luck with those two treatments, but I'm superstitious about it now.
I'm glad you've said this, Lord Jeffery. The very minute before you posted, I was wondering if this 'loose outline' business was getting me into bad habits. But I do feel that these enormous, strict outlines rather kill the excitement of plunging in there and setting your brain loose.
As long as you have a strong skeleton structure, knowing the beginning, the end, the characters and the main plot points, surely that's the most important thing. The outline for this current script is actually changing as the script develops, which may be heresy to some, but if it ain't broke...
It may well be a bad habit, but it works for me. I think it has advantages and disadvantages.
Tarantino doesn't use a strict outline, on Resevoir Dogs none at all. Same with the Coens. They've been quoted as saying they don't know what the next scene is going to be, sometimes.
Those three guys are great examples, because sometimes they give you hugely entertaining, free-wheeling brilliance, and at other times they give you frustrating bloody minded dead ends. That's the joy and the danger of the loose outline.
The other danger of working like this is that you might just run out of steam. Fargo sat on a shelf for a year after the triple murder scene, before one day they came up with Marge. That'd kill me.
On the other hand, Misters Pegg and Wright spent 6 months planning Hot Fuzz before they started to write it.
But back on the original hand, Charlie Kaufman said something like if you know how a script is going to end b4 you start, then you've failed.
So you pays your money, you takes your choice I suppose! I'm a planner myself, but it's what works for you...
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