When I got home Thursday night, I felt like total shit. I was at 50% kung fu and dropping. This bug was kicking my ass, getting stronger from one day to the next. I was concerned that I'd spend the long weekend suffering and not getting much writing done.
Fuck that. It was time to beat this thing down. I decided to dedicate an entire day to doing nothing but getting better.
I went to bed at nine on Thursday, and woke up at noon on Friday. Fifteen hours of sleep. I went to the store and got three cartons of oj. I brought that home, drank a ton of it and used it to wash down vitamins, Tylenol and cold medication. I slept some more. Woke up, drank more oj, ate more vitamins. Slept.
I woke up Saturday morning at 95% kung fu. Not completely better - there was a shade of lingering sickness - but nothing that would get in my way. I got a bizarre bug up my ass to clean. So off I went back to the store, got a ton of cleaning supplies, and de-mung-ified my apartment. By noon, I was feeling great and standing in a pad that gleamed white and smelled like lemons. Sometimes you just gotta.
I wrote 35 pages on Saturday, bringing my page count to 276. I had to stop because my hands were literally starting to hurt.
I celebrated with a twelve pack and In Bruges. Yeah, yeah... I know drinking right after recovering from an illness isn't the smartest thing in the universe. But, you know what? You bust your ass and write 35 pages in a day, and tell me you don't feel like throwing a few back.
In Bruges is an amazing movie. I laughed my ass off watching this thing. The writing, acting, directing and shooting all come together. It doesn't change the world or anything, it's just a very good character-driven Brit gangster movie. But, man... my fave Brit gangster movie so far has been Snatch, and In Bruges replaces it. This is a great flick, I can't recommend it more highly.
On Sunday, I wrote another ten pages. I had to come into the office, and after that I went to the Hollywood Forever cemetery screening of Don't Look Now. It's more of a well-directed movie than a well-written movie, in my own humble, but that ending... It's one of the bigger WHAT THE FUCK?! endings in the genre. Watching it again, it occurred to me that Don't Look Now is the British version of a giallo movie - it has a lot of the same characteristics: Italian setting, weird psychics, painful dialogue, yuppie hero, a killer on the loose, crazy plot points.
But most people just like it for the famous sex scene, which got a lot of applause.
Yesterday, I wrote another ten. But, in the midst of all this writing, I figured out something that cracked act two, which had been giving me some trouble. I rolled a few scenes into each other, making what was left richer, more important to the characters, more dense with story, and more immediate. My page count dropped, but not nearly as much as I'd thought. I still have to go back and comb out the knots. But I'm gonna save that for later... solving the act two problem on the page gave me a clear vision of the rest of the story, all the way to THE END.
So I'm just gonna sprint ahead and get a first draft done.
When I started this project in January, my original goal was to finish it in six months. When it wasn't even close to being done in June, I stretched my deadline to finishing it by the end of summer. Now that we're in Sept, I'm shooting for wrapping it up by year's end.
I got cocky in terms of the time frame I thought I'd need, because I was thinking in the context of my screenplay output. I've been writing scripts since '98, and I've gotten to a point that slamming out a first draft no longer takes me a very long time. (Figuring out the story does... but that's a separate thing, as I typically overlap my projects; I'm thinking of one project while writing another and re-writing the one that came before, so on and so forth).
But I'm still relatively new to the novel form. It's not the length so much as my inexperience. With a script, there's a running counter in my head of page count, plot point, structure, etc. Little alarms go off, letting me know when the next beat has to happen. With novels, it's a longer and slightly less formalistic set-up. Scripts are just shy of haiku in terms of structure, whereas in a novel you really can have a couple of pages in which the characters just kinda talk to each other. It took me a while to get used to that, to know when to move the story, and when to dial down the action a bit.
I'm back in the office, and ready to rock. This is gonna be a big week, and I'm looking forward to diving into the mosh pit.
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2 comments:
On the novel thing: Yes.
It's been tough to explain to you guys why I never have a finished piece of work, but I think you get it now.
Or rather, I have hard-drive-clogging amounts of finished work that suck ass. And thus, as this stuff sucks, I don't consider it finished. It's only finished if it rocks.
Why don't I "take a chance" and send some of this stuff in? Well dude, it's to have mercy on people who do your job, and to protect my pride until I've written something I wouldn't be embarrassed to see in print. Writing is easy. Writing well, not as easy.
I'm really sprinting on act three. I've decided, as I have new ideas or notice plot holes that, instead of going back and fixing them, I'm just making a note to fix them after the first draft is done.
Nothing matters more at this stage than THE END.
With a first draft done, I'll go back and fix what needs fixing. Since I'm not doing that now, it'll be a longer rewrite process, but I wanna be polish a finished product instead of STILL slogging away at draft one.
But it's coming right along. The more I write, the better it gets.
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