Write What You Know

I wrote in the last post that the hardest part about making a movie is the prep. While that's true for the most part, there is also another equally difficult stage that comes before it - if you are also the writer of the project, well than that process can be just as hard and, at least in my experience, even harder.

The old adage is to write what you know. For me, that proved to be sage advice. I took an event from my early teen years and built it into the short screenplay that would become "Salvaging." Having lived some of the story made it a little easier to picture the scenes and characters and that helped quite a bit. But the first demand of writing is patience and that doesn't come easily to me. I want those words to be perfect the first time they hit the page and when they aren't, which is every time, I have a hard time rewriting. Here is where having the advantage of knowing the story from personal experience helped me get past some of the pitfalls of re-working the story and improving it.

But all the life experience in the world doesn't change the fact that the rewrite process can be rough and it is easy to get lost in it. Before I knew it, my attempts at improving the story soon disappeared and I had no idea what I meant by any of it. Those were the dark days, the days that made me wonder what the hell I thought I was doing writing this thing anyway. But I had to keep going. My biggest help through this rough period were my trusted readers. My lovely and talented wife Meghann and a few others took the time to read and re-read each draft* and give me their input on what was working and what wasn't. I just had to remember that I didn't have to use everything I was being told about my story and fit it in somewhere. The trick I had to learn here was to take in each reader's remarks and apply what I thought worked and ignore what I thought didn't. It was still going to my script after all.

Many drafts and much time spent playing free online Mahjong while hoping for a miracle breakthrough finally paid off and here we are today. Discipline is pretty important in writing as well and this blog is probably an attempt to force myself to write more often. More time at the keyboard is more time writing is becoming a better writer...that's the theory anyway.

Joe

* Each draft EXCEPT for the first draft that is. The first draft is likely terrible and bad feedback at this stage can kill a project. Don't do it, brother.