The Crack

So as previously mentioned, I've been wrestling with my supernatural thriller, a script that has some great ideas to it but which never quite entirely jelled.

One of the problems is that the story keeps mutating. It started out as one thing, but as I keep upping the visuals and the thrills, and changing the character dynamics, and refinessing the backstory, what I wound up with was too many pieces and echoes of different stories.

Too many half-realized ideas and glancing subplots. A story that revs up, and then idles for too many stretches.

The tale I'm telling has a lot of complex things in it. It's the kind of tale that really needs to be all worked out from the start, so that the supernatural stuff and the character stuff dovetail throughout, driving the story together.

It never got that.

In the last pass, I came up with (yet another) new first act, and then a third act that finally really started revving things up pretty well. Unfortunately, this just left the second act feeling slack and aimless in comparison.

I doled the script out to a few friends, and over the weekend I got the bulk of the notes on it back. Good notes, though oddly largely different; though everyone spotted the same bad typos (fortunately not many of them) and incoherent dialogue, everyone sort of had a different take on the script's problems.

Though, boiled down, it was all about Act 2.

But as I started going through these notes, and wrestling with what they were saying, that's when it came.

The CRACK.

The crack is the loud noise in your brain, when your plotline suddenly snaps into place. When everything suddenly makes sense. When the big gaping hole in your script suddenly seals.

When all you want to do is write.

The crack.

I've come up with what amounts to three major plot changes, that actually weren't suggested by anyone, and yet somehow it was a simmering combination of all of their notes that led me to the breakthrough.

Unfortunately, the crack often comes with a price, and the price is the realization that your script isn't nearly as close as you thought it was, and that it is still going to take a lot of work to wrestle it into place (the next crack is when you slap yourself on the forehead, and wish you'd solved all these plot problems beforehand).

It's not just about plot changes. It's about tearing it all apart, and making sure that every scene deals with these changes well. It's about starting from scratch on some levels, and really making sure it's all well-constructed this time.

The irony for me of course is that most of the time, I'm giving people notes, trying to lead them to the crack, and I can usually tell when I have; I get an e-mail back that sounds like they are flipping out, going through the shit-I-have-to-do-a-major-rewrite-on-my-script-but-wow-do-I-want-to moment.

And hopefully it's those moments that help fuel greatness.

So shit. I have to do a major rewrite on my script.

But wow, do I want to.

Thanks to those who helped.