Interesting

I had an interesting experience yesterday. Monday is my day off. I usually write all day, or do translations all day, or run errands. Yesterday the task at hand was finishing The Tempter rewrite for the producer. After I finished around 3 pm, I went back to Disfigured. I have been eager to go back to this script for a while, I guess mostly because I had to work on The Tempter, it sort was the last thing I wanted to do. What can I say, I’m a rebel at heart. If I have to do something, I’ll have to force myself to do it. The artist in me is life a spoiled child that has to be kept in check at all times.

But, I should say, going through The Tempter, I impressed myself at how good the story was. It had been a while since I had looked at it and I have to say I was pleased with myself. I have a feeling The Tempter is commercial and very much high concept. I think you’ll see that in the big screen before any other one of my scripts.

That wasn’t the strange experience I was talking about. I started working on Disfigured again. I came with this concept shot:



It helps me to have the visual inspiration to keep writing. I was afraid that the third act was going to be too short, that I didn’t have much mileage on this story anymore. But once I started writing it, I came up with stuff I had never even imagined before. This is why I like writing scenes versus outlining it. You never know what will come to you when you’re writing scenes. I can say that my writing ritual/style is very unique to myself. There’s very little structure to it, and I don’t think I’ve written two scripts the same way. Some I have outlined severely, others I have written with no outline at all.

But I digress. The interesting experience is I started writing this violent sequence in the third act, and the setting, the acts, the suffering, it all started to bother me and I finally had to call it a night. My own writing was making me squeamish. What is wrong with me? I’m not usually squeamish at all, especially if I’m creating it. It also occurred to me to change the ending of the script. I think I’m coming to terms with women and finally truly learning to love women.

This only makes sense to me right now, but once you read the script, it will make sense to you too. Right now the Alanis Morissette lyrics for the song Eight Easy Steps comes to mind. I think I finally get it.

“I'll teach you all this in 8 easy steps
A course of a lifetime you'll never forget
....
How to hate women when you're supposed to be a feminist”