One day, I

For a few days I began to point at myself - that I was a flake, that I have short attention span, and that I am always quick to put myself down.  But then I started thinking about the process and began to realize something - the material had begun to bore me. Not through any inherent fault of my own, but simply because the material followed this stringent structure that I imposed on it (for very noble reasons, I should say) and that I lost all excitement because I wanted the characters to follow the structure that I had meticulously plotted out.  I realized that maybe my characters were too punk for that, if that makes any sense.

Not really.

I finished a handwritten draft of the script on August 5, but only finished typing the whole script yesterday, August 23.  There’s just the matter of transcribing the handwritten draft, right? So why did it take me so long?  It’s because I have this magical ability to bring myself down - by attacking the very things I thought were clever/inspired/good in some way.  As I type, I keep hearing different variations on the word stupid in my head.  For a while, the thoughts became so insistent that I couldn’t even bring myself to read what I’d written before.

My parents drove me to the bus terminal and we were listening to the radio.  The requested song played: it was, I think, An Affair to Remember. My mother started talking about it being the theme song for a movie with Annette Benning and some actor she couldn’t remember. My father said he couldn’t remember the movie, so my mother began to tell it to him.

“Tapos nagplano silang magkita sa isang...ano bang tower yun? Yung sikat?”

(Then they planned to meet on top of this...which tower is it? The popular one?”)

I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear what my father had to say so I stayed quiet.  He interrupted her as she began to think out loud.

“Sears Tower. Sa Chicago ba yan? Yan yung pinakamataas na tower noon!”

(”Sears Tower.  Is that (movie based) in Chicago?  That used to be the tallest tower before!”)

My mother shook her head. “New York,” she said.

“Ah, World Trade Center!”

Or perhaps, let us not.  Let me just say this - sure, socializing can be fun (even when you have nothing in common with the people you’re hanging out with and they can’t understand your silly sense of humor).  However, watching a very satisfying movie is so much more invigorating to the soul.

I gave up on catching those free foreign films that a cinema would regularly screen every year because of the long lines.  But this year, I decided I would make an effort, simply because the hours I have spent alone inside my room far outnumber the hours I spend talking to people personally.  I spent a whole weekend not talking to a single person - in fact, I think I’ve had numerous weekends like that.  While I suppose I could survive with that, I do admit I miss my friends.

So I finally met up with friends yesterday, watched one silly film (I slept through the first one, sorry), ate bad food, and camped out for three hours to watch the last show - a Japanese coming of age movie with the English title, Wood Job! You can just Google the premise of the movie, but it is one of those movies that sounds totally typical in theory but fantastic in execution.  We could not stop raving about it after.  I found myself saying that it’s a good example of a very satisfying film.  As someone who watches a movie closely, I knew the tropes used, I knew where the plot was going, but this did not impede my enjoyment of the movie.  Knowing that the movie was working with a very well-known structure actually made me appreciate it even more.

Here’s the deal: I’ve been writing my first full-length screenplay since...April this year, I think? But the story has been brewing in my head since last year.  The idea was to write a coming of age script with a cast of characters who would run away for different reasons and wind up in the same place.  It seemed simple enough, and a fun enough concept to play around with - but since I write mostly plotless character-driven narratives, it has proven to be a challenge.  Early on, while I was conceptualizing and finishing the storyline, I decided to follow the Syd Field 3-act structure to help me with plotting.  You know, Normal World, Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, Midpoint, Plot Point 2, Climax, Denouement, that kind of thing.

Ideally, this structure would help you clock in at 30 pages/minutes for Act 1, 60 pages/minutes for Act 2, and 30 pages/minutes for Act 3 - basically your standard-length movie.   That was what I was ideally going for. I diligently worked on my story.  What I did was this: after I worked on the storyline, I decided to work on the story of each character separately in prose form.  This was my “outline”.  And then after finishing this odd prose/outline, I took the scenes, arranged them so that the stories would simultaneously be happening in the script, and then proceeded to translate the prose scenes into actual sequences.

As of today, I am still in Act 1 - by my calculations, I will be finishing it this Friday if I am diligent enough.  I usually do not write on weekends, but for the past two weeks, I wrote, which is great because now I can’t go to sleep without writing at least one scene. I have yet to plot out Act 2, and yet I’m already on page 60.

Yes, 60.

While I don’t want to let that bother me, it still does.  Aside from the fact that I seem to be hitting a wall and thinking, “Ugh, that scene is horrible” each time I finish a scene, the page count has been bothering me.  What am I doing wrong?  Why can’t I get this right?  I know, deep down, that I should just keep going.  I should just keep writing until I finish it and then think about how to improve it after.  But...and I hate ellipsis - it’s truly painful.  All I can do right now is to keep going despite all these discouraging things going on in my head.  I am, indeed, my own worst critic (and I’ve had a client say to my face, “Why is the copy so bad?” - so you can just imagine all the bullshit I subject myself to in my head).  

As much as I’ve been truly preoccupied by my day job and what I consider my real job (despite not getting paid a single cent for it) every second of every day, I have to admit, I’m feeling terribly, terribly lonely.