Flow Writer

Over the past four days I've spent over 13 hours working Tracks. And while today wasn't progress toward finishing, it was well-spent on tightening some areas of the script that had been bothering me. I'm also spending a lot of time away from the computer thinking about the storyline of Tracks, which isn't necessarily unusual or productive for me, except that I'm rapidly taking my ideas onto the page.

Both facets are important steps for me, given that I've been gestating so many ideas for so long--yet not getting them onto the page--that I've seen many of them wither on the vine, disappear into the crevasses of my memory, or escape into the world to show up under someone else's name. Four months ago Tracks wasn't even on my radar, yet since I've turned my attention to it, I've been flowing.

Whether the flow is yielding good writing or not remains to be seen. I'm optimistic.

I have had some challenging moments in Tracks, especially when I've dropped my heroes into difficult situations which will take ingenuity to escape. I'm not really all that resourceful when held captive in the middle of the enemy stronghold, I've never been in a fight with three men with my hands zip-tied behind my back, and I've never been on the roof of a train about to collide with another. So I'm having to be creative to save my heroes--and my screenplay--from falling apart.

I'm learning that I work best when I just let the story go for a while, see where it takes me, then reel it in a bit if I find myself in a corner. I've known this about my writing style for a while, yet ever since a debacle in my childhood, I've been gunshy about doing it.

I was writing a science-fiction novel when I was around 11 or 12. Basically it was Star Wars on Earth, with some rebels running around from the "federalists." All of the characters were based on my friends or erstwhile crushes. And of course the mysterious hero was based on me. There were also a lot of robots and laser weapons and rumors about a City in the Sky (one of the names of the book...it changed a lot).

It was really cruising along, actually. I was into the 9th or 10th chapter I think, somewhere around 120 pages in, when all of the sudden - poof. I just stopped writing it. I had hit a dead end where I couldn't see what was next. I remember the last scene was between a girl and her Artoo Detoo-esque robot named XL-CO, who had rocketed the girl to safety into a foreboding canyon (I imagined a little droid with propulsion long before the Star Wars prequels retroactively gave it to Artoo). They crash-landed when his fuel ran out. They both survived, but the girl was soon shocked that she could sense that XL-CO was in pain, and moreover that he seemed to have a very human essence to him. The implied revelation was that XL-CO--and all robots--were given intelligence by using the downloaded personalities of dead people.

But the story just died right there. I had no idea where to go next. 120 pages! Down the drain.

Anyhow, I've been worried about having that kind of thing happen to me again, and the result has been that I've mercilessly edited myself while trying to include all possible pathways and avoid all possible loose ends.

Only once did I break through since then, when I finished my first screenplay Lost Time (which will mercifully be lost to time if there is a God...I mean, it had some good parts, but more than anything I was just glad to finish it). I recall the feeling of total elation when it wound its way to a rather satisfying conclusion in 127 pages.

As I close in on the completion of Tracks, I am proving to myself that I can finish the job, and even the danger of writing myself into corners is just a way of connecting to my heroes.

If they can get out tough jams, so can I.