I’m so very nearly at the half way point.

The chances of finishing this draft before the end of November are slim. Not impossible, just unlikely. It will mean writing 6 pages a day which is definitely doable - provided I have no more distractions and stop procrastinating. But the story is beginning to bore me which I’m taking to not be a very good sign. Or maybe it’s the last scene I wrote last night (I say wrote, what I mean is drunkenly splurge words on a page in the hope that they make some sort of sense in the morning). In theory, I quite like the scene potential but it definitely feels like a filler and not actually furthering the story.

It’s not going entirely badly. I’ve written a couple of characters that I like a lot. One surprised me entirely because I wasn’t sure I was going to include him and haven’t really done any background planning for him but there he was, on the page, telling me exactly how he talks, how he acts and what he looks like. This morning, while driving to work, I suddenly realised who would be the right person to play him and, with that revelation, understood what the character was going to do and how he would fit in more to the main storyline.

The bigger problem lies elsewhere. I’m not convinced by the motivations of the protagonist - no, strike that, I am convinced by his motivations, I’m just not sure that I’m going to be able to get him to where I want him. I think I’ve worked out how to do this (partly inspired by some of the Metlab feedback) and it does involve changing a lot of the backstory, which is fine. However, it also involves changing most of what I’ve written. So I’m in a quandary. Do I push on, finish this draft then go back to the storyboard and make the necessary amendments then or do I stop where I am and start again? The answer, I feel, must be to carry on. To paraphrase William Goldman, having stuff written down will make it easier to change later on.

None of the successful blogging professionals seem to write about this sort of dilemma but I guess they must go through it. I don’t know? As Chip said yesterday with his “boring draft update”, that he felt “listening to writers talk about writing isn’t the most interesting thing in the world” and I understand where he’s coming from. Listening to me whining about how I can’t get it to work (the story, you filthy minded creature!) can’t be scintillating on any level.

Okay, I admit it, this is a self serving, attention seeking post which I’m hoping will ellicit a couple of responses of “Don’t sweat it - we’ve all been there and that’s how it goes.” I guess I’ve just go so used to bashing out short scripts in not very much time at all and now I’m struggling on something that is so much longer. To use a running analogy, it’s like I’ve been running 5km races for ages and then decided to take on a marathon.