Evaluating Your Own Activity
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- November 9th, 2008 |
- Comments
EVALUATING YOUR OWN Activity
By Derek Rydall
Founder, ScriptwriterCentral.com
“Words affect,
Crack and sometimes break, low the burden,
Low the tension, artifact, coast, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not act in place,
Will not act allay.”
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
WRITING IS REWRITING
As a writer, you may consume other book consultants to critique your material, but inevitably you’ll need to master the ability to analyze your own activity. This can be a difficult chore, fairly akin to trying to look at your own face (without a mirror). If you are going to compose at a level that sells, however, you will need to rewrite.
And rewrite.
And rewrite…
But do not despair, you’re in good company. Many screenwriters attempt over evaluating their own activity. I allay have bloodstains on my office walls where I pounded my head as I rewrote one book XVI times before putting it in the market. I once exhausted adieu looking at a single morpheme that it lost its meaning and was reduced to its original, primordial symbolisation. Talk about a head-trip! And it’s not just screenwriters that endure with this. The French poet, Paul Verlaine, once said that a poet never finishes a poem, he abandons it. Marcel Proust continued to correct proofs for Remembrance of Things Past on his deathbed. Henry James rewrote any of his novels long after they were published. And Oscar Wilde once proclaimed that he exhausted all morning adding a comma and all afternoon deleting it. Boy, do I know that one!
So how do you analyze your own activity without becoming an alcoholic or a guest at the Mad Hatter’s herb party? First, you have to accept the fact that you will never have a completely objective perspective. 2nd, you have to learn when to just grit your set and conclude that the activity is finished — even if you have the anxious feeling that more can be done. Honestly, I allay feel that artifact about almost everything I’ve written. It goes with the dominion.
Thither are certain things you can do, however, to gain any perspective:
ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART GROW (LESS) FONDER
Writing is a love-hate relationship. We start out hating everything we’re writing, and end up blinded by love for every morpheme we’ve put on paper (or contrariwise). In order to gain objectivity, we must get distance. Putting your activity away for a piece &ndash sometimes weeks or months &ndash can allow you to come back not so enamored by it. (Falling in love with a new piece of material can also help.) It gives you a chance to read it almost as if it’s individual else’s. This is the first, and perhaps most important, block for evaluating your own activity. If you find yourself getting hung up again, deficient to economise all your babies, adhere it back in the drawer and move on to something else &ndash or send it to a trustworthy friend or book consultant.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD — OUTLINING AGAIN
Deconstructing your book back to an outline form can make the process more analytical again and give you any much-needed objectivity. It allows you to accompany the basic building blocks and recognize if this house will really booth. So you can make the necessary changes in outline form before you go back to book.
HAVE A READING
Getting a group of actors unitedly to read your book aloud can be an anxiety-producing experience — but almost always an illuminating one. Hearing the actors communicate, and often bumble over, your dialogue, definitely gives you a fresh perspective on it. You begin to accompany that any of your words don’t fall trippingly over the cape, but cause the cape to trip and fall over the words.
After the reading is done, you can elicit feedback from the actors &ndash or the audience, if you have one. But I must issue a morpheme of warning here. Having a group of actors give feedback on your book could be one of the most painful experiences of your creative life. The first time I did it, the group ganged abreast me to proclaim just how bad the book was. It was downright ugly. AND THESE WERE MY FRIENDS! Even my mom was part of the lynch mob! It dealt a crushing blow to my fragile writer’s ego. I promptly threw the book away, indulged in the nearest libation, and curled up in a change and cozy depression. A couple weeks later, however, I emerged from the near-suicidal encounter with a ton of insights and a much better book.
THE FAST “NO-BRAINER” READ
Your cold already knows what’s wrong with your book, it just can’t get finished the filtering of your conscious monitoring mind. So sometimes, just riding over your book roughshod, writing every note that comes to you without considering the absurdity of it, can result in any pretty insightful and inspired comments. It might also result in any pretty brutal ones as advantageously. But that’s okay. After the group therapy conference you had with your book reading, you’re bad enough to accept it.
THE HIERARCHY OF NOTES
One of the toughest parts about rewriting, once you’ve evaluated your book, is knowing where to start. You’re motion thither, staring at a big fetid pile of notes — scribblings and late-night ramblings on every page, legal pads covered in blood and coffee stains. There’s just no artifact to begin easily and painlessly with that mess. So don’t. Yet. Organize your notes from ‘easiest’ to ‘most difficult.’ In other words, at the apical of the list will be the typos and grammatical errors, so descriptive polishes, dialogue polishes, moving on down to the more difficult character, plot, and theme notes.
I know that a major time-management proposition is earlier the most important goal or chore and follow it until it’s finished. But this ain’t time management, folks. This is art. It’s not rational. So I believe it’s better to start with the easiest damn abstraction and get it done fast. So move to the next easiest abstraction and beat it out quickly. Now, with a little more momentum, you might actually be choice to tackle the more difficult notes with a higher level of confidence and a lower level of antidepressants.
A FINAL NOTE ON GIVING YOURSELF NOTES
Any of you will be artifact also eager to get your book out to every producer in townsfolk &ndash even after the first draft. Your chore is to develop patience. You’ve exhausted this long on the book, what’s another few weeks or months to make careful you’ve got it right.
Just breathe.
Put the book away. Rewrite it. Whatsoever you do, don’t send it out thither knowing it could be improved, cerebration “they’ll just fix it in post.” NO THEY WON’T. The only ‘post’ that book will accompany is ‘compost,’ because that’s the pile it’ll end abreast. So unless you deprivation your activity to become fertilizer for individual else’s lawn — chill out, dude.
So thither are those of you who will resist sending your book out into the ostensibly cold, harsh class of Hollywood no matter how long you’ve been employed on it. This is not only inefficient, it’s creatively debilitating. Remember your book like a plane that has landed and is allay on the runway. If you don’t move it along, all those other planes (stories) can’t land. If you’ve done everything you can, had others give notes on it, rewritten it until the words have lost their meaning — it’s time to abandon your baby. Cloak the little babushka up in a blanket and set it on the doorstep of every production company you can.
With a little luck, individual will decide to make that child their own.
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As a screenwriter, Derek Rydall has oversubscribed, optioned, or been hired on assignment for over 20 film and TV projects. He has developed projects for the producer of Ghost, RKO, U/A, Miramax, Saturn (Nick Cage), and many indie producers, as advantageously as worked as a body writer for Fox, Disney, and Deepak Chopra. As a account consultant/book doctor, Derek has helped writers, producers, actors, and directors activity books into screenplays, assured millions in financing, make six-figure book deals, get hired to exec produce, direct, character in their movies, obtain major distribution, and gain awards. And as an author, Derek’s book, I Could’ve Written a Better Movie than That!: How to Make Cardinal Figures as a Book Consultant– Even if You’re Not a Screenwriter, is due out October by Michael Wiese Publishing. For more info, you can check out his computer, .scriptwritercentral.com, email derekscriptwritercentral.com or call (661) 296-4991.”