...where inspiration will come from.
I happened on this picture while surfing the web...and it made me laugh, out loud. Because it gave me a way to make the ending of "The Alice '65" work as comedy. I was planning to have a Russian bad guy and an Australian mix in at the end and make it all freaky and suspenseful and off-beat in its action...which is NOT the direction the story wanted to go and was letting me know it by refusing to move...but now it's going to be very off the wall and still caught in reality to the point of (hopefully) laugh-out-loud.
It came at just the right time, too. I was pretty down.
You see, over the last year I've been entering Find Ray T into various screenplay competitions, and out of 20 entries (at no small cost in fees, I might add) it made finalist in 2 of them. The rest? Zero. Zip. Nada. Not even Quarterfinalist. Yesterday, I had another one let me know it'd been shut out, again.
FRT is probably the most commercial, Syd Field style script I've ever written. Covers all the bases. Hits all the plot points. And does it in a way that I like. I seriously do like the script and story. But even when I send it out to producers looking for something just like it (I get leads from InkTip, ISA, LinkedIn, ScreenwritingU, Mandy, a friend of mine, and a few others) it's always, "Not what we're looking for."
I've come close to giving up on screenwriting so many times. Even told myself it's silly. Hell, proclaimed it from the mountaintops! But I keep doing it, and I'm doing it, again, with A65. I guess I'll keep going till I'm dead. Must be my own brand of psychosis.
But the fact is, as much as I enjoyed (and hated and moaned about) the process of making "The Lyons' Den" into a book, I think of my stories in script form, first. And I doubt I'll change. Hell, if A65 works out to be funny enough, I may revisit some old scripts and rework them. I dunno.
I just know that's what's keeping me going.
It came at just the right time, too. I was pretty down.
You see, over the last year I've been entering Find Ray T into various screenplay competitions, and out of 20 entries (at no small cost in fees, I might add) it made finalist in 2 of them. The rest? Zero. Zip. Nada. Not even Quarterfinalist. Yesterday, I had another one let me know it'd been shut out, again.
FRT is probably the most commercial, Syd Field style script I've ever written. Covers all the bases. Hits all the plot points. And does it in a way that I like. I seriously do like the script and story. But even when I send it out to producers looking for something just like it (I get leads from InkTip, ISA, LinkedIn, ScreenwritingU, Mandy, a friend of mine, and a few others) it's always, "Not what we're looking for."
I've come close to giving up on screenwriting so many times. Even told myself it's silly. Hell, proclaimed it from the mountaintops! But I keep doing it, and I'm doing it, again, with A65. I guess I'll keep going till I'm dead. Must be my own brand of psychosis.
But the fact is, as much as I enjoyed (and hated and moaned about) the process of making "The Lyons' Den" into a book, I think of my stories in script form, first. And I doubt I'll change. Hell, if A65 works out to be funny enough, I may revisit some old scripts and rework them. I dunno.
I just know that's what's keeping me going.
2 comments:
Keep at it, Kyle.
I had a bout of "odd sources of inspiration" this week as well. I was reading essays by Katie Roiphe - particulary her "The Naked and the Conflicted" in which she talks about how writers such as Philip Roth and John Updike write about sex in the 60s and how writers such as David Foster Wallace and Michael Chabon write about sex today...well, past tense for DFW...and then I thought about the gay lit that I've read and how sex is handled in gay lit...here I'm trying a distinction between the more "popular" gay lit titles in which sex seems more a matter of shading and timbre.
Well, it made me decide to try to write a book - ideally a critically acclaimed gay lit book that would handle sex in much the same way the Updike and Roth did in the 60s - sex and particularly extracurricular sex as a means to stave off - metaphorically - aging and death.
Well, maybe.
Dude, that's fantastic! Do it! Work through all the crap that comes with being a writer -- the procrastination and uncertainty and self-aggrandizement and questioning yourself -- you'll be so glad you did! I can't wait to read it when you're done...or finally reach the point where you can't do anything more and have to let it go. Kick ass!
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