The Writer's Law...

When you say, as a writer, that you will only make a couple of small adjustments to a work...maybe add in a line or two to help clarify the piece...you will quickly find you're fooling yourself. There is no such thing as a small adjustment when working on any project. I've reminded myself of this while working on Find Ray T.

My plan was to add a few lines of dialogue and expand a little on a moment 2/3 of the way into the script to heighten its humor...but instead the fates decided to fuck me over. Apparently, my old copy of Final Draft is screwed up. When I found the latest version of FRT, from 5 years ago, it opened up nice and easy. But the second I made a change, half my formatting fell out of whack.

It was insane. Suddenly, my dialogue was mixing in with names in half the the script. And no matter what I did...from shut down the program and reopen to save into a RTF so I could upload into Word to putting in page breaks to keep the bad part from infecting the rest of the script, nothing worked. So in order to make the minimal changes, I'm having to reformat each line. Scene heading. Action. Character name. Dialogue. Section by section.

I'm about 35-40% done, and it's tiring...but it's also giving me the time to smooth over other sections of the script that could use it. Removing superfluous words. Heighten other moments. So this counts as a new draft. When I am done, it will be sharper, cleaner, clearer, and (hopefully) funnier...and Damon more complete a character. Perhaps even believably heroic, at the end.

And I will do no more screenplays. I'm sticking with books, from now on.