Before I get back to talking about important stuff...

Title ideas:
1.) Something to Lose
2.) Going It Alone
3.) Nothing to Lose
4.) Gunpoint
5.) Lethal Force

And now, for an overly elaborate analogy:
Imagine you've got a messy room to clean, full of crap you can't throw away. So you set about just separating everything into categories, insisting that you'll arrange it all properly later. The separation process is tough and grueling, but once it's done, you basically pass out and think, "Okay, all that's done. Now I just gotta arrange it later. Easy." So some time later, you come back to the room and see all the separated stuff and realize that you have no freakin' clue how you're gonna arrange everything or if you'll even be able to do so at all and that, in any case, it's gonna take forever. So you curl up in the fetal position and write a blog where you make a weird analogy about the room and throw out possible titles.

Some people would have just said "Hey, revising this story's gonna be tough," and left it at that. But I'm a writer with blog space to fill, dammit.

While I'm stalling...

Might as well throw up some quick thoughts while I'm taking a break from doing the important stuff.

I screwed myself over as far as time goes (big surprise). Totally my fault. No excuses. I just suck and let myself get intimidated when I actually had time to work on it. Now, I'm fighting through other classes and trying to get this done at the same time. With that said, all that over-thinking has made some parts of writing it easier. The excessively frustrating part is that I still have a couple big events that I'm not sure how to make work logically within the story. I know what needs to happen, but how is another thing. I'm gonna have to hope that when I actually get to writing it, it makes more sense than it does in my head, just planning it. My biggest problem is keeping the love interest (Jess) relevant to the story and having her involved in what's going on.

I'm gonna do absolutely everything in my power to get this done on time, but I honestly don't know if it's gonna happen. It's not that I'm wildly obsessed with avoiding a hit in my grade, it's more a matter of personal pride since I know that I had plenty of time to do it. I don't want to have to deal with that kind of shame. If being frustrated and stressing out over a story counted for anything, then I'd be a huge success. I gotta stop letting my writing make me so miserable. But I guess it's too late for that on this go around. I just gotta get it done and hope that it makes some shred of sense.

Writing myself out of a corner

I think the event that is currently my midpoint was going to happen later in the story as I had it loosely arranged in my head. With that said, I think I made the right decision - it had to happen when it did, but as of right now, I feel like I'm paying hard for it. It's like I wrote myself into a corner and now all these plot points that I thought were planned out neatly in my head have revealed themselves to be jumbled bits of vague ideas that may or may not even fit at this point. Allow me to be a bit more specific so I'm not talking in vague references:

The first half of the story was mostly spent with Nate, the unappreciated Internal Affairs investigator, trying to expose the physically superior, beloved, but corrupt cop, Wrigley. So they were sort of going at it without anyone else really knowing. My plan was to have roughly from the midpoint to halfway through the rest of Act 2 spent with the cops finally suspecting Wrigley before he blows his cover and a warrant is put out for his arrest. So what's the problem? Well my midpoint is more... extreme than I imagined. There's really no way that Wrigley would be able to go any length of time without being exposed at this point (Nate set it up so that Wrigley almost kills him in front of a ton of witnesses, plus the criminals with whom he was aligned have just been busted, and Nate's even got a recording of him saying too much). There's really no way to move the story forward other than having Wrigley realize he's exposed and take off to become a full-fledged fugitive/criminal, fighting the cops and going after everyone who tarnished his good name.

That raises a few problems. For one thing, it gives me the age old "crap, I'm running out of story near the end of the Second Act" dilemma. Two, it kind of skews the idea of the good guy fighting the uphill battle. That's not to say that Nate has it easy, but right now, he has to be a bloody mess on his way to the hospital, and then he'll help with the investigation. But after that, then what? Obviously he'll be roped into a big final confrontation with Wrigley, but there aren't going to be a whole lot of opportunities for one Internal Affairs investigator to go after this guy if the whole police force wants him (and now the criminals are pissed at him, too). The story can't just become about Wrigley killing people while Nate goes around talking to Jess (the love interest) and other cops and whoever else. I've gotta connect the characters - the setup is there, but it's mostly only there for a final confrontation with maybe one failed attempt. Jess has to be threatened, for example.

And there's also an issue of how much time can/should pass. Logically, there would be a passage of time - a couple weeks to a month, where Wrigley has fully disappeared, maybe even becoming the FBI's problem, Nate has healed up a bit and has had time to hang out with Jess and all that stuff before Wrigley comes back and the shit hits the fan for the final few sequences (how Act 3 is going to be long enough is another issue for me. I thought I had it worked out, but I'm not sure anymore.). But from a writing standpoint, I know that it's better to avoid any major transitions in time.

Whatever. I'll figure it out, but it gets a little tougher with each section. Writing in this blog helps me see through some of the clutter and figure out what I need to do, in the same way that talking it out helps even if no one's really listening.

Midpoint Thoughts

Well, I guess I should first give myself a pat on the back for not only getting everything in on time, but doing so with a reasonable amount of time to spare and without completely losing my mind (emphasis on "completely"). There's no point in trying to determine if I think that what I wrote is genius, trash, or anywhere between, because my answer could be different on any given day. The days after finishing one of these sections are interesting - a little intimidating - in that I have to take a step back from the script and mentally re-adjust. I don't mean "stepping back" in the sense of not working on it since I have been for the last two days. However, I find that I have to think about what got me excited about writing in the script in the first place and see how much progress I've made in achieving those things. It's almost like I've been swimming through the ocean and now I've found a floating log to hold onto for a minute before I start pressing on again... yeah, I guess that analogy works.

So I have to focus on just blasting through a section, pausing long enough to think about what needs to happen in the next one, and pressing forward. It's odd how certain things that you swore needed to happen in your story when you started end up being easily tossed to the side, while others prove to be every bit as essential as you initially thought. And I'm really, really hoping that I can keep the work on this section more evenly distributed than the others so it's not a mad dash to get it done during the second week. But it always starts as such a jumbled mess initially and takes shape gradually. I find that I'm not all that great at predicting how much time a sequence will take, so it's always a roller coaster ride in itself to see if I've got too much, not enough, or just the right amount.

I'll edit this tomorrow or so, as I had a lot of thoughts, and I'd say only a fraction of them are springing to mind in a jumbled mess right now.

A Quick One (While He's Away) <--Who reference

While my awkwardness in getting moving on Act II is a small wonder (it still feels a little awkward), I'm feeling better now than I did at the time of my last posting. Like with the last section, I keep fluctuating between thinking I have not enough and too much. I think I started with too little and then came up with too much in an attempt to overcompensate. So it's actually more reflective of earlier drafts of the plot in that I may be trying to cram in too much. Then again, there's an equally good chance that I'm just fine.

I get the impression as I'm writing that my scenes are over-written and that the plot's sloppy, but that's what first drafts are for. As long as I can straighten it out later - hey, if I have too much, then it should just be a matter of taking away, right? Even so, there is a grand design to it all that I think makes it work. We'll see, it's still really early to comment on that sort of thing, as I'm not done. In fact, I'm slightly worried about meeting the deadline, but I'm sure I'll squeak by, as always.

EDIT: A few hours after posting this, I got really jumbled on potential plot points, all of which are cool in some ways, but flawed in others, and now I'm just frustrated that it isn't all magically perfect immediately. I'm really gonna have to be accepting of the "First drafts always suck," kind of mentality and hope that I find my story as I'm writing, because I know there's something awesome somewhere in there.

Act 2

Writing Act II has thus far proven... awkward. That's not to say that it doesn't work (or that it won't, at least), but I'd be lying if I said that the story is writing itself. Obviously, the more you struggle to write something, the more self conscious you get about it and the more you question how much it works. I suppose the goal, for now, is to avoid getting too bogged down in that sort of thing and just keep progressing forward. Fair enough.

I also understand that Act I is typically supposed to be easier than Act II, so it's not as if I'm discovering some new territory here. In my head, though, Act I had a pretty linear path. There was only so much that could happen. Now, the freedom to take the story virtually anywhere is proving to be very frightening. I also have a bad tendency to get more interested in a character's pre-existing life before all the craziness than in the actual meat of the story - not just when I'm writing, but even when I'm watching movies. I think it's because that section of the story is easier to relate to, since nothing too out of the ordinary has happened, and the character hasn't had a chance to do anything about his crumby situation.

It probably also doesn't help that Act I is more about establishing the character(s), while Act II is about getting the plot rolling. That's been causing me more trouble with this script from the beginning. If I focus on writing toward the midpoint, it helps. As usual, though, it all comes down to sitting and down and doing it, all excuses aside. I'd better get on that.

Act I - JUST finished

Talk about racing against the clock. I just handed in Act I at 5:00 on the dot. I didn't even have a chance to proofread, and I'm sure there's some lines here and there that I would like to add/delete/change. But that's why it's a first draft. I've gone back and forth from thinking my story was awesome to thinking it was terrible to everything in between. Then I thought I might not have enough for a full script after having thought I had way too much. So I am ALL over the place here, but I got it done and I think that what I wrote is interesting (for now, at least). I am worried, going into Act 2, though. I can definitely see running out of material or having to dig way too deep to keep it interesting. Whatever. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. For now, I'm happy to have met the deadline, and now I have to just keep pressing forward.

Act I

Misguided though it may have been, my earlier planning is helping to make work on Act I far less miserable than it could have been. Since my problems were that I had too much rather than too little, it's mostly just been a matter of focusing my story, and to be honest, that will probably be far more difficult in Act II. One step at a time, though. It helps, in a lot of ways, to just start writing - sometimes planning every plot point makes it easy to complicate things, where as writing it out cuts through the crap and simplifies it. The parts of my story that establish the characters are proving much easier than the parts related to the plot.

After watching all these cop movies, I've seen that the plot doesn't need to be half as complicated as I thought (watch Internal Affairs or Pride and Glory - they're actually pretty simple stories where not a whole lot happens), but there's so many options for what a corrupt cop can do that it can be hard to figure out what's appropriate. So yeah, connecting all of the characters in a sensible way and figuring out the different parts of Wrigley's schemes are the difficult part at this point. Figuring out how the characters should behave and talk is far easier. I guess right now I'm just building toward a first act decision of Nate physically confronting Wrigley, presumably to help Jess, as opposed to following him from a safe distance, thus kicking off the process of Wrigley coming after him, specifically.

As a brief side note on that subject, I'm toying with how much of a jerk I want to Nate to come off as early on, while Wrigley is initially more likable, even though the audience pretty much knows that he's corrupt early on. It's not until we really start to see that Nate is trying to do the right thing in the face of daunting evil that things shift. I find the notion of rooting for the guy who, on the surface, is less likable to be an interesting one.

If I can just accept that this is a first draft and that it can be fixed later, I should be good. However, I tend to try too hard to make it perfect the first time, and that slows the process. Damn neurosis.

It has begun..

As of Friday when I sent in my opening sequence, I'm feeling good about writing this again, although I will admit that as of right now, I don't have the plot finely worked out or anything. That'll be a large part of the process of writing Act 1 for me - figuring out the rest of the plot.

My opening sequence basically featured Nate very suspiciously staking out two drug dealers who he believes to be connected to a local murder (we'll find out later that he suspects that they have info on Wrigley) when Jon shows up to give him a hand. A simple questioning turns into Nate having to chase the one guy down, which proves more difficult than expected. Nate gives as good as he gets, but is tempted to do the thug in even worse, prompting him to remember why he switched to Internal Affairs in the first place. Jon comes out unscathed. I tagged on a scene of Wrigley playfully showing off his martial arts skills back at the police station just to lead in to whatever I write next.

I've been studying different cop movies, as recommended by Professor Kaufhold, and still have a few more to go through. Production Workshop has held that up a bit, but it should be good.

Back to the drawing board

Despite my best efforts, Professor Kaufhold tore my synopsis up pretty hard. Some of the critiques I totally agree with, others, I'm not sure, but I'm sure that, as usual, he's right on all of them and I'll probably realize that soon enough. The problem is that I've got a LOT of work to do after what I thought would be a somewhat simple matter of writing the opening sequence. Seriously, so much stuff has to go (my problems were based around there being "too much" and a "lack of focus" more than anything else) and... yeah, I'm a little lost right this second, so I'll just leave it at this brief post for now.

Plot... or not

Just in case the "Clarification of Assignments" was inspired by my posts, I'm fully aware that this isn't the place to put official assignments. I'm using this to try and get all these ideas bouncing around in my head into some kind of sensible, organized (albeit sloppy) format before I type up more proper, formal versions to be sent in. With that said, I was going to post a sloppy version of my plot, but I ended up typing way more than anybody would have any reason to read (other than Professor Kaufhold, of course, hehe), so I won't do that.

After wracking out my brain on this to the point where my insanity should no longer be questioned, I'm fairly content with where I've got it, especially since I've got an ending with which I'm happy and yet isn't as ridiculous as what I had planned originally. However, I really scrambled to get this done before the deadline, and, as such, it will still need some work even as I start writing the script itself (hell, if I know that, then what's Professor Kaufhold gonna say? Oh well.).

There's probably a few logic errors in there, with some events possibly feeling forced. Dominic seems to be a giant Macguffin rather than an actual character, but I think it almost works. I'm sure I'll be told otherwise (understandably). Regardless, it's come a LONG way and given where it was, I'm fairly happy with it as of this moment. That could change as soon as tomorrow. Who knows? Oh, and I've probably got more ideas floating around for establishing Nate's character than I'll ever be able to get in (enough for an A&E Biography, probably), so it'll be interesting to see what gets cut out. Some parts of it will be easy to write and others will be quite difficult, but we'll cross those bridges when we get to them.

Getting the Wheels in Motion Part 2

Adding to the everyone's hatred of Nate is that he's investigating Tyrell Wrigley, the most publicly beloved cop on the force. This guy gets in all the local papers for his involvement in the community - he teaches karate to kids - and he's got a wife and two kids. In his late 30s (possibly early 40s), he's a former marine and thus is really, really dangerous. This isn't your fat, donut-loving cop. However, the mob's been getting away with an awful lot lately, so somebody's crooked. And when Nate discovers some very poorly disguised mob murders in Wrigley's area, he thinks he's got his man.

Sure enough, Nate's right that Wrigley's been taking bribes to look the other way and giving the mob insider information, but he needs some really hard evidence to be able to convince everyone else. That need to try and catch Wrigley in the act leads to Wrigley catching on to Nate's investigation. Given that he's got the mob on his side and has Nate physically outmatched in every way, Nate's in serious trouble as they come after him. Luckily, Nate has no sense of his own well-being, so he doesn't back off from his investigation.

It probably goes without saying that there will be at least one major mob boss type who will serve as a secondary villain to Wrigley, and his goons will give Nate ample action-oriented trouble.

Nate goes back and questions some of the people involved in Wrigley's old cases. This leads him to Jessica, the girl with whom he fell in love back in high school, but was always way out of his league. The story goes that she hooked up with some thug [tentatively] named Dominic who got her pregnant and she dropped out of school. Nate hadn't heard from her since (and it can be assumed that this was the first thing to really start forming Nate into the abrasive guy he is now). She's a waitress whose kids are grown up and she's saving up to move some place better. Her and Dominic have been split for years, as he was never good to her (Nate suspects that he used to beat her), but he pops up now and again to be a thorn in her side. Wrigley has some sort of interest in him.

I was going to have Dominic just be some random gangsta street thug type, but I think it makes more sense to have him be a low-level mobster. Meanwhile, Jess's will probably have a lot of family connections to the mob so that she's caught in the middle of the conflict and there's something really, tangibly at stake if Nate fails. Depending on what ending I go with, Dominic may be an important character with a real presence, or he may just be a faceless name that gets thrown around to progress the story. More on that later. Nate is, of course, still interested in Jess and spends a large portion of the movie trying to figure out how to get closer to her, visiting her at work, etc. If there's one thing Nate is terrible at, it's figuring out women. This becomes even more complicated once Wrigley and the mob come after him, as he doesn't want to put her in danger. But Wrigley's already asking her questions since he needs to find Dominic (who nobody can find), who evidently has some potentially incriminating information.

There's one more important character: Jon Levy, the one cop on the force who Nate can almost call a friend. They aren't fully partners, but Jon helps him out from time to time. Though not the total badass that Wrigley is, Jon is an alpha male of a cop - strong, athletic, and by-the-book. Jon knew Nate back in high school, which is why they are able to interact now, despite the fact that Jon acknowledges Nate's unpleasant personality traits these days. Jon is divorced, probably with a kid, though he doesn't have to have one. Oh yeah, and he dated Jess back in high school. Throughout, Jon will help Nate out of a jam or two, which is good, because Nate never calls for backup. I'm interested in writing these two together - I think they'll have an interesting dynamic.

So, we've got: Nate, Wrigley, Jess, Jon, and possibly Dominic and a mob boss - I'll call him Joey Ragano, since that's the name I used for a mob boss in my Legal Battle story that went nowhere. Next, I'll get into the more specific events of the story, whether they're set in stone or not, and that will hopefully allow me to go back and fully work out the characters before I send in formal bios.

Getting the wheels in motion Part 1

Whether my brain got over-saturated with the details of this story from thinking about it non-stop for all of break and then some or I'm just a lazy bastard with elaborate excuses is debatable, but either way I've been avoiding this far more than I should. Hopefully talking about some of the things that I have set in my head here will get me back into things more appropriately. The good news is, I think I've got the characters pretty well set - my issues are more related to specific events and what I can or can't squeeze into this thing.

Let's see, we've got Detective Nate Hawkins. He's a very lonely, very abrasive Internal Affairs investigator. Nobody likes him. Oh yeah, and there's a mob-related crime wave going down. I think it makes the most sense to have the story set in a North Philly suburb-type area, as it would still have a somewhat seedy city feel to it while making it more plausible that a lot of the characters knew each other when they were in high school and that sort of thing.

Back to Nate, he's in his mid-30s and has all the other cops, who can't stand him, are convinced he's gonna kill himself. This might not make it into the script, but he once "jokingly" said that he wouldn't kill himself until his mom died. Well, his mom just died a few weeks before the start. They didn't talk much, but he would support her financially. Meanwhile, he's got a deadbeat brother with whom he doesn't get along who was a mooch off their mother and they argue over who was the better son, since his brother actually spent time with her.

Nate's never been in a relationship. Ever. No, he is not an alcoholic. I actually considered having him be a Pepsi junkie just to poke fun at the notion of the cop with a drinking problem. We'll see if that makes it. The thing is, Nate is actually pretty good at his job despite the his inability to deal with people properly. Sure, nobody likes him, but he doesn't really stir up a lot of trouble and he kind of keeps everyone from getting too sloppy. It doesn't hurt that the Internal Affairs board's level of authority is kind of a joke. Depending on what ending I go with (you'll see what I'm talking about as I get further into this), I really want to have a running theme of Nate struggling to resist giving into a sense of brutality. In early drafts, I had it where he would push the excessive force boundaries with each criminal he'd apprehend, even threatening them with the idea that he could kill them and would be right to do so. Every time, he stops himself (though he may have one formal brutality charge against him), but in the end, he'd snap and kill someone who probably deserved it. But I'm getting really far ahead of myself with that.

He's got an extreme sense of justice at all costs, has no respect for the rights of criminals, and has been shot so many times that he can't keep his hand steady enough to fire a gun properly. I'll probably have it so that he doesn't hit a single shot until the end. He's a tough bastard who will get hurt a lot throughout and keep on coming, to the point where he's kind of bumbling in his pursuits. There's nothing smooth about what he does, and it's more through will, determination, and some cleverness that he survives rather than physical ability.

I've sort of developed everything else in the story as stemming from Nate's character and what would be needed to test and challenge him and that sort of thing, rather than starting with a plot first. What does he want? Love (isn't that sweet?), though he would never say it, and I'll get into that later. What does he need? Probably the same thing, but on a more basic level, he just needs somebody to care about him and vice versa. The Detective thing keeps him going day to day and gives him something to do, but he has it more because he's compelled to fight crime more than actually taking pleasure in the job. He's not really qualified to do anything else.

Definitely more to come. I'll get into the other characters.

Pitch; Initial Thoughts

I've been hammering out this currently untitled Detective story since just before I went on Co-op last September and it's come a long way, just not quite far enough. When I pitched it in Screenplay Story Development, it was pretty convoluted and I realized I was gonna have to simplify and maybe change some things I didn't want to change. So I spent the second half of break freaking out and trying to make this work. It went to ninth hour, but I had my pitch pretty much down pat, and was feeling good about it. I wasn't nervous. I had it this time...

And then I skipped one sentence. I was fine, but then I fell apart and botched yet another pitch. Yeah, I know I'm the only one who cares, but I wanted to get it right this time. In any case, that brief pitch obviously only scratched the surface of what I have in mind, and there's quite a few things I would like to discuss with Professor Kaufhold, particularly the ending. I really want to avoid too many cliched cop drama tropes and write a good story that doesn't abandon the ideas that made me want to write it in the first place. We'll see, and I'll get more specific about what I'm referring to in the coming days.

If nothing else, this is making me realize how bat shit crazy I am, as I went over my synopsis of this so much that I really had to step away from it for a day. I intend to work a few things out with it tomorrow (crap, it's after midnight, so make that "today"). I actually am looking forward to writing this, which will help immensely. Hopefully I can come up with a title before too long, so I have something a little more formal by which to refer to it.

If I go on any further, I'll start ranting about things I hate, so that's all for now.