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.