The writing life: One Year Later (tm)
Okay, so, in the last week two people have said to me, "You need to update your blog."  So I'm updating.  I have to admit that I wonder if even ten per cent of those two people will then READ my blog. 

One of the things that kept me away was just not feeling that I knew what to DO with this semi-public forum.  But, recently, I've decided that I need a place to comment on how my writing career / hobby / call-it-what-you-will is going, if only to keep myself sane. 

I write every day, usually in little bits of break time that I can glean away from the bottomless pit of needs and wants that is my job.  That seems to work out pretty well.  Projects get started, projects get finished, projects get edited and produced and published. 

My latest completed project is a two-hour script for my audio series, the Arbiter Chronicles.  This is a "series finale," of sorts.  It's the 16th Arbiters script I've written.  Over the course of sixteen shows and seven years, I've decided that the series format is awfully cumbersome and hard to maintain.  It's hard to get the actors playing nine regular characters to find time in their lives to come in and record the shows.  So I've decided to end the series as it exists, and continue to develop the stories in other formats.  (More about that later.) 

About halfway through the plotting phase of this episode, I realized that this is really comparable to a screenplay.  So I dug out my notes from my screenwriting courses and tried to apply the rules of writing a successful screenplay to this script, "Contents Under Pressure."  Of course, you can't apply them all.  Audio is not film.  But the basic principles of plot and character still apply. 

I finished the first draft last week.  Bits of it are brilliant, if I do say so myself.  Bits of it are weak and plodding, I know.  As a whole, it's probably a little unfocused.  I find this is usually the case with an ambitious story.  Focus is usually a while in coming.  But at least it's done.  It exists, and now I have strong motivation to make it good. 

The bad news is, I don't have time to make it good.  I need to put some polishing touches on the next radio show I'm going to produce (more about that later, too), I have to write a radio play (two, actually) for performance at Farpoint this February, and I have a completed novel from two years ago to dust off, edit, and send to some agents.  So I'm probably a couple of months out from re-writing this one, although I did write an additional scene almost as soon as I finished it. 

In the meantime, to try and refine my script-writing edge, I'm reading Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin.  Riskin is the genius who wrote most of Frank Capra's films, including It Happened One Night, and  Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.  Probably the greatest screenwriter ever.  I think my family thinks I'm nuts, because I'm laughing so hard reading his script for Platinum Blonde right now.  (And I've never seen the film.)  It's sad, but Riskin's style of writing probably wouldn't sell a single script now.  He put in a lot of speeches, his stories had "messages."  And yet his dialogue is crisp and funny, and their are layers of subtlety in his characters that our modern "sophisticated" viewers can't begin to guess at.  And, if you try to tie any of his stories to a given political cause, you'll fail miserably.  The guy had his politics, but his stories lifted him beyond them. 

More on the next project tomorrow, I hope.