January 28 - IT'S A MILLION DEGREES.

Okay, that's an overstatement - it's only about 40 degrees celcius today (104 degrees farenheit), but in my house it feels like it's a million degrees. The joys of living in an unairconditioned apartment, I guess.

I really wanted to sit down and write tonight, but it is just SO. HOT. And we're in for a week of this weather. Even just the simple act of turning on my desk lamp makes me feel hotter.

As the classic Simpsons quote goes, 'It's too hot today'.

I'm putting in a good effort, though. I've got a fan set up DIRECTLY next to my face, I'm essentially in my underwear (too much information, too early in the friendship?), and whilst I'm sticking horribly to my faux-leather chair, I've managed to nut out a bit of scene structure that I was struggling with on the weekend. Who knows if it's going to be any good or not - could just be the result of a heat-addled brain.

Speaking of which - I've just decided this script needs a dream sequence. HECK YES!

Wow. It really is too hot today.

January 26 - Mild panic.

It's a long weekend at the moment, thanks to Australia Day, but it's filled up remarkably quickly. Consequently, rather than being out at the squillion events I've been invited to, I'm home alone trying to make some more progress on my script.

I transferred my Final Draft file from my iPad (where I was writing while I was away) onto my computer, only to find that the page count works differently between the two platforms - so whilst I was celebrating being at 30 pages when viewing my script on the iPad, I was realistically only at 27.

This caused a slight panic, given that I'm aiming for a one-page-per-day average in order to have a rough draft by the end of March. Before, I felt like I was keeping ahead; now, with 27 pages on the 26th of January, it feels like I'm about to fall behind.

I also hit my first roadblock, in that the script has been flowing really well up until now - but my transition into Act Two has reared its head and I now find myself uncertain about how I want it to work. I know the old adage says that it's better to write something terrible than nothing at all, but it was a bit crap to find myself suddenly realising that things got a bit muddy between Act 1 and Act 2.

Part of the solution (and whether or not this is a positive thing will be, I suppose, revealed in the fullness of time) was to add in a scene that I hadn't planned at all; one that ups the stakes significantly for the protagonist. I think it works. I'm not sure. But at least it's helped me move forward... even if it's really clunky. And I guess moving forward is my priority for the moment...

January 24 - Writing on the road.

I recently disappeared up the coast for about ten days for a very good friend's wedding, and finally made it home a few days ago. We had a bonus day in Sydney on the way home due to car issues, which was a bit of a pain - but at least I got to catch up with my friend Pete, the guy who set me this writing challenge in the first place. He was chuffed that his (possibly beer-influenced) challenge had actually been the thing that got me off my arse and into writing mode, so it was nice to share with him the fact that I'm now at 30 pages! Hurray!

Anyway, back to this wedding, and the cause of our epic journey up the coast. Kelly (the bride) and I used to do drama together when we were about fourteen, and have been friends ever since. Rather than fly up her wedding, being held up on the NSW / QLD border we figured we'd be a bit adventurous and make the 3,400km return journey by car - because everyone loves a road trip, right? Especially when you get to visit incredibly iconic Australian landmarks like this:


Also in the car were the co-writers of the TV show I'm working on, and my partner (who is also a writer and is currently workshopping a number of ideas). So essentially, we were a mobile script factory with a LOT of hours to kill - and consequently, several new writing ideas were developed in the 38 hours / six days of driving.

There's something about the rhythm of driving down Australian country roads (especially when you've got cruise control!) that lulls my brain into 'thinking mode'. Even if you're the designated driver, you can go hours and hours without really needing to use your brain for anything other than keeping the car pointed in the (vaguely) correct direction. Consequently, I had quite a sizeable amount of time to think about my script, and writing in general.

One musing I had on the trip was how fantastic travel is for inspiring stories and ideas. The TV show we're writing is based on our own experiences in London. My feature film is inspired by events that transpired in LA and Western Australia. Heck, many of the other short / feature ideas I've been listing recently have all been inspired whilst on the road, whether it be in Australia or overseas. There's something amazing about being thrown into new situations, with new people, and getting an insight into all kinds of locations, characters, countries and lives that you'd never come across at home.

And as someone who lives a pretty chaotic life and finds it hard to put time aside to work on writing projects, being stuck on a plane for 17 hours is a pretty good excuse to put your head down and WRITE - there's no getting up to grab a snack or put the washing on, you're pretty much trapped.  A fair amount of this feature was plotted out on the way home from LA last year, actually, and one of my most prolific writing streaks on an episode for my TV show concept occurred whilst stuck on the tarmac on the way home from Europe last year.

Writing in a car is a little trickier, but I'd loaded up Final Draft onto my iPad and found that I was surprisingly productive during the trip. I spent quite a lot of time re-reading what I'd written so far, thinking about what was coming next, and even managed to add a few extra pages. I also had a captive audience if I needed to ask a question about something.

Here's the view from my 'desk':


We also spent a few hours listening to writing podcasts, including one where Michael Hauge and Christopher Vogler talked about their versions of the hero's journey. I've never been a big podcast person (finding the time to sit down and listen is just too hard for me!) but it was interesting, now that I've started writing, to apply their concepts to where I was at. Reading a book is one thing, but having the authors talk about their work and apply it in a more practical sense was incredibly helpful. Admittedly I zoned out a few times, just because one of them would say something that would trigger a thought / idea about my film, and then I'd start thinking about that instead - but it was certainly reassuring to find out that (theoretically) I'm tracking pretty well against many of the points that they raised.

Something that's becoming clearer and clearer as things progress is just how important it is to do your groundwork before you start writing - the more you've plotted it out, the easier it is to keep things rolling (and to vaguely gauge how you're tracking).

And for me, as a first time feature-writer, just knowing that I'm ticking at least some of the 'how you're meant to do it' boxes, is very encouraging.

Now I'm back in Melbourne, the holiday is over, and it's time to get my head into the 'real' world again. But luckily, given I've had some pretty good momentum happening, I'm not that worried about keeping the ball rolling.

January 12, 2014 - a MEGA DAY!

So, the last week has proved to be a bit tricky. I was back at work this week, kinda unofficially (ie, I'm trying to get ahead before we officially open, when I conveniently head away for a wedding one day after we start up for the year), and I'm trying not to do to much of my personal stuff at the office. Plus I had quite a bit to do, largely because we're nearing the end of this massive project and I'm desperate not to miss anything. We've put over a year's worth of work into this film and I can't afford to mess anything up at the eleventh hour.

However, today I made up for it. I sat down and did a whopping FOUR HOURS of writing! Not just on my feature, but I also did a few passes on a short film that I'm writing and that I hope to do as a co-pro with these awesome people later in the year.

I've produced a LOT of films over the past few years, but nothing that I have written purely by myself and that I've put out into the world. So one of my goals this year is to shoot something that I've written and that I'm really proud of. Because I'm a total smartarse, I've come up with something that I want to shoot in two countries. Simultaneously. Just leave the Oscar on my doorstep, please.

 Anyway, I sat down to do a pass on this particular script, fixed a few bits and pieces (which added a few pages - good god, this is a long short film!), and then jumped onto the feature.

I'm also about to head up the coast on a road trip for a friend's wedding, and I know I'm going to find it a bit hard to write over the next week, so I wanted to get my page count up. I've got Final Draft on my ipad now, and I've got a whooooole lot of driving to do, so who knows, maybe I'll have some time to write in the car when we're on this epic journey:

 

Now I'm at 26 pages (here comes 'Break into Two!') and I'm pretty happy with how it's tracking so far. Yes, the intro is too long, and I'm hitting some of my key markers a bit late (the theme is stated on page 9 not 5, the debate isn't until page 15, etc) but I'm not wildly off... which is reassuring. Who would have thought, that research I did into structure actually helped.

It's still early days, sure, but so far I'm really  happy with how the story is unfolding too...  there were a few story points that I really wasn't quite sure would work when I was plotting this out, but as soon as I started to write them - BAM! Solutions presented themselves. The scene took on a life of its own.

The characters, with the risk of sounding like a total dick, are starting to develop their own personalities and taking the scenes in slightly different directions...and that is one of my most favourite, FAVOURITE parts of screenwriting. I love it when stuff starts happening that you didn't expect, relationships start building and scenes start unfolding in ways that you had never (and could never!) have planned. It's some kind of intoxicating magic when that happens and I got a whiff of it today.

I really hope I can get some work in on the road. Or at least spend the 17 hour drive brainstorming stuff with my fellow road-trippers (whether they like it or not). I feel like I'm onto something good at the moment...

January 3, 2014 - An hour is better than nothing, I guess.

Today I only got in an hour. But an hour is better than nothing!

Prioritising writing is hard. There's always so much to do, and getting yourself into the right brainspace can be tricky.

But still - an hour is an hour, and I'm getting a WHOLE lot out of my head. It's immensely satisfying.

I've decided that for the first draft, I'm viewing it as a total braindump - no proper formatting, very basic screen directions, just dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. That's the fun bit. I'll bore myself with the formatting later on...

Plus, I know I'm going to tear the shit through this draft later on, so it hardly seems worth it to make it pretty just yet.

January 2, 2014 - Talking is the same as writing...right?

Okay, to be honest, today I didn't actually write anything on this script. A bit poor, given my roaring effort yesterday.

However, I did talk a lot about writing, and I figure that also helps.

I spent the afternoon with my good buddies Trevor and Monica. For the last three years we've been writing a TV show together - an 8 part comedy/drama currently entitled 'Snakebite and Black', about a young Australian girl who moves to London to work in a pub, but finds herself well and truly out of her depth. It's a coming-of-age piece, based on our own experiences, and we are freaking in LOVE with it.

Unfortunately it's been a difficult year, so we haven't done as much work on it as we wanted... but today we got to chat about our plans for the new year, and our goals for this series. Even if we never get it made (it'd have to be a co-pro, and that's a hard thing to wrangle), we're having a ball writing it and we want to see it through. Man, it felt good to be talking about this show again.

When I was reading 'Save the Cat Strikes Back', there was a section in there saying how you should do one thing every day that furthers your career - if it's not writing, it should be networking, pitching, listing ideas, etc. In this sense, I would count today as being incredibly productive - we talked about 'Snakebite', I got to pitch 'Kimberley Rose' to Trevor, and we also talked about some ideas for an interactive theatre piece we want to develop this year.

I love talking about writing. I absolutely love bouncing ideas off other people. To be honest that's probably one of the reasons it's taken so long to write a feature - I've been a very collaborative writer up until this point. Trevor and I have been writing together since we were about 17 years old when we were running a theatre company together (as evidenced by this godawful website - it's crazy that angelfire still exists) and wrote a wonderful film together called 'Pisces, Arise' (which, unfortunately, we totally ruined in production...but I still maintain it's one of the best things I've ever written).

Not having that discipline, or that other person to use as a sounding board, has made it hard to start this feature, I think... and it's also a bit terrifying to step out on your own and see if you really are any good without your creative 'other half'.

I guess only time will tell who the real genius between us is...let's hope this doesn't turn into a 'Red Dwarf' scenario.

January 1, 2014: IT BEGINS.

Last night, I went out to a New Year's Eve party at my good friend Rob's house. I'm a big fan of New Years, I'm a sucker for the symbolism it brings, so I'm always up for doing something party-ish. This year, however, I had to push myself out of my comfort zone a bit- for the first time ever, I actually kinda felt like staying in. 2014 is a big blank slate right now, and that scared me a little. Plus it'd been forever since I'd been to a house party and I'm starting to feel, God forbid, a little 'old' when I go to them these days.

This paranoia was indeed justified later in the night when a particular party guest, who clearly thought he was pretty seasoned and mature at the ripe old age of 24, totally freaked out when he found out I was 32 and had to call his girlfriend and a bunch of people over so that they could all guess my age and marvel at 'how great I looked'.

Anyway, I sucked it up and headed off to the party, and had an (unsurprisingly, now that I think about it) excellent night with some good friends, my brother and his girlfriend, my own partner, and a bunch of new people we met. There were lots of film-type people there (including a few other people working on feature scripts) so I blabbed and blabbed about how I was starting my feature at the start of the year, how exciting it was to be finally doing it, etc. Somewhere around the 2.30am mark, someone pointed out that the New Year had well and truly begun, so I had better start writing soon.

There was a slight moment of panic.

Luckily my friend Josh started crumping and we were all distracted by his hotttt dance action, but the initial pang was still there - this is actually happening now. After all this talk, I gotta come up with the goods.

We left the party at 4am or thereabouts, were home and in bed by 4.30am (a definite record for me - it's been a while since I've been out that late!) and didn't get up until early afternoon. We made a giant breakfast / brunch and then were too full to move. The afternoon lazed by. The clock was ticking. It was the first day of my Giant Writing Adventure, and by 4pm I still hadn't written anything.

So, with great concentration, I peeled myself from the couch, plonked down in front of my computer... and BEGAN.

It was pretty sweet. I wrote the first two scenes (about 8 pages or so) which meant that I was already smashing my lame 'one page a day' average.

Not a bad effort - especially since this was me, not that long beforehand:



It's only one day down. But I'm still pretty excited.

The genesis of this blog (and me writing a feature film)

Greetings, gentle reader, and welcome to my epic journey: the writing of my very first feature film screenplay.

A little background is in order before we begin, I suppose. I'm a 32 year old writer / producer / musician / general creative type from Melbourne, Australia, and I've been making arts-based stuff since I was in my late teens. Writing was always what I loved doing the most, but being a natural control-freak I fell into producing pretty quickly. Not to say that I don't love it, but it's certainly much easier to find a job as a producer than a writer in Melbourne. Anyway, as the years have rolled on, I've produced some awesome films that I'm incredibly proud of (you can find most of them here), but have also come to the realisation that producing tends to totally drain any available brainspace I have for writing (or doing anything else creative, really).

I've spend the last three years or so slowly nutting out / writing a TV show with two very awesome collaborators, so it's not like I've been totally lax on the writing thing... but my goal of writing a feature film script has remained on my 'to do' list since 2009. For some reason, writing 90 pages of content seemed incredibly intimidating (although nutting out 8 hours of TV content wasn't, for some reason) so my feature ideas have always been a big half-baked; I've had concepts I've liked but I've never taken the time to actually block them out properly. And until very recently, I hadn't even read any of the 'classic' screenwriting books that other 'serious' screenwriters seem to be able to recite inside out and back to front.

I was working on a supernatural thriller idea for quite a while, but I could not for the life of me work out what the ending should be (a minor detail), so that one started to stagnate a little for me. I decided that, to make things easier on myself, I should stick with what I was comfortable with for my first feature script - something in the comedy-drama kinda field.

The actual plot for this film was inspired by a number of events - the general initial idea was that I'd like to do something fish-out-of-water-y, possibly involving a road-trip, and utilising some of Australia's crazy landscapes.  Several months later, I saw a comedian called Ray Harrington at Filmapalooza in LA, whose work in this particular film inspired the beginnings of my lead character. I decided that I liked the idea of an American finding out that his real father is an Australian stockman / outdoorsy type, so I started brainstorming in that direction. This was then followed by a facebook callout asking for feedback on a very minor story point (if you were trying to track someone down these days, how would you do it? Would you really just facebook / google them?) that turned into an incredibly insightful and revealing discussion about family and fathers that turned my whole story on its head.  Finally,  I took a trip to the very isolated El Questro in Western Australia, where my parents were working temporarily, and suddenly realised that this is where I wanted my film to be set (and that the character of the estranged father was, in fact, almost eerily similar to a guy I met up there). After six months of general, floaty ideas, I suddenly had a complete vision for a feature... and I even knew how it ended!

This was followed by about two months of reading books, plotting the story out, and then eventually being convinced by my good friend Pete at Opening Act Films that I should set myself a goal of  three months to get a rough draft out, and six months for a polished draft. This conversation was in November 2013, but I managed to push the starting date for this challenge back to January 1, 2014 - the date on which I resolved to start actually writing dialogue.

And indeed, I actually did. And if feels freaking fantastic to finally be doing it.

So, to give you an idea as to what this film is, here's my brief pitch:

Currently entitled 'Kimberly Rose' (which I'm reasonably sure I'm gonna change), it's a coming-of-age / Golden-Fleece story of a quiet, bookish insurance broker from New England named Ellis. He's grown up in a small town with Rose, his single mother, whom he's incredibly close to. As far as Ellis knows, his father was Rose's college sweetheart, who left when Ellis was a child and has had virtually nothing to do with him ever since . But Ellis's world is turned upside-down when Rose, hospitalised with a brain tumour, reveals to Ellis that his biological father might actually be an Australian horse-wrangler she had a brief affair with whilst she was teaching English in Europe. Desperate that Ellis not be left alone after she dies, Rose wants to at least give Ellis the chance of reuniting with his (possible) father and his half-siblings on the other side of the globe, should Ellis decide to seek them out. Convinced by his outgoing best friend Scott that tracking down his real father is an absolute must, Ellis and Scott embark on an adventure to the other side of the world that will change their ideas about family, friendship, and what it means to belong.

Anyway, I have a very long year stretching out in front of me, but I'm excited to see where it all goes...