Monday 9 May 2011

"Allen Bridge" blog #11...

The page count is now up to 55 after a weekend full of distractions, I would have written for longer today but an impending storm (that has thus far not materialised) scared me away a bit - I didn't want to be writing and then be on the receiving end of a power cut at the wrong moment, because knowing my luck Final Draft would be auto saving when the power went out, thus no doubt corrupting the file, thus losing any progress I'd made. So playing it safe and not tempting fate, I left it mid-way through a lengthy conversation between central protagonist Miller, and curious character Harland, at The Black House.

The conversation in question goes into a fair bit of depth about the town itself and it's dark history - both past and very present - some of which comes into play in Act III.

So if it wasn't for the threat of a storm (and therefore power cut, which in our area is common when even a snifter of thunder and lightning looms overhead) I'd have bashed out the entire conversation in one sitting - but better to split the sessions and not need it, than to not split the sessions and run the risk of a power cut at the exact moment you don't want one, and then lose all the new content due to a corrupted file.

Even still, when I've completed the conversation, I'll go back over it to add a few things in that I will have no doubt forgotten ... indeed I had assumed I'd have been flying through the pages today, but even a lengthy dialogue scene doesn't necessarily flow freely from your fingers. Perhaps because this one is mostly from Harland's mouth, and it provides a lot of town history, rather than character interplay - the latter I can rattle through quite swiftly (particular if it's comedy, due to my 'banter style' sense of humour), while the former takes a lot more attention, and invention. Harland's talking about the town's history - and that history has to be invented in the first place. You have to write a fictional history before you can even retell that history through one of your characters.

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