Day 17

13:10

Now, that's more like it. Waking up just before sunset. Sitting in front of the word processor without another care in the world...

First, a little exercise, and some lunch.

14:15

Just found a very friendly ferret rummaging around the bins outside. Lis has decided to name him Fergus. I've never seen one bef0re - he's a damn-site more charismatic than the cat.

Maybe I could get a ferret, and we could be pals. He could run across my writing desk (if I had one) and we could play in boring moments.

Or I could stop daydreaming and start doing some work.

02:15

I'm staring at a couple of words that raise conflicting emotions. It's page 129 of my script. The words sit below a trickle of print and above a sea of white: THE END.

I don't know what to do. I always find the last days of writing a story the most difficult: it's almost impossible to write a satisfactory ending in the first draft.

I find it relatively easy to start something off, make it intriguing, start each day in a new place. When you get to the middle, as long as you've planned enough in advance, it tends to progress smoothly, so long as you keep it sweet, concise, and you know with confidence where you're going. But the end, that's where suddenly, nothing seems nearly as powerful or dramatic as you thought it would be. You start by looking back over the last couple of pages from yesterday and thinking, 'No, that's all wrong.' You can start and end in virtually the same place, entirely disatisfied with just with what the characters say. These are the places where plots stand still, and you see who the characters really are. And they're just empty.

I think this certainly might be the case with first drafts, but then - even after five drafts, my first feature screenplay attempt still wasn't dramatic enough. The last twenty pages of a story always seems to slow me down, mire me in problems that sap my confidence in the project as a whole.

This might be tied to the fact that it's been days since I wrote properly, and it feels difficult for me to get back on my feet.

I realised something today: it's not difficult to do something hard when, every day, the proof comes back that you're succeeding at it. It's when you've spent a few days failing, that's when everything else in your life seems a better idea - more fun, more of a distraction - than the difficult thing that you've been doing.

I don't know whether today was a sucess or a failure. But I reached my word count, and that's good.

Oh, and in the course of writing this screenplay, I've listened to Jerry Goldsmith's soundtrack for Chinatown 58 times in its entirity.

I should find some more music.

word count: 3,384
hours writing: 5