Ain't No Line like a Deadline

Last night I had a dream within a dream. Like I woke up once, went about whatever I was doing, and then woke up a SECOND time. I have some crazy dreams, but this is the first time a dream within a dream has ever happened to me. Doesn't that only happen in scary and poorly written movies?

I am not participating in Screnzy this year (I know you all have been on the edges of your seats to know what I decided). I am insanely busy and can barely fit in my regularly scheduled writing, never mind a completely fresh story I hadn't even thought of yet. Screnzy, you're so much fun. Maybe next year.

Because, oh how productive deadlines can make me! Former screenwriting professor recently emailed me details to a screenwriting contest. They were giving a discount particularly to Michigan students. This weekend I thought maybe I had a shot of cleaning up Keys to the Garden in time (when, of course, I haven't even started my draft), but welcome to reality, Amy, you're not in college anymore where you can spend 7 hours at the coffee shop writing for your day of deadline.

Those days were so awesome.

Juggling a job, a life, and my writing doesn't allow for that anymore. But did this contest I won't be able to enter get my butt in gear? Heck yes. I wrote 7 pages yesterday. I got through my inciting incident. If I can keep this self discipline up, maybe I can finish the new draft of Keys by the end of the month, which I NEED to do because that's the Nicholl deadline.

So the deadline to a contest I won't be able to enter will have me pushing to finish my script by April 11th, the deadline for Creative Screenwriting's contest, which I will fail to reach because of the rest of my life, BUT it will give me enough momentum to finish in time for the Nicholl.

It's nice to know that I need THREE deadlines in order to complete one draft. But truly, self imposed deadlines just don't work as well as real deadlines do.

A 2 Cupcake Kinda Day

It feels like there're fireworks going off in my brain. I feel like I might have at one point had a topic for this post, but my seizing histamines are clouding my thought processes. I hope it's allergies because (1) I refuse to let myself get sick from any of my students and (2) it means that warm weather is coming. I definitely have been feeling the affects of cabin fever these past few weeks.

I am 90% sure what I'm doing come the end of June. The other 10% is reserved for various miracles.

My classroom teacher is confusing our students by telling them that I'm a writer/author. They don't understand the word "aspiring" yet. They keep asking me what the title of my book is. I was going to bring in my stacks and stacks of stories to show them, but I think they might get even more confused if I show them the books I got for free from LuLu for finishing NaNoWriMo. The business side of publishing and self publishing might be a little over their heads.

I have rewritten the opening for my secret writing project three times now. I think I finally have something that works. Which, you know, I cannot share at this particular moment...

Oh man, I had the craziest dream earlier this week. I woke up and wrote it down immediately so I could make it into a story. I don't think that's ever happened to me before. I have pretty vivid dreams, but nothing that's jumped out to me before with inherent dramatic characteristics. Unfortunately, I think the best format for this story would be fiction, and I am so out of practice there. Maybe NaNoWriMo this year. Regardless, it's about fifth on my priority list.

ABC and Cablevision, can you please work out your issues so that I can actually watch the Oscars. Though if you don't, at least I'll have a valid excuse for not seeing them this year.

Also, George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones was picked up by HBO. Am super psyched. Won't start airing until next year, but I will definitely be upgrading my cable plan to include HBO now.

Michigan's campus during February, snowy streets, primitive forms of transportation, students strewn everywhere. Or a still from the opening scene of Game of Thrones.

Illogical. I would never run a race.

Last night I dreamt that I missed running in a race with my best friend because I had spent 8 consecutive hours reading 700 pages of a mammoth version of Lolita. There was also a charter bus involved somehow.

If someone can explain...

I've started to think about this summer and all after. Actually, I've moved beyond thinking about it to being practical about it. I'm moving by the end of the summer. At least moving out of my parents' house. My philosophy towards moving is that it's better to move some place where I already have relationships. Not because I have a problem with making new friends but because now I am too popular and don't feel like adding anymore Mike's or Jessica's to my phone book (I have at least 6 Mike's already). Really, though, I think our relationships are pretty much the most important thing in our lives and maybe we should stop making career driven moves and instead make friend driven moves. Don't get me wrong - I plan to uproot and spend several years pingponging across the country and maybe the world. I just feel that people are a more important factor than typically given credit as being. With that philosophy, there are now only two real places for me to be next year, here in Jersey or back in Michigan.

Michigan is cold.

I'm not ruling a return out of the picture, but as it happens, I have two job leads here in New Jersey. And one of my defining qualities is that I hate job searching. Really, I've been thinking about a list of things I hate, and I had about three, and now I have four. Well, actually, I can only remember two of the original three, so I guess I'm... still at three.

I put my resume in with one of these jobs tonight. I should have the other one in by the end of the week. It's weird, because it's only January, and the plan is not to be unemployed again until classes end in June (teacher aide jobs are not guaranteed year to year, though I believe it's the sort of hierarchy where seniority is a bonus). If I have to make a decision now, there are still a lot of months left until that decision will be implemented. And if I make a decision to pursue a certain job now, what about the opportunities that will open themselves up in between?

Still, it's nice to already have leads. And both leads are jobs I'd be interested in. And it would be nice if I had to do no more than follow these two through to June.

Also, job searching takes time away from the last two seasons of Alias. I can't imagine what sort of withdrawal I'm going to go through when I finish.

Wow.

I just woke up from one of the most amazing dreams ever. No, seriously. I'm pretty sure most of my favourite people were in it, just randomly, because they're my friends. Lots of funny little moments, including a dog drooling like an uncorked fire hydrant on me - so gross - and finally being blunt like I've secretly been wishing I could be. But the best moment of all was that there were a bunch of Scottish people "in town" to shoot a film, and one of them was Ewan McGregor. Not only did I talk to him - I actually flirted with him. I know, I know - he's a married man - but I can't control my unconscious, you know?

I was Engaged to be Married Last Night

To some real Prince Charming too. There was some upset at the end though. I can't remember if we broke off the engagement because I was in love with someone else or I proved how much I was into him to his queen mum. Either way, I think the dream ended up happy. Wish I could remember it.

I didn't write yesterday, but that's ok because I was working on things from my 101 list. Making It is almost done, too, which is a little strange. I'm at 88 pages on a script I'm not even passionate about. Can I talk anymore about the importance of discipline?

When I was at Old School Land, I went to visit my old theatre professor. It's an amazing feeling to be able to sit on the most comfortable couch in the world and hold your own in a conversation with a very intelligent man that you used to ask advice from all the time, sitting on that very same couch. He's teaching a class on playwriting right now, so we discussed the industry and the writing process and ragged on prewriting a little.

Granted, I know prewriting actually works for some people. Maybe if I had done some prewriting for Making It it would be a salvageable story - or at least I would have recognized that I wouldn't like it before I started writing it. I've done some prewriting for my Script Frenzy screenplay, some notes on Acts I and II, but in general, I'm not a big prewriter. There are a couple of reasons why.

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining...researching ...talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing." - E.L. Doctorow

Prewrite all you want, baby. Nothing's actually getting written until you're putting down the real stuff. We have an old joke in the writer's community about people, when they hear that we're writers, say "Oh, I have a fantastic novel idea." Prewriting is a form of not writing.

A lot of times it comes out contrived and irrelevant . When I sit down and try to write a backstory for Eileen Charles of Banesberry, Virginia, usually what I come up with is a lot of irrelevant history. At this point, I'm not really sure what my character needs, or if I do, it's stuff that's inherent in her character to move the plot along. For Grace in The 4:05, I just needed to know that she had been let down and disappointed by people her entire life. As I wrote the story, examples came out. I didn't have to write down the whole saga about how her ex boyfriend had run off with her best friend because I didn't need to make her untrusting and disillusioned. She already was that way when I thought up the story. Maybe I think backstory is a little irrelevant too because what you're writing is a story about now. If you're backstory is too interesting, maybe you're writing the wrong story. But for me, writing backstory just feels like throwing a bunch of random character traits and boring bits of history. Some backstory is good, for character motivations and such, but I think inherently the writer already knows that backstory. I just don't see the point of writing out your character's favourite color and how she gets to work.

Reason number three: it's boooo-ring. For us short attention span writers, the best way to kill a story is to obsess over it before the actual work or writing begins. It kills some of the joy in writing, at least for me, because of the next reason, I think.

"For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I'm surprised where the journey takes me." - Jack Dann

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." - Joan Didion

I mean that's it for me, really. When I write I'm hoping to learn something, to discover a story, to reach an emotional level that prewriting, I find, constrains. I usually don't write around a plot. I write around an idea or a question. The 4:05 was about unconditional love and forgiveness. In Making It I tried to explore the coming of age of five teenagers and how they struggle with immaturity and maturity. In my Script Frenzy screenplay, I'm going to try to answer the question of what happens when people really love unselfishly. When I discover the answers to these questions, I get more invested in the story. And to be honest, I think that's why Making It hasn't worked. Not because I didn't do any prewriting on it, but because the themes were not ones that I could really get emotionally invested in.

Besides, when you write without a set plot/outline, you leave more room for the characters to take over. When I wrote The 4:05, I didn't have the ending nailed yet. Together or not together? And when I got to the last scene, I had a struggle because I didn't want them together but the story did. I tried to balk and say I was going to write two endings to see which I liked best, but when I started writing it, it just came out right. I didn't have to worry about an alternative ending because the journey in the story had been completed, the question had been answered, and the plot had been resolved.

Prewriting really works for some people. If there's one thing I've learned throughout my discussions with other writers, the books I've read, the blogs I've stalked, it's that there are as many different ways of writer as there are writers. And I realize that my lack of prewriting usually means more rewriting. I'd rather have it that way. And I'm not going to feel guilty if the whole of my prewriting notes is just a couple of sheets of paper.

Now, I have to go watch Lost. I came home in the middle of the season finale, and once I watch the tape I can release the whole family to finally discuss their theories. We always have great Lost theories.