Thursday 7 October 2010

Hangover Blues

It's feels kind of strange sitting down to write this after such a long break from blogging, a break that was not planned but was probably much needed. I've been doing a lot of soul searching as of late and contemplating the future and for the first time in a long time not in a pessimistic fashion. It's been a long road to travel down over the last decade and for a brief moment there I was considering heading up the next off ramp but I guess the journey isn't over quite yet. I've dusted off an old script of mine recently and have begun the long rewrite process on it to get my eye back in as any writer will know all to well the worst thing you can do is take to long a break away from honing your craft.

A mind is a terrible think to waste they say and being someone who has had little outlet for creativity over the years mine is all but dust and faded words that no longer rhyme. I even stopped writing recently and am finding even that brief break from it has effected my writing style greatly. The last few short stories I've written have all headed in one direction head first straight through an unhappy ending. My attempted scripts of late have lacked my usual jokes in the 'action' for the reader's benefit but luckily for me I am slowly starting to change this unfortunate and unwanted trend. Don't get me wrong not every story should have a happy ending and depending on tone and subject matter not every screenplay should have in jokes for the reader but the subjects I tend to write about do, my work has been effected by my mental state at the time of writing I guess. I had even started to feel that writing was becoming like a chore for me to do and I've never felt that way before and hope I never will again.


A fellow writer friend of mine named John Cooper Smith, who I met online at a screenwriting forum, sold his first spec script to a small production house who specialise in making straight to DVD horror films and my first reaction instead of being happy for him was flat out jealousy, how wrong is that? His script is about a girl who finds out she was adopted as a baby and begins to search for her parents. Describing the rest would give the ending away so I'll just say it'll be gory for sure. The working title is "Family Dies" and should be released late next year, I'll try to get a link to the website for the film when it's up and running.

Anyway I can hear my wee niece getting in from school so no doubt she'll want her daft uncle to give her a hand with her homework. Thankfully she's only 5 so it's writing words like 'do', 'as' or 'cat' three or four times so nothing to difficult I dread the first time she gets the times tables to learn, lol, I know them all except for the 7 and 11 off by heart I guess I've had to many head knocks to remember them all.

Thanking you
The Housebound Writer

8 comments:

  1. Andrew, none of your stories have to have happy ending. One of the greatest writers of the United States never wrote a single story with a happy ending - his name was Edgar Allen Poe. BTW, please get in to contact with me, PLEASE! I've sent you at least two emails.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Jeremy, good to hear from you, you raise a very valid point about Edgar Allen Poe's work not having happy endings. I've checked my emails and didn't see any from you was it this email address you wrote to thehouseboundwriter@hotmail.co.uk ? Coz I've been having problems with the spam filter on my other email account.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks Andrew. Sorry about the accusatory tone.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Don't worry about it Jeremy no need to apologise.

    ReplyDelete
  5. A good little article from a (usually but not this time) subpar blog that made me think of you:

    http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mmandaville/2010/10/24/tips-for-writing-a-low-budget-screenplay/#more-403329

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks for the article Jeremy it's a well written piece on keeping the budget down while in the writing phase of a project.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hi Jeremy, no I'm not on Facebook at the moment, I heard a scare story a while back from a friend of mine who had his account hacked and the hoops he had to jump through to prove his identity to reclaim control of it. That kind of put me off the idea but I may reconsider that decision soon as I'm hopefully going to go into production on a short film at the beginning of next year and Facebook and Twitter seem like great ways to advertise these kinds of projects online. Why do you ask?

    ReplyDelete