Patrick and I met up with my writing mentor Margaret today. We really needed some advice from another writer…one who’s been where we are now and come through the other side with a script. We also needed structure and deadlines. Margaret has also produced, so she’s good at that too.
She suggested that we each take a character and do a scene breakdown for them. Working in tandem to Margaret’s deadline, I’m taking the daughter, and Patrick is taking the mother. She told us to enlist the senses, and, I tell you, this works. I wrote for two hours tonight. Two hours a day. Finish before the deadline of March 1st. Then we come together again.
The hardest part will be giving up the notebooks. I’m OK with the computers. With the furniture and clothes. I’m even OK with the books and the DVDs (although we’ve spent the last 8 years on the collection). The notebooks though? My oldest one was a wedding present from my marriage to Mark circa May of 1989. The notebooks include daily journal entries for the past 10 years, film production journals from the 30 or so films I’ve worked on (including Fragile, Daybreak, and Liza), Short Stories, ideas for articles, film scripts, novels, collages, sketch books, books of lists, books of clippings, photos, postcards, wish books, voodoo spells, addresses, blank ones.
I can’t take these with me. How in the hell am I going to choose? I think about all those Katrina evacuees. What did they take. And what did they leave behind?
2 Responses
vertigoheights
woah! you can’t possibly get rid of those notebooks! I can’t imagine getting rid of all of mine if i had a choice. hell i’ll mail them to you one by one rather than let you get rid of them!
Daniell
Pack them up and mail them to me. Send them as cheaply as you can. I’ll hold onto them for you. Or at least scan as much as you can and save the pages to your computer. It won’t be the physical notebooks, but at least you will still have your thoughts and writings.