In the popular imagination it is the horror of the first, blank page parentheses or the empty screen with its incessantly blinking cursor) that thwarts the would-be writer. But for me, the blank page (even the first one) isn’t that bad.
It’s a foam-filled pit. A playground of white space where there really are no mistakes — or, if there are — you can easily get rid of them by crumpling up the piece of paper or ctrl-shift-up arrow to select all of it and whack on the delete key to remove all of it from existence.
No, what gets me are those pag
es in the middle. There’s less freedom there. And the stakes are higher. Because if you get those wrong it's either because you’ve messed something up earlier (And then, oh my God, all that work was wasted!) or what you’re doing now is breaking the whole thing.
You’ve got to keep the whole work in your head, and keep the end in mind and somehow, forge a path between the two.
Which is exactly where I am with A Town Called Nowhere.
Oh, it will be fine. It will all work out. Especially because I get a rewrite once I get to the end, but right now, it’s daunting. Especially because I haven’t been able to work on it.
Currently, all my writing time has been going to a screenplay adaptation of The Soak. I’ve had some real interest, so I decided to take two weeks and bang it out. (Another week and I will be done. ) The most fun part about this is it’s been long enough that I can pretend that the novel was written by someone else, and adapt with real flair and abandon.
Also, I have written many pages of script and produced many minutes of video (live-action and animated) so I’m really much better at writing for that medium. www.sendreinforcements.com.
As soon as I’m clear from that, I will be back on Nowhere. First a quick synopsis and catch up, then straight on until the end.
Nice! I remember liking The Soak.