In preparation for Script Frenzy I’m rereading Wordplay, Terry Rossio’s excellent collection of columns on screenwriting. In case you don’t realize that you’re familiar with Rossio’s work, he and partner Ted Elliot have written some major Hollywood blockbusters, including current box office king “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”. I read many of these columns nearly ten years ago when I was just learning the craft of screenwriting, and they’re just as valid today.
In fact, maybe a little too valid.
All writers have pet ideas. The trick is to not get stuck on one. Write the damn thing, get it out of your system. If it’s great it will sell, if not, then get onto the next thing. You’re not going to stumble on that career-making concept if you keep revising the same pet idea for five years. (I’ve seen this happen.)
Source: WORDPLAY/Columns/03. Beachcombing
As I read that it struck me that “revising the same pet idea” is exactly what I’m doing with In Shining Armor, Between Heaven and Hell and The Unification Chronicles. I’ve been writing–and rewriting–these stories for… Ow. 20 years for ISA, 13 for UC and 10 for BHH. That’s a lot of retreading over the same territory.
There’s a running gag among my writer’s group that they will rejoice if I ever submit anything for critique that they haven’t already seen in one form or another. My argument is that I know these are good stories, I just have to do right by them. That may be, they may be good stories I just haven’t had either the ability or drive to tell before this particular point in my career. That doesn’t make them any less stale.
One of the reasons I’m so excited about Script Frenzy is that I’m working on an idea I haven’t written before. Granted, the idea itself is already three years old, something Josh and I came up with together for Project: Greenlight and then promptly avoided, but it’s fresh to us because other than one evening hashing out a plot outline at IHOP, we really haven’t done anything at all with it yet.
And that has me thinking about what I do come July. By then I better damn well have a day job again and my writing time (at home, now, remember, unless I get myself a laptop to schlep back and forth) will be strictly rationed. I need to make the best use of my writing time and dammit, Terry Rossio has a point. If I don’t keep trying new ideas I won’t find the one that makes my career. Because good stories they may be, the stuff I’ve been working on for the last 20 years hasn’t done it.
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