Writing Life: One Change

Just when I thought I was done writing this most recent pilot script (for now anyway — is any script really truly ever done?), I had an inspiration strike me like a bolt out of the blue. 

It's amazing to me to how making one seemingly tiny change in your pilot script can have significant overall impact. Looking at this latest draft of my drama pilot script CONNECTION, which I approached as a sort of alt-reality experiment, I now not only see the entire project in a new light, but see that this seeming minor change — in perspective — is what it ought to have been from the very beginning and, thanks to a cascade effect, it brings the script closer in line in many ways with my original intentions.

Doing so involved a huge amount of re-outlining, re-writing, and reconfiguring but I am immensely pleased with how this latest draft turned out and how it feels so right and so natural. A path is formed by laying one stone at a time, but sometimes it takes a detour to find one's ultimate destination.

The impetus for this transformation? Interestingly enough it was this ScreenCraft article, entitled "Can You Fix Your Script with One Brilliant Change?" which looked at how Passengers could have been a vastly different (and likely far superior) film with one brilliant (if major) shift at the beginning of its script. The article itself drew inspiration from this riveting YouTube video below: