Writing Life: Fade to Black

I finished a detailed polish on the latest draft of my (latest) pilot script — and I have to say that I'm feeling really, really pleased with how it turned out.

That's not something I often say.

For whatever reason, I've always felt like there's something suspect about writers who genuinely love whatever they've written. Perhaps as a former critic, I'm most deeply critical about myself and my work. I'm never truly satisfied, never truly at ease with the thing I've just written. (It's often only later — sometimes years later — that I can even look back and reread something I've written and say, "Hey, that was pretty good.") But maybe that's just me.

With this latest draft of CONNECTION, however, I do feel a sense of pride, particularly in how far it's come from the original idea and from that first outline I wrote. It's changed in innumerable ways, but perhaps most notably with one major shift: the protagonist. By changing perspective and focus (see my recent post about making one change to your script), it opened up the script entirely and took the story in unexpected directions, allowing me to delve deeper into one of the main characters and bring her more fully front and center.

There's something deeply sad about finishing a work, particularly a pilot script, which is meant to be an introduction to a group of characters, a concept, a world. It's not easy saying goodbye to the people who have been rattling around in your head the last few months. But a spec pilot script is just that, often a sample of your work and nothing more. The notion of continuing the story within the script is tantalizing, but ultimately often impossible. Like a certain cat, these characters both exist and don't exist at the same time. (Except perhaps in dream.)

In this case, I spent more time on this project than I did in writing my last two pilot scripts combined. Which might be why saying goodbye and closing this Final Draft document is especially difficult: there's a sense that I'm not ready to be done with it or move onto the next thing, even though I know I need to start something new. I feel like there are so many more stories to be told with these characters and I'm loath to leave them. But a feature idea beckons — one that I've already outlined — and as hard as it is to switch my brain to a new project, it seems like it's time for CONNECTION to fade to black.