Wandering with Purposeful Purposelessness
July 27, 2006
These pitches are driving me crazy. They remain almost done, but I can never push their globular, gooey asses over the wall to being totally done.
It sounds pretty easy to come up with a hook for a series, characters, and story arcs, but in practice, it's rather difficult. I have to know enough about all of the details of a complete, imaginary TV series, all those little twists and turns, captivating images and really cool characters, to be able to simplify it back down to share with a development executive.
Think of it like having to tell a brief summary of the first season of the new Battlestar Galactica to someone who has never seen it before. Now picture having to do it before you, yourself have even written the pilot to the mini-series that aired first. In my case, duplicate this effort by four, for four different and distinct series that exist only in the back of your mind.
The roughest part is that so much of the act of creation is just daydreaming. It's about imagining with "purposeful purposelessness." Purposeful in that you are looking for the details of a story in your imagination, but purposeless because you don't want that mystical, story machine to exclude anything important.
I have to let the imagination tumble through possibilities, gathering snippets of story and character together until enough of it is present that the "Ah, ha!" alarm goes off and and I can sit back down to write.
Writing I can do. That's easy -- even when I bang my head against the wall repeatedly to get a phrase just right. It's really just a matter of molding and shaping the words until they mean the same (or even more) than the full idea sitting in your head.
It's that daydreaming to the "full idea" part that always trips me up. I want to do something now. I want to send it out tomorrow, have it reviewed on Monday and a decision by Tuesday-- Wednesday at the outside -- so I can get on with things by next Thursday. The broth is boiling off, as my grandmother would say.
But it just doesn't work like that.
Posted by Jody at July 27, 2006 08:57 AM
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