Once again, I'm on to a new writing project. If you read this with any regularity, you'll be forgiven for thinking you've heard this before. That's because I'm always starting new projects. It would not be unfair to call me a bit scatter brained. I do not think in straight lines. My brain leaps from subject to subject wildly and constantly. The upside is I get a lot of ideas. The downside is that finishing things becomes a problem. The way I deal with this is to make an attempt at any halfway decent idea I come up with. I simply never know which ones are going to turn into something good. But eventually ideas pile up enough in one area to finish something.
That brings me to the latest project. It has no title and I'm kind of loathe to talk about it. But there is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the things that will get finished and turn into something good. There are simply to many ideas buzzing around it for once. A lot of times I have only one idea for a story and that just isn't enough to carry through to the end. This time the story has plenty of ideas. In fact, probably more than I need. Some stuff will get cut.
Now what makes this stand out from my previous scripts is that I'm trying to write about someone fairly normal. All of my previous scripts center around oddball loners. That probably says something about me. This time my intention is to take a normal well adjusted family sort and dump her into a bizarre situation. So I have two main problems. One is write a normal person and make them interesting. In other words, without the crutch of quirks and mental illness. The other problem is write a convincing woman. Not being a woman, I'm not entirely familiar with how they think. So this requires a lot of thought, research and questioning women. That differs from my usual approach to characters, known as just wing it.
It's coming along well. I'm about forty pages in, which isn't a lot, but there is tons of material in my head just waiting to be used. I could easily see a first draft approaching two hundred pages. Obviously I'll have to cut that down. Right now I just want to get the story down on paper and worry about being concise later.
