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Close, Close Enough and RightPosted by dhoffman on July 15th, 2010

One of the things about writing that I find interesting is, the absolute best night you spend writing can produce some completely unusable stuff while the idea you jot down on the train, hoping to get it all in while pulling into the station (and everyone’s packing their stuff, almost like they’re pressuring you to hurry up) can become the most important bit in your story.

Last week was an amazing week.  I was so productive it was actually unsettling.  Really.  If I’d kept going like that, I think I would have finished this draft in, um, less than two weeks.

Yes, that’s how close I am to the end.

Then the weekend happened, and I was productive, but it was the different sort.  I’d reached a bit of story, you see, where I had to sort out what the one, perfect, best way to go was.

Which means, of course, I had to write it twenty or thirty ways before I sorted out what that one, perfect, best way to go was.

I tried it a lot of different ways and some of them were really solid.  One of them may resurface in the next chapter, as a matter of fact.

But none of them were right. Close, and even “close enough” but not right.

Think I hit on right on the train thought.  Wrote about 500 words — some notes, some actual words — on the iPad (paying for itself yet again) and now I need to go home tonight and see if they work as well as I feel like they did.

And in the meantime: walking on air.

Bad, in a Fascinating WayPosted by dhoffman on July 12th, 2010

I keep feeling like I should have something more interesting to say than “wrote some stuff; feel pretty good about it” in order to justify having a blog post.  Then I feel badly for not blogging for a week, so I want to pop in and post a whole bunch of nothing.

Then I remember nobody reads this, anyway and I don’t feel so badly.

Last week was what I’d term a “productive week”.  More than that, I spent the afternoon yesterday going through Chapter Eighteen.  Ostensibly, I wanted to give it a look so I could see how I wanted to close the chapter off.

But really I wanted to see if it read as well as it seemed it would while writing it.

I made some very small changes, and tried a dozen or so ways of finishing the thing off before deciding I’d revisit it later on and going outside to jump in the pool.

From there, we went out for dinner to the place we’d meant to go for lunch.  And when we got home we watched the Benicio Del Tor The Wolfman which was, um, terrible?

It’s hard to quantify, honestly.  I think I remember reading about how the actual (spoiler) werewolf effects were CGI instead of MIS (man-in-suit) and how it was a terrible waste of a Rick Baker design.  I can support this criticism because, while the werewolf looked cool, it had that eerie unreality that CGI gets.

Worse, though, was the screenplay, though in a really fascinating fashion.

Basically, when things happen in The Wolfman they seem to happen with very little context, preparation or presentation.  I’ve read there were editing issues, and that the studio chopped the film to hell and back, but I can’t help but think it all goes back to the screenplay.

But, in another light, I sort of enjoyed a movie that didn’t waste time establishing characters and setting.  We’re given things with no explanation than what we see (and what we see doesn’t give us much) and it’s up to us to decide if we’re into it or not.  I kept waiting for some sort of payoff beyond a werewolf shredding people — in other words, a good character moment — and while I’m not sure I got it, and while we did throw our hands up more than once watching, we did watch it, and I’ll probably watch it again someday (either on my iPad or while working.

So, that’s something, I suppose.

Hoping this week is productive.  I had a good energy last week I’m hoping to tap into again.  This is the home stretch here and I’m excited to see how things turn out.

Hitchcock and McGuffinsPosted by dhoffman on July 5th, 2010

Great little video as Alfred Hitchcock helps explain what a McGuffin is.  Haven’t been blogging much lately because, well, I’ll blog about it in a day or three, I hope.

Here you go:

McGuffin by Hitchcock from isaac niemand on Vimeo.