The biggest hurdle

After a few false starts I think I've finally made a decent beginning on the script for the sequel to Seer.

Thiis is not unusual for me. Normally when I begin a new projects I have to delete and restart at least twice before I feel like I have something I can work with. Such was the case here. Now, though, it's starting to flow for me--I'm already seeing other scenes down the road, the story is unfolding, characters are defining themselves . . . this is why the process is so much fun.

The hardest part of a project for me is getting started. I've heard other artists talk about how intimidating a blank page one is and I can identify. But once those words start appearing it gets a little easier.

Another old adage that happens to be true--great stories aren't written, they are rewritten.

Here's what I liken the process to--this is a story I actually heard on Captain Kangaroo when I was a wee lad, and it is almost certainly not true, but it is illustrative. The story is, someone asked Michelangelo for the secret of his success as a sculptor. His reply was, "Say I want to make a sculpture of a lion. I find a piece of marble, and I carve away everything that doesn't look like a lion."

People look at me with an expression that you are now wearing--I guess I'm the only person in the world who gets that story's point. Let me see if I can explain it.

The first draft is the block of marble. Rewriting is the process of carving away the stuff that doesn't look like a lion--in other words, editing it so that the story contained within emerges unfettered and visible to those who chose to look for it. But before you can make the lion you must first have that block of marble.

Maybe that makes sense. I hope so.

So, I'm going to be banging away at this thing for the next few months,, then banging away at the rewrite, then sending it off to a friend of mine who will read it and then give me some notes on it, then rewriting again, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting . . .

I know, it sounds like sheer drudgery. In reality it is quite fulfilling. Once that ball gets rolling, that is.

So, if you want to be a writer, write. If you don't do that it'll never happen. Nobody will publish or film that blank page one.