I started writing this blog after countless months of character studies and storylines, so I never got write about those head banging processes, just the tasty side of writing, the dessert if you will. But this week we were hit with a depressing revelation, one of our carefully crafted storylines in episode 3 (also know as the Widow maker) just wasn’t working and what hoped would be a quick fix turned into rewriting the storyline from scratch. On the down side we had to go through that stressful process again, on the plus side it is fresh in my memory so I can write about it.
Day One
We identified problems with the main story, the ending wasn’t working… and the beginning was struggling, luckily we all agreed on those points… this consensus would be rare treat over the next few days.
Day Two
Realising that there would not be a quick fix we turned to our trusty whiteboard (quite possibly our most useful tool in writing this series). We started by writing up the beats of the current storyline, brainstorming ideas what we could do to the fix the problems. We examined character motivations, looking for a way to make a story about subtle manipulation more active, we threw in new devices, altered the story around the plot points we liked from the original. There was loud debate as we all tried to inject our emotional bias into the story. After several hours of head banging we finally ended up with something 2 out 3 of us were relatively happy with. However, this is not how we roll, if there is a dissenting voice, that voice must be heard and quelled. On this occasion it was my dissenting voice, I looked at the storyline and could not get past the fact that what we had ended up with was half our original story and half an all new story. At that point we were at the end of the day, tired from fighting and decided to pick it up the next day.
Day Three
Sitting down we looked at the board, we read out the story and since nothing had changed from yesterday I still wasn’t happy. Whether we like it or not we needed to start from scratch rather than building a new storyline on the bones of an old one. So we started again, this time we knew our in point, we knew the emotion of the our end point and we knew that we could only use 3 characters, since others were busy with their own stories. We wanted Character A to have something over Character B that would be so powerful it would make Character B do Character A’s bidding. We had really struggled to find something we were all happy with, then someone remembered a storyline that we tossed around in the very early stages of the game. The device was perfect and from dissent came universal agreement. The storyline very quickly wrote itself, with the same heated and passionate discussion, but with an agreement that we were all heading in the right direction. It had been another day, batter, bruised and tired, but we were certainly feeling better about it.
Day Four
We looked over the storyline again and were feeling pretty good, it was certainly better than the one we had before, more active, higher stakes and more personal. The ending still needed work and again heated debate came out. One of us can get particularly passionate guy and in the heat of debate he doesn’t phrase himself in the best way (we all have this problem, so I’m not picking on him… well I am, but just in this instant, to even it upm one of us can sound condescending and I sit silence being negative or not contributing anything… apparently.), so sometimes two of can find ourselves arguing with a passionate person who sees is projecting their own feelings on to another character who would not act the same way. In arguing with him about that character we ignore that genuine concern. In this case he could not understand how Character C would not be angry at what Character A had done to Character B, but Character C is mellow and forgiving, it says it right there in his bio next to “hugger”. This was an obvious win for us, but their was a point. Character B would not understand how Character C could be so forgiving and that would need to be conversation those two characters would have to have and it was a beat we had ignored and were not hearing.
And Finally…
Ultimately the writer had mixed feelings at the end of the day, she knew the story was better, but she now faced a 70% rewrite of her script. It is bitter sweet, but hopefully endemic of why this writing has taken so long. Never settle. No matter how frustrating it maybe, we don’t settle, we don’t fudge, we don’t turn a blind eye. When all is said and done this should be the best we could have made it.
