I’ve been so busy writing the script that I’ve neglected the blog. It’s time to rectify that situation.

Yes, I am actually writing script pages. The index card outline was completed on Sunday, and I did some character notes on Monday, and then started writing script pages on Tuesday.

As I mentioned in the blog on Monday, I felt very positive about the story, its structure and the characters once the index card outline was done. Usually when I start a script from scratch I do complete character biographies of all of the main characters. These usually take a day or two each to do, and they cover several pages dealing with the character’s personality, physicality, sociology and background. Since a lot of that work was already done by the original writer, I didn’t feel the need to go through that process. I felt like the characters were pretty well developed in the original draft, and only needed some slight tweaking.

At that point, I decided to use something that I learned at a screenwriting seminar a few years ago. If you ever get a chance to take David Freeman’s “Beyond Structure” class, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s a two day class that helps provide the tools that you might be missing to hone your technique as a screenwriter. In this class, Mr. Freeman goes into detail about character, character depth and the need for characters to have several different characteristics in a pyramid in order to create that depth. It also helps for one trait to be negative in your hero in order to give him or her something to overcome. It also helps make them more accessible to the audience and allows for the audience to feel empathy towards them. That is a very rough paraphrasing of the theory, but you should get the idea.

I created a character pyramid for the three most important characters in the story.

Once that was done, I felt that I had a much more firm grasp on the characters so that I know how they’ll react in certain situations and I’ll be able to harness their unique personalities in ways that will help the overall story.

Then, on Tuesday, I wrote the first scene of the new Draft.

I wrote a couple more scenes on Wednesday.

I wrote another scene on Thursday.

I wrote more scenes today.

Again, I’m happy that I took the time to do a Hero’s Journey outline as well as an index card outline. They’re both providing road maps that I can use when I get stuck in a writer’s block moment. The scenes are flowing well, and I’m anticipating getting to the end of the first act tomorrow. What I like about what I’ve done so far is that I’ve shown my main character’s flaw, but have also given him a “Save the Cat” moment (thank you, Blake Snider), so that the audience will relate to him and like him.

The mentor is proving to be more of a challenge, but it’s not imperative for the audience to like him right away anyway. I feel it will make for a more satisfying arc if he starts out the story as somewhat unlikable and then grows into a likable character as the story goes on.

Today, I got to the scene that introduces the girl who will probably turn out to be the love interest in the script. She is not a love interest in the original script, but a screenwriting instructor that I had at USC always said to give your main character a love interest because it gives him more to lose. It doesn’t mean that this has to be a love story, but giving the hero more to lose always makes the story more interesting and entertaining.

I also must say that just through this introductory scene, she’s already my favorite character in the script.

I’m looking forward to a productive weekend and I will have lots more to say in the upcoming days.