Friday, October 08, 2004

IT'S HARD TO WRITE MAGIC

I'm not very happy with my beat sheet for Unseen.

Part of the problem is that I've written a document I don't generally like to write. The Telefilm Screenwriting Assistance program wants you to go from a 5 page pitch to a 20-or-so page outline. I find an outline that long to be unwieldy. You lose the story in all the pages. A screenplay is different, it comes alive with the dialog and the action. An outline rarely comes alive, so it may as well be as short as it can be to encompass all the beats. That way you can see the story structurally.

The bigger problem is I'm not seeing the magic in my story right now. It's a contemporary urban fantasy set partly across the Veil between Seen and Unseen. But I feel I've either drawn the Veil aside too much or not enough. I've treated the Unseen as science fiction, not as mystery. There are answers, if you only had time to sit down and hear them. The story is a thriller story -- the heroine's mom has been kidnapped by the Unseen. That means there's little time to sit down and absorb the mystery. There's some clunky expo that puts the facts down on the page.

Once again I feel I'm pushing the story on the audience instead of pulling them towards it.

It feels somehow wrong that there should be answers at the end of the story. There should, maybe, just be questions...

8:42 AM

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