writing stuff

In the process of writing my first act, I realized that I deviated a lot from my treatment. I'm realizing things as I write and making changes, hopefully for the better. I got a comment from Professor Kaufhold about one of my secondary characters actually seeming like the main character and I think I'm beginning to see that as well. It's funny how writing is such a learning process. I couldn't imagine laying down a treatment and following it beat for beat.

Treatments

I really do appreciate the necessity of writing some kind of treatment before attempting to dive into a story. I made the mistake of not doing this in Screenwriting 2 with my sixty page script. I was essentially flying blind and the story took turns that I did not anticipate. I wrote myself into more than a few corners that were extremely hard to get out of while still doing the story and the characters some kind of justice.

That said, treatments also frustrate me. They are a necessary evil in my eyes, but they really make me pull my hair out. Sometimes I like to fly blind into a scene ad see what happens. I can always cut it or take the core of the scene and incorporate that. No matter how closely I follow a treatment, I always find myself deviating from it in some way because character information and plot drivers occur to me as I write. Also, I find myself using "sequence" a lot in the actual writing of my treatments. This is probably because I have not fully envisioned an important enough scene yet to put in that place.

Just the act of getting through the writing of a treatment helps to expose obvious plot holes and inconsistencies with characters.

Story stuff

Pitching really frustrates because the story is never done any justice. I knew that the second I said the words "H.IV. positive"everyone in the room would seize up and the atmosphere in the room would become more and more uncomfortable with each passing moment. Professor Kaufhold said it best: "H.I.V. is like the atomic bomb of chronic diseases." I definitely anticipated this type of audience reaction. However, I still believe that I can make it work. Wether we choose to address it or not, H.I.V. is a very real threat to all people but especially to naive young people. And this is why H.I.V. makes for a compelling story element, because it scares us to death even though it is no longer the grim, swift killer that it used to be. Modern medicine has come a long way. Yet still, H.I.V. has a certain taboo air to it that may never be overcome.

In the end, I want to have a story that truly affects the audience. Kids affected me greatly. I wasn't myself for at least a week. I couldn't get the characters in the film out of my head. It was as if I knew them personally and I genuinely cared about what happened to them. I don't want my story to be quite as raw or depressing as Kids but I definitely want the audience to feel something real for my characters.