So I guess I’m back on here. I gave up on this because of my health struggles last year. They were partially resolved at the beginning of this year so I no longer wanted to die but then I had to go back to the office. And combined with the other ongoing health issues, the most I could muster was distraction on Twitter, continuing struggles with my novel, and working on a screenplay. I didn’t want to also put time into a blog about analyzing the dramatic qualities of movies.
But now that Twitter is burning (and even if it survives, I’m wary of continuing interest in it), I need to find a new outlet for my random thoughts. Mastodon is a federated mess of open source weirdos. So Substack it is.
One of the ideas I had before I succumbed to my health last year was an article or series of articles on Design Thinking As Applied to Writing. Or maybe As Applied to Screenplay. Because design and screenplay are similar in their insistence on economy and value. And the way you apply design discipline to a building, or a branding exercise, can help in how you look at structuring, plotting, and writing a screenplay. Or so I think. I still haven’t finished one screenplay, so I can’t say for certain. But it sounds right, and the article would be essentially me working through my theory to see if it has any merit. I may come back to this idea.
I also have an idea for a series called, Let’s Write a Screenplay, where I work through a screenplay idea I’ve abandoned even though it still has some promise. Working through the idea would, of course, be about teaching the fundamentals of dramatic structure, and mainstream screenplay craft all the way down to writing the actual script. But it wouldn’t necessarily be about crafting a sellable screenplay.
Then again, I could just write this screenplay I’m working on. I finally have an idea I think can work. And I’m having a blast structuring it right now. I just can’t do that here.
Like the aftermath of any nuke, I’ll just have to wait to see how the dust settles.