Trains, days and characters

There was the guy with the sunglasses chewing gum, and a matchstick casually balancing on his lower lip waiting to fall off, but it didn’t. There was the Harry Potter boy lost in his book, and there was the man reading “Mathematical Foundations” a book as big as a bible, and not the most sexy subject I could think of.

And there was me. Staring out of the window, counting down the 76 days to New York, the story for the short now slowly taking shape in my head. The story, without revealing all too much about it here, is going to be about a man and a woman, about Life and Death, about daring and risking things, about trains, about being shy but persistent, about finding meaning in the things you do and about Love. Actually. Hey. And there might be a dog in it too. And some seagulls.

The good thing about this course is that you learn how to approach it all. While I have been struggling with my feature script for a year now, I now know that I have approached it the complete wrong way. Which isn’t a big surprise, because what did I know about writing. Not a single thing. The trick is chop it into pieces, to first write your idea like a kind of normally written (short) story, write a character profile for the maincharacters, then start hacking around formatting it like script, add dialogue, stir, let is stand for a while, et voila – a script is born. I didn’t do the chopping, I was already stirring but the pieces didn’t fit in the cup! The course has definetely been useful until now.

So for next Monday I need 2 character profiles, which is basically answering loads of questions about your characters and turning that into a description like this : example from Sopranos.

2 pages of written prose, a page about him and a page about her. I can do that.