Script Disapproval

I'm kind of all spinny in my head about this script idea I have. I may have mentioned it before in an earlier post. The story is tentatively titled, Smitten, and it's kind of a boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy tried to find girl but girl is nowhere to be found sort of script. It's loosely based on an experience I had a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away and I thought that I wuld be able to accomplish it as a no muss, no fuss short film, no longer than 20 minutes kind of effort. After several conversations with friends and my significant other, not to mention some time spent reading Linda Aronson's Screenwriting Updated, the thing has ballooned into something much bigger than I originally intended, and I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

As a result of the aforementioned factors things have gotten a bit more complicated for my characters (well, maybe just the main character) structurally and I have the feeling that the whole point of the story - the whole innocent, squishy, sentimental core of it - has gotten lost somewhere in the details.

I can't say that I'm not enjoying the exercise. To be perfectly honest, it's kind of neat to see something you thought you were doing turn into something else, but I've been told that I'm falling victim to formula and cliché, which in any galaxy is a level of suck I don't want to achieve. My wife is telling me that I'm not putting enough of myself into the story or the characters and, while I don't know if I agree with that sentiment, it's certainly something I need to think about more. I mean, ultimately, if I don't convey the emotional hook of the story, if you don't care about this guy's emotional 'journey', I've failed.

Urgh. It makes me want to just forget about it all for a while and shoot the two scripts I have sitting on my bookshelf. Ahh, if life were so simple.

Anyway, it's late and I have to be up in 4 hours, so I'm going to put my anxiety attack on hold for a while.

Later!

mike