LittleWyvern.com

Man, putting together a brilliant and original plot is a lot of work. It is especially difficult trying to do so in a group of three. It is extremely difficult when one of the three is eighteen hundred miles away.

I think that we are getting there though. At the very least we are making progress.

It is one thing to have a good idea, it is quite another to build an entire storyline around that idea. On Tuesday night Bill and I sat around the living room for a good three hours putting together what we both agreed was “a super awesome” storyline. I think that we even high-fived when we finally called it a night.

Tonight Bill and I pitched our storyline to Matt and almost immediately met resistance. It sucks that we are trying to do this now, considering that only one week ago Matt went back to Chicago for the summer. (Forget the ten months that we are in the same apartment… let’s knock this bitch out at the most inconvenient time possible.) Anyways, it turns out that some of our “super awesome” plot ideas were not quite that. A frustrated argument ensued, the likes of which is only possible in an AIM chat room between two fairly slow typists. In the end I think both Matt and Bill walked away from their computers. Whatever.

Our ‘meeting’ adjourned, I closed my laptop and retired to the gym. I had run barely one half of a mile before lightning struck and my oxygen-deprived brain overflowed with a new batch of Super Awesome Ideas. Already struggling to breathe – due to the massive incline I had accidentally set on the treadmill – I was now faced with the daunting task of choosing between the health of a) our literary exploration of the heart and b) my similarly atrophied actual heart. I compromised, finishing out the mile before hurrying home to my waiting laptop.

As things currently stand our storyline is still incomplete, but I feel really good about it. The three of us agree on far more than we disagree, and those parts of the story which we collectively love are, in my humble opinion, what is going to make this screenplay work – even in the face of whatever strange things we ultimately add to it.

As a final note, I find myself frequently reminding both Matt and Bill that this is my first screenplay, too. I have no real clue as to what we should do next. I certainly have my own ideas about who the characters are and in which direction the story should go, but I am trying really hard not to force those ideas onto the group. I want this to be a collaborative effort, and to that end while we have had the first of (presumably) many disagreements, I am sure the final product will be all that much better for it.

But I still don’t understand why they won’t let me add a Roller Derby scene.