Heavy Lifting

It ain’t for everybody.

There are times I’m glad for my twenty plus years in the blue collar trades.  For one it means my family will never go hungry because I’ve always got a fallback position to go to.  The other thing my trade gave me is that sometimes, you’ve just got to bear down get through the task at hand.  No matter how much you’re sweating or how much it hurts.

There isn’t always a slick technological solution at hand.

I’ve been listening to a couple of script Gurus as of late and it’s funny how much they focus on idea generation.  Well not funny really as this week I’ve come up against a few people who obviously have a problem with this.  One who cries out for others to give him good ideas to write about.  I told him to go try something easier like plumbing.  Nothing against plumbers, it’s an honorable and lucrative trade.  I’ve never known a poor plumber.

But ideas are what writers are supposed to do.  Now I don’t generate a whole lot of new ideas in a day, maybe I have one really good one in a week.  I do however take a lot of mental notes about stuff and tuck it away for another day.  I’ve been doing that my whole life.  There’s a pretty big compost pile between my ears.   So if I find a workable idea, I’ll work on it a bit before filing it away for the next project or the next project down the road a bit.

Now the other idea starved individual was a script forwarded to me by a friend to have a look at.

Reading it was like riding on the prairie, except the monotony of the prairie is broken up by the curvature of the Earth.  It was for all intents and purposes a truly Canadian script.  Plenty of stuff being said and said well but not much fucking happening.  It committed the most deadly of all script offenses, I stopped caring about the characters.  Which was too bad because there were ideas in there but they were skipped over or not exploited at all.  Which led to no conflict.  No conflict means it’s not worth watching.  It sure as hell wasn’t worth reading but because it was for a friend, I had a look.  Otherwise, I’d have round filed it by page ten and gone on with my day.

Which means at some point in the near future, I’ll have to meet with this person and give it to them straight which they’ll hate me for, which I in turn hate just as much.  Which really does make me not want to read new writers.  Maybe my new advise should be, if it’s your first script, take it and put it in a drawer and never take it out.

Now go write something worth reading.