So here I was, I’d say a little over a year after my previous laptop crashed with my only version of a freshly adapted screenplay for Dig Down on it, and what was I doing?
Adapting Dig Down into a screenplay.
It would be fair to criticize the direction of my writing career, or call it stagnant.
And yet, it felt great sitting down to write the screenplay again. As I had mentioned in my previous post, I didn’t have the time needed to devote to a new story, and had to scrap drafting a manuscript I was working on.
I wouldn’t say I was depressed, but I wasn’t in the best of moods during that stretch. I’m usually in a good mood and feeling positive about myself when I’m in the middle of writing something. I think my most upbeat stretches of high school and college were when I was writing stories, especially when I first got to college and really started experimenting with voice and narratives in novels (maybe published one day), and several short stories.
I also felt that with the advice and notes I’d gotten for Lock the Doors, I was catching a lot of things as early as the first (really fourth at this point) draft of Dig Down that I knew would need to be edited out (like all the eye movements in the book)! This allowed me to think up creative ways to focus the camera on what I felt was important in the scenes, something I never had to think about when writing the original stories.
I was in such a good mood with this process that even when, in February of this year, I got the results from the Filmmatic Horror Screenplay Awards and saw that Lock the Doors wasn’t selected again in the final screenplay competition I had entered it into, I wasn’t even fazed. I had already moved on to work on my next project (yes, it was an old project), and if the news had been different-GREAT!-but I was focused on making Dig Down as good as it could be.
I’ll talk about where that left me with the project, next time.