After going over the in depth feedback I’d gotten from the Page Turners Screenplay Competition, I needed to get to work. I had gotten the notes only a few days before I was scheduled to have a phone call with the lead reviewer, which the contest runners had said were extensive, so I needed to come prepared.
In the days leading up to my phone consultation, I began working on addressing the notes and questions that the feedback had posed to me. The first was the question about the title, Dig Down, and whether or not it should be changed. I outlined several reasons of what the title meant to me, and more importantly, what it meant to the story. Until this point, I had never really thought too much, and never articulated, the different layers of meaning in the title.
If nothing else, I was grateful for the notes because they really made me explore the story that I had written and been a part of my life for years, to a level I’d never reached before.
I also spent time each day working on the four layers of each character in the story – what their external and internal motivations were, what their philosophical motivations were, and the secret that each of them harbored. Again, this was great because the notes were like a challenge to me to take my story and do even better, to really dig beneath the surface of the story I had told. To me, while Dig Down is only the length of a novella, I felt that there was so much more packed into its size than other novellas, even other stories twice its length.
This exercise was also great because in answering the questions about these characters, it allowed me to delve into aspects of the characters that didn’t make the manuscript. Details that were in the notes but couldn’t naturally be incorporated in the story, or information that had been divulged in the serials I posted on this site, and eventually compiled into a book of short stories in the Dig Down universe that I sent to people who had subscribed to my email list, found their way into these character studies, and in some cases, found their way into the later drafts of this script.
This was what I was primarily focused on leading up to the meeting because it was the most time consuming. With the amount of time it took me, I was glad I had made the decision to take the day off from work for this phone consultation, because it gave me the whole day leading up to the call to prepare.
As much as I was focused on getting prepared for this meeting, on the morning of, there was still one thing I hadn’t done. There was a link to a video that had been embedded into the feedback, which I was waiting to watch once I had a block of time dedicated to do so.
I’ll discuss what the video was about, next time.