A few days into residency

Residency underway. Not too bad so far. It's rather the way of this whole process that I alternate about every two hours between a feeling of energization for the craft and of despondency over how hard it is to make it as a playwright. Residency does not at all suit my temperament, as I harp on every time, but I'm trying to take the parts of it that do work for me away for my development. It does feel nice to be in school again, to walk down the street to class with a bite of breakfast in hand. Wish I could start every day that way.




We workshopped the first fifteen or so pages of the screenplay for The Tailor of Riddling Way, and I was pleased to find the response was quite positive, even enthusiastic. My classmates found Tom to be engaging and likable, they were intrigued by the mystery of Emma ordering the dress, and wanted to see what was going to happen-- three markers of a solid script right there. The largest issue it had was that my descriptions of the action were overly detailed and novelistic, which in the screenplay form is considered excessive and slows down the reading. That's the cinematographer's job, not mine. But I want a huge part of the theoretical movie's appeal to be, to use a term my cool teacher this semester latched onto, the dressmaking porn, the lush visuals of the couture garment making process. So my urge is to write all the details of that in. But it would make a reader feel bogged down, so I have to find a way to convey the notions without all that text.
As a side note, some other majors issues of the script, which I hope to revise at some point:

1. Alice needs to seem lonelier at the outset, so that it makes sense that Tom's entrance into her life makes her reach out and want to let him in

2. Officer Crier disappears from the middle of the script, and so must be woven in more consistently, since he's one of the three allies Tom makes by the end

3. The last scene needs to have something at stake in order to create tension. Tom has to have something to "pull out of the fire."

Now that I've had a bit of distance from the script, I'd like to work on this stuff.