New screenwriting #12: Restarting

Around 5 years ago I went to Birmingham to see the Question of Sport Live show with my friend Chris. We’ve been friends since the first year of uni and while we were travelling to the show we jokingly said about how we would be each other’s back up plans if we didn’t get married, as we both like cricket and could spend days at Lords making our way round the ground with Zimmer frames!
The following day my friend Humaira took me to a spa for my birthday and we chatted about the conversation I had with Chris and it was there I got the idea for a screenplay called If We Aren’t Married.

It’s about 3 pairs of male/female friends who have all agreed at some point that if they aren’t married by a certain age they will get married to each other. The question is do any of them actually go through with it?

So after that spa day I set about creating a plot and characters. I did character backgrounds, wrote out each narrative strand for each couple and set about writing it. To help visualise the characters I actually had pictures of people from magazines as the characters, so I could imagine them better. I wrote 13 pages straight off the bat and then just stopped. For some reason I couldn’t write anymore, even though the plot was laid out for me. I remember my friend Jas reading the synopsis and she stopped before the end as it got too sad.

It wasn’t until this challenge that I thought about restarting the screenplay again. However when I wanted to restart it, I was going through a break up and weirdly some of the things I was going through, I said the characters were going through….even though the plot was written 5 years ago. Restarting it around April time was just too raw, I got upset every time I was reading the plot as things could relate to me, and I just wasn’t in a good place.

Months have passed and what I’ve figured out is this. 5 years ago relationship wise I hadn’t had much experience. I think at that point I had been out with one guy for 3 months and another for 9 weeks. Fast forward 5 years and I had a 2 year relationship, saw one guy for 4 months and another for 6 in addition to pre 2010. And there have been some near misses along the way. With all the highs and lows, it’s actually given me an emotional tool kit which I didn’t have before. All I had really was a chick flick view of life and not real life.

And the tool kit is great for writing; it can help me add depth to characters that I didn’t have before. For the challenge I added another 18 pages and one of the main challenges I initially had was combining 3 narrative strands together. One morning I had lots of different elements to the narrative strands spread on the living room floor trying to combine them all equally into one main plot.

Another challenge is whether when writing I write in order of the main plot, or just write each strand separately and then combine.

So going forward from the challenge, this is the screenplay I’ll next complete. And what am I going to do with it once it’s done? Send copies to Chris and Humaira who were there at the start of the idea forming, and to Jas to see if the piece makes her cry. If it can bring out any emotion then I know I’m on the right lines.