I'm just about done with the first draft of Fear of Clowns and it's horrible. But that's okay because I expected it to be horrible. It's also going to be somewhere in the range of 70 pages.
I feel like this script, more than most, is a big pile of clay. I plopped it down and rolled it into a ball and shoved it on the wheel thingee and pulled it up into a tall blob. Now comes the part where I have to make it into a vase. Then comes the part where I bake it, and then the part where I paint it. And when I'm done it will be all pretty and violent.
Today I rewrote my final confrontation scene. See, the last script I wrote, as you know, was about fighting zombies. So the fight scenes I'd grown accustomed to writing involve lots of cool martial arts moves and bludgeoning and one-on-thirty battles with a broom handle as the only weapon.
So yesterday, when I sat down to write the final gunfight, I went a little overboard. The scene is this: a boy who has barely any experience shooting a gun walks into a room with three other boys, each of whom has a gun and each of whom is a better shot. And somehow this boy has to kill the other three without dying.
My first attempt at this was ridiculous. I had all kinds of complicated moves and lots of melodramatic shit. Then I went to sleep and I woke up realizing that it should be simple. Protag kills Kid 1. Kid 2 shoots, hits in a non-deadly place. Protag shoots and kills Kid 2. Kid 3 comes out of the bedroom where he'd been hiding. Both boys stand holding their guns on each other. Then a distraction, and Protag kills Kid 3.
The thing is, Kid 3 and Protag are best friends so I've got one of those, Oh no, what have I done moments where my Protag cradles his dying best friend in his arms after he shot him. And right now it's so cliche it's making me ill.
I don't want people to feel like I'm being melodramatic. I want them to naturally feel for these characters. I want them to really cry when my Protag has to kill his best friend. Right now they'll groan.
And that, I think, is what's in those thirty odd pages I'm missing.
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