Re-Write-O-Rama: Day 7
Re-Write-O-Rama: Day 7.
January 1: Type FADE IN / The Beginning.
January 31: Type FADE OUT / The End.
31 days. 1 script. Movie script. TV script. Whatever.
Goal: Rewrite an existing draft.
I’m doing it with a Zero Draft I knocked out in November. You’re invited to join me on your own script.
NOTE: If you want to use the month to prep a story or write a zero draft, that’s fine. The point is for you (and me) to use Re-Write-O-Rama to kick off 2016 with a bang and make progress on a script!
To learn everything you need to know about the Re-Write-O-Rama: Winter 2016 Challenge, go here.
Hashtag: #RW31SCRIPT
You may download a calendar here or here to track your progress.
Join the conversation in Comments here, Twitter, and the Zero Draft Facebook Group (over 500 members) for a chance to win a daily prize: The Hecht Award!
Today’s Writing Quote
The challenge of screenwriting
is to say much in little
and then take half of that little out
and still preserve an effect
of leisure and natural movement.
— Raymond Chandler
Check out my 10 part series: Rewriting Your Script.
Today’s Inspirational Video
William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1950
Here is a transcript of the speech:
Ladies and gentlemen,
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
Inspiring stuff from one of my favorite authors.
If you have a writing quote appropriate for the Re-Write-O-Rama challenge, post to Comments here, Twitter (#RW31SCRIPT), or in the Zero Draft Facebook Group.
If you have a video to inspire or perhaps give us a laugh, same thing.
But here’s the biggie: Let’s support each other!
How many pages did you rewrite in the last 24 hours? How are you feeling about your story? Are you loving or hating your rewriting process? Did you have a good day or a bad day? Do you have any questions about your writing process? Ready to give a virtual hug… or maybe you need one.
Use Go Into The Story, Twitter, or Facebook to bolster your creative efforts. And remember: Every day I’ll be handing out the coveted Hecht Award to the best Comment, Tweet, or Facebook post.
Hopefully we’ll get a lot of great photoshops like we did with the Zero Draft Thirty Challenge.
Finally each day in January, I’ll be dishing out a special batch of Re-Write-O-Rama flavored creative juju for everyone who posts.
Nothing else to say. Just. Rewrite.
Onward!
UPDATE: Check out this tweet:
Happy for Shelley that she’s cracking her rewrite. But it’s that second part which caught my attention. I think it’s safe to say one dynamic we’ve discovered in the ZD30 and RW31 challenges is when we connect with each other, share with each other, support each other, we do become a kind of family.
An eclectic, spirited assortment of Scamperers, Zeronauts, Word Warriors, and Outlaws, but family nonetheless.
And bottom line, we can take comfort knowing we are not alone in our creative quest.
For reminding us of this fact, Shelly is today’s recipient of the sacrosanct Hecht Award!
Okay, family. Back to work!
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