i've forgotten how to write description. its very troubling. i've been working on the latest draft of 'shunned' / 'shunted' etc. for the last month or so, and i finally sat down to do some writing this weekend. it was fun... although it reminds you why most writers are assholes. when you're in writer-world, the rest of the world ceases to matter as much. its like you've got tinnitus. everything else is dulled and muffled. the only thing that matters is the writing.

reading the script again, i'm struck the blandness of my action description. it lacks spark. its very factual. dry. i mean, couple that with the overall domesticity of the scenes, and its a kind of average mix.

i blame this on four things:

a) law. most of what i've been writing for the last, i dunno, SEVEN YEARS, have been law essays. surprise surprise, law essays tend to be very factual and dry. the most poetic you can get is inventing bullshit terms like 'scalar sociopolitics' and using concepts like the 'interdependent systme of needs'. my vocabulary has shifted to having an assortment of synonymns for 'argue' and away from anything which might be, god forbid, emotional in nature. this is bad. thankfully i only have two more law subjects ever. yay! admittedly, one of them is a 10,000 word research project... but i plan to go freaky with the not writing of law essays.

b) comics. i love comics. i really do. unfortunately, comics are a dialogue driven medium, not description. most of my fiction fix has been through comics recently.

c) plays. i love plays. i really do. but, like comics, plays are dialogue driven... both in the written form and the performed form. no description.

d). my general reading of non-fiction. even outside of law, most of what i read is non-fiction: magazines, news articles, books on the art of deception. unsurprisingly, these tend to eskew poetic description wtih dry, dull facts.

so... on the upside. my dialogue skills have improved, even if i have to conscious resist making my characters sound like they're from Ennis' Preacher or Whedon's Firefly (ie i keep on writing 'ain't' and then remember noone says 'aint' in Australia 'cept me). on the downside, their environments & actions are secondary... which is a Very Bad Thing. i honestly believe that one of the fundamental unique elements of cinema as an art form is space. you use space to reflect or juxtapose the characters' psychology. this is underdeveloped in the script as it stands. currently, shunned feels somewhere between a comic book and a play, rather than a screenplay. this can be fixed - and it must be.

this all means that one of my post uni plans should be to start reading novels and poetry again. poetry is actually probably a better source of inspiration than novels - its a highly condensed, imagery-driven form. very much like screenplays.

i've also got structural concerns... but that's another post entirely.

wow, this is probably the longest post i've written in a long while... and its actually about what i claim to do ! how about that?