Between idea and outline Shereen Jerrett
Industry Centre > Blogs > Between idea and outline | Shereen Jerrett
Posted by Shereen Jerrett
on Thursday, July 24, 2008.
Categories: Writing
Between idea and outline lies the shadow….
Ideas. They all suck.
Anything can sound half decent in a two line pitch, even ninja zombies. It’s easy to say you have a brilliant idea, but what exactly is brilliant when it just remains an idea?
Now the next step, that’s the one you have to respect. The next step is the tough one: building that idea into a film. It always feels to me like I am trying to catch sunlight in a jar. I can see the flicker of the idea: brilliant, blinding, it flashes on, then off.
Infuriatingly off. I can’t quite grab it, I see moments, shreds of characters, lines start to come to me. I get vague, find myself standing in the back yard aimlessly staring at the flowers… or the stucco, it doesn’t really matter, because deep in my head I am chasing sunlight.
Aimless post-its with cryptic (even for me) notes dot my landscape, lining the fridge, or picture frames, forgotten under the unpaid bills, stuck to the bottom of my shoe.
I put soap on my toothbrush, leave the house in my slippers. I actually use that silly voice memo function on my cell phone, it is less lethal than scrabbling for paper when I am driving.
Friends find me a little dull; at times incoherent, or withdrawn, or suddenly inappropriately passionate about something we weren’t discussing.
I envy people who just bang it out, I have never worked that way. I hate my ideas, they wink at me from the shadows, grinning wickedly, refusing to adapt to my timeline, always forcing me to follow theirs.
Dragging them out, insisting they work for me always leaves me with a piece of writing that sounds embarrassingly like every poor quality sit-com I have ever denied watching. Light doesn’t dazzle from a 40 watt bulb.
I am learning patience; so now I wait, and I just watch as that beam of sunlight slowly crosses the room, waiting for it to come to me, washing warmly over me, so bright my eyes swim with red dots.
And just when I feel my whole world open and the idea pour through me, so complete that it is like I am no longer in the sun, but I am the sun… the funding gets cut, or they decide to go with another project, or any one of a million other bitter things happen…
But every now and then, it doesn’t happen. I hang on to that.
“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state
which makes art inevitable.”
– Robert Henri
NSI on the web
Views expressed here are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI).
Comments
Login with Facebook
You can post comments using your Facebook account by clicking the button below.
Login with your NSI account
Sign in to add comments or join (it's fast and free).
The views expressed here are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI).