Friday Forays in Fiction: Script Frenzy 2010

I took the plunge again. Was dithering right up until last night. But if I could do it last year while away from home helping to care for my Mom post surgery and stroke, I can do it this year even with everything I already got going. The key is to treat it like play instead of work. Thus, as last year, I'm not going to measure success by number of pages but rather by how much I enjoy the process and how much I learn about the process of script writing which is still so new to me I'm like a toddler learning to walk or work a hula hoop.

Last year, I chose to adapt one of my own short stories as my project so that I could put all my focus on learning the techniques of script formatting. This year I'm stepping out a little further. I'm taking a character for which I've done a few flash fiction pieces for fun and and developing a screenplay mostly from scratch in terms of the story though a scene or two from the flash fiction pieces might end up in it.

Since I set those pieces in the same mobile home park as my NaNo novel Mobile Hopes, which is much like the one I've lived in the past ten years, setting is also settled. Also a plethora of supporting cast is available. So plot is the issue I need to figure out before next Wednesday night at midnight.

As you might guess if you've seen any of the flash fiction I did with this character, (here, here, & here) this will be a comedy. As to whether it will also be a love story, I haven't decided. Probably. Since I can't think of any comedies that weren't love stories except for those in the Porky's genre which I've no interest in emulating.

So that means developing a love interest for a 40 something, never-been-married, visually impaired klutz with such poor social skills she won't look adults in the eye and carries on multi-syllabic conversations only with birds, cats, small children and her comatose (or otherwise aphasic) father.

Here's the link to my Script Frenzy profile, which at this point I'm still in process of filling out since there is so much I haven't settled on. I've no title yet. I'm also going to be changing the name of my character.