Writing shorts makes one-armed press-ups look easy
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhhhhhhh. There I was, thinking I had something approaching a decent draft, and having re-read it, it seems perfectly worthless. I wanted it to be an exercise in screenwriting without any limitations such as writing to budget, but as it is, it just doesn’t seem to hold together. Trying to write a half-decent short makes one-armed press-ups look easy.
On the bright side though, I think I’ve got the story figured out. I think the problem is the way I’ve presented it. There’s one particular scene that bugged me all along, to be honest, but I had my head in the sand about it. It just seems incongruous and wrong, so playing around with the narrative is an opportunity to fix that. I will take out the scene from the linear narrative and just throw in a couple of segments of it as memory flashbacks during key scenes. I know that everyone’s writing flashbacks these days - it’s an incredibly overused and tedious technique, but sometimes it just works. I think it might just work in this script, in which case the story might just hold together after all.