Well, they haven’t killed me yet, and I guess they’d better not, because now they’re counting on me to get the book written in time. I’m a’crankin’ on it. It’s interesting to see the difference between writing something in someone else’s universe, and writing in your own. It’s a lot easier to do someone else’s story. For one thing, you don’t have to make everything up. (In this case, I’m taking a storyline that’s already set in celluloid and, er, binary digits, so the plot is already there.) When you want to know a technical or background detail, you can ask someone else. (That doesn’t mean you’ll get an answer, or at least a quick answer, but you can ask.)
The changes in technology have affected the process of doing this kind of writing, I’m guessing. Instead of just going by memory, and by a script that’s *way* out of date as far as the final show on screen is concerned, I can have the whole thing readily at hand. I’ve loaded the DVD right onto my hard drive–both on my desktop and my laptop–so I can simply toggle between my work and the video. I can get the dialogue right (for that matter, I can get the scenes right–you’d be amazed how much it all gets moved around and changed in final production and, I assume, the editing suite). I can look closely at the set, and the characters, and their mannerisms. I can also move on from that to add the layers of depth and texture that distinguish prose fiction from a visual production.
The trick may be to keep from getting too tied into that. I do, after all, have to write this book quickly. But you know something–I’m having fun.
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