Who's Your Favorite Celebrity Impersonator?

Good news everyone

A few people have contacted me and let me know that they intend to work on scripts and stories of their own along with me. That’s so extremely cool! I hope to be vaguely helpful. If you’re thinking about working on your own story but don’t feel like it will be good enough or that you aren’t experienced enough or anything like that then stop it now. The good news is that all our scripts are going to be awful, horrific masses of inane babble. A wise teacher once gave me permission to write an SFD. SFD stands for Sh**ty First Draft. All our first drafts are SFD’s. The second draft will be an SSD. The third will be an STD. With a little bit of luck and a metric ton of work you should reach something readable somewhere around draft 3 or 4. Fear not. It gets better as you work on it, get feedback, work on it, get feedback, work on it, etc. Just write your SFD and enjoy the process of being a bad writer. You’ll be a good writer later.

Completely unoriginal work

I try to have interesting and vaguely less than obvious ideas. The beats for act 1 and 2 aren’t all that original or imaginative. The beats for the second half of act 2 are even less imaginative. Here they are.

• ·      Harlan wakes up in the hospital. He discovers that Nathan stayed with him while he was in a coma. His family never came. Nathan “contacted” them but they never came.
• ·      Harlan wants to be left alone.
• ·      Fantasy sequence where he deals with this betrayal.
• ·      They have 24 hours to make it to Nerdtacular. Harlan decides they have to get there. They stage an escape from the hospital.
• ·      Intercut their escape from the hospital with a fantasy escape.
• ·      They make it out of the hospital and set out on the road.
• ·      Intercut a fantasy with both of them on an adventure together with the drive to Nerdtacular.
• ·      They drive through the night. Harlan takes a turn at driving.
• ·      Harlan is delirious and exhausted. He drives like he’s drunk.
• ·      A cop pulls them over and thinks Harlan is drunk. Nathan tries to explain but the cop doesn’t buy the story about the coma.
• ·      Harlan imagines the cop is an alien trying to turn them into pod people (or something like that). He drives away.
• ·      The cop pursues but they’re in the middle of nowhere and they’re able to give the cop the slip.
• ·      They decide they have to ditch the car and set out on foot.
• ·      They’re lost in the Utah desert. A truck pulls up to offer them a ride.
• ·      They end up at the compound of a very strange cult. Is this fantasy or reality?
• ·      They’ve missed Nerdtacular but Harlan points out that Dragoncon (or something similar) is happening in a few days and they can just get there in time.
• ·      They plan to leave just when the FBI surrounds the compound. Fantasy or reality? Is that just a sheriff’s deputy looking for the guys who ditched a car a few miles up the road?
• ·      They have to sneak out in the middle of the night. They steal a van from the cult’s carpool.

I didn’t finish the act. I got stalled on the point of the cult. I think it would be fun for them to end up being picked up by a cult but I’ve seen that quite a few times. At dinner my lovely wife had a great suggestion. Instead of a cult they’re going to be picked up by celebrity impersonators. The impersonators will take them to a training camp for celebrity impersonators. I haven’t seen that. I think that would be pretty funny and tie into the themes of the story well. I left the bullets about the cult in the beats above so you can see the process. I wrote it down knowing it would need to change. I knew I would change it but I wrote it down so that I could clear the road for a new idea. Not all our ideas will be good, particularly not at the exact moment you want them to be good. So put the bad idea in writing and replace it when the good idea hits.

Tell your story already

I’m in the early stages of writing this story. I barely have an idea where the story ends. While it may seem silly to start looking for feedback about a story that’s still in utero I don’t think it could hurt. If I hadn’t sat down and told my wife the story she would have never had the suggestion for the impersonators. I would have never thought of that without her feedback. Telling someone your story will help you see where it’s weak and where it’s strong. Do your friend’s eyes glaze over during that part with the bear? Do they get interested when you’re talking about the part with the dog? You don’t have to cut or keep things based on their reactions but it certainly gives you a sense of how it’s working so far. We’re going to talk about feedback at great length the more we hang out but I wanted to make sure you know it’s okay to get feedback at every point in the process. Just don’t get wrapped up in going back and working on things. Make a note and move forward.

Next time we’re going to finish up the beats and take a look at the story as a whole. Or we’re going to discuss obstacles and the “what’s the worst that can happen” tool. One of those two things. Or maybe a different thing if it strikes me as worth discussing.

Make sure you leave some comments. Let me know I’m not yelling into the void. I’ll keep yelling into the void if you don’t comment but it’s fun when the void yells back.