A Road To Journey On

I pretty much finished up the third draft of the screenplay for my upcoming film this afternoon. I say "pretty much" because there's still a few bits and pieces that need to be polished and honed, but apart from that it's done. And, thank Heaven, it's a lot better than the second draft. Oh, my writing style hasn't radically improved in space of a few weeks, obviously; persistent editing and thoughtful critique can change (promising) rubbish into gold. But actually, as much as I'm indebted to these factors, I don't think that they're what made the final difference this time. Between the writings of second and third drafts I found something - namely, a path. See, the first two drafts weren't horrible exactly, but all that was going on was a periodically interesting conversation between two people. In a nutshell. So the script kind of meandered its way to an ending, highlighting this and that point but never really putting one foot in front of another. It was an exploratory foray - which is fine. Except. Except, most people (myself included) don't really want to be taken for a vague ramble. They want to go somewhere. They want to see progression and change and development. Anything else is (if prolonged for any appreciable amount of time) quite frankly frustrating. It's not just a writing problem either. For years I felt that, though engaged in interesting jobs and pastimes (well, the pastimes were interesting anyway) I wasn't really going anywhere. What I wanted (and needed) was a path to follow. Something that would transform a walk in the woods into a journey. Having now found it - for the present, at least - it's easier to relax and be content with everyday life, because I can see that I'm going somewhere. The funny thing though, and the encouraging part for those who are still wandering, is that now, looking back, I can see that I always was on the road.