Once upon a time, there was a writer. This writer decided to take on a new challenge: writing a screenplay. Script Frenzy is a seductive siren to a writer with an itchy set of typing fingers.
The premise of the script was simple: vignettes, surrounding a sad day in the life of the protagonist, Autumn Brody. Through monologues and dialogue, it was to be a commentary on life and death, mental illness and love.
I got about five pages into it, and abandoned all hope of ever writing a screenplay.
It wasn’t the story that thwarted me; as usual, all of my plot bunnies were in a row. It wasn’t the translation of words to images that baffled me; as all of my friends know, my writing always begins with a sudden, sped-up movie of the entire plot bursting into my skull, after which I replay it, capturing it with metaphor and mad doses of caffeine. No, it was the formatting itself: it was too jarring, too tedious to set it all up. I wanted to type a novella into the scripting program, and have it magically convert it to lighting cues, set scenes, and annotated dialogue.
Change Of Season 1.0 was promptly shelved. Without the contraints of the vignettes, I didn’t know how to convert the tale to standard narrative. Nearly two years later, I was smacked with a new vision, a new story altogether… and within it, I recognized the shy redhead scampering through a forested campus. It was Autumn: younger, more fragile, but still struggling with the demons she’d revealed before in her twenty-seven year-old version. Only now, there were more problems… There was a story to weave the abandoned characters together.
The plot bunnies had gone wild, and I was now slave to their proliferating offspring.
Where the bunnies have taken me, I won’t reveal just yet. But I will say this: I am proud of this Change Of Season upgrade. It is perhaps the most challenging and complex story I’ve pulled together, but it is a culmination of lessons from previous writing experiments.
I truly hope you will enjoy the ride as much as I have.
A.C. Dillon 