i helped a friend read through the first draft of his movie script with a couple of readers the other evening. half way through we started giving him some compliments, to which he said "thanks guys, and seriously if this script sucks, tell me because i'd kind of like to make a career out of this, so if its bad please tell me".
hearing this and reading on, i was reminded of something my old professor Stephen Heal once said in a scriptwriting class. he said, "there is only one thing that separates good writers from great writers. great writers are good re-writers". of course, Mr. Heal had said this when all the students in his class, including myself, had failed to do any rewriting on our scripts as he had assigned. which perhaps made his lesson have even more impact.
i think that's the thing with this business of art. or any kind of vision that we want to reify. my friend had the foundation for something great, the real question was if he had the perserverance to hammer and chisel and fix this thing until he was blue in the face, and this thing was perfect. it gives us simple people hope. we don't need to be mozarts, who's manuscripts were allegedely flawless, perfect first drafts. we just have to have the determination and the patience to work on it until it's perfect.
it also reminds me of one of the songs on the album, which i will in no way claim to be perfect.
in the middle of shawn' and i's writing period two autumn's ago, shawn, when i was away, decided to rank our first 15 songs. this was upseting to me cuz how on earth could i compare my, or our, babies in such a way. needless to say i eventually came to terms with it, and made my own ranking, which i didn't like but i could deal with. at the bottom of both of our lists was a song, that we pulled out of the rubble, rebuilt and improved enough to make it on the album.
so, in a way i'm glad he made the list. the song may have just fallen by the wayside if we wouldn't have admitted to it needing all the work.
anyhoo, go back to your lives
d
4 comments:
deep... couldn't have been deeper if I thought it.
...but it's supering more thoughts of equal depth in me.
...right, now back to simple SA life!
how song are you referring to?
intimate mistake
I always appreciated that about my writing professors at UBC. Getting good means doing it over and over and over again. It means writing everyday, even if it is writing out a to-do list.
And the arts are like that aren't they? Maybe that is why so many people fail to make it....
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