Dreaming About My Script

This morning I woke up and I had it. Or, at least, I had a lot of it. I dreamt about my script, about certain scenes that I’ve been mulling over for the past week or so. Not wanting to lose the images that I had dreamt about, I got out of bed and immediately started writing. Of course, there were a lot of absurdities in my dream that just didn’t make sense (Barney moving in with Robin and Ted because he’d lost his apartment, and me suddenly appearing to make eggs and toast for all the actors), but other things, like Lily’s relationship with her mom, and Barney’s war with one of his co-workers began to fall into place.

I still don’t have the complete “story,” (I can only ask so much of a dream!) but I’ve got the bones and a little bit of flesh now. This morning, I also did a little bit more research, a.k.a. I watched a few episodes to make sure I had some key facts on the background story correct.

I’ve wanted to dream about my writing, and key scenes I’ve been having trouble with, for a long time now. Granted, I’d been hoping to dream about my novel, but I’ll take what I can get it.

I’ve had dreams about writing before—sitting at a park bench and whipping out an entire chapter in long-hand, for example. But, I’ve never dreamed about, or at least remembered, specific things that I could actually use. So, I’m amazed that my dream was even slightly coherent and usable. Not only that, but in my dream, I played certain things over again, changing things slightly, and then running it by my boyfriend to see if he thought it made sense. It was like I was writing while I was dreaming. I wouldn’t mind if dreams like this happened more often!

I don’t expect this to be a nightly thing. Hell, I don’t even expect it to be a monthly or yearly thing. But the dream, at the very least, acted as an impetus to actually start putting things on paper. Lately, I’ve been writing without writing, if you will. I mull things over, wonder about characters and how they would react if I put them in a certain scene, but hadn’t committed very much to paper as of yesterday. As of right now, I have a good five pages. Not much, but it’s a start.

Writing a TV Script

Miss me?

Cuz I’ve missed writing on my blog.

My French is coming slowly but steadily along, and it did give me a bump of inspiration last week… but I’m still feeling a bit stuck right now. I’m smack dab in the middle of the story and I still don’t feel like I have enough motion driving the story forward, especially for the story that centers on Anne and the riots in Paris during 2005.

So, I’m taking a break, a.k.a. taking a step back from the novel. I was kind of wary about doing this, since I’ve had pretty good momentum until recently, but sometimes I just feel like I need to step back and reassess. And reassessment, for me, involves not looking at my story for a little while—at least a week, but no more than two.

At the same time, I’ve obviously got to keep the creativity and writing flowing, so I’m now working on something totally new and different. I’m writing a spec TV script (a script for a current TV show). For a long time, I’ve been curious about whether I could pull of a TV script, whether I’d enjoy it, etc., and figure it’s about time I try. After all, you can’t know if you’re good at something unless you try.

I have NEVER written a script. This is completely new for me, including how to format a script. But I’m already having fun with it. I’m basing it on the CBS show, “How I Met Your Mother” since I know the characters inside and out, given that I’ve watched every episode of the four seasons multiple times.

Comedy is not usually my thing, but since I know this show so well, ideas are already flowing like crazy. Plus, my boyfriend is a huge fan of the show as well, and we’ve somewhat been working as a writing team, bouncing ideas off one another, shooting for ridiculous plotlines (as are common on the show) while also making sure the plot makes sense for each of the characters.

This is totally unlike any writing I’ve done before, and, so far, I’m loving it.