Making It Your Own.

I have been catching up on some writing while working on RM over the past month or so. It had a while since I had worked on any of my scripts, but I've been meeting some new managers lately, and I wanted to polish up a couple of my pieces. When writing a script, there is always this question of when something is complete, will it ever be complete? When I wrote RM, I went through so many drafts. It was draft after draft. It was hard because in the beginning, I wasn't clear on my own personal goals and how I wanted to tell that story, so I let other people shape and then re-shape the vision. There was especially once writing teacher I had who is good, but he's very dogmatic about how he believes a story should be written. Anyway, I left that group, stopped with any/all writing workshops, stopped getting feedback, and started spending long hours on my script, deciding and defining it the way I wanted. It was hard, but as I began to listen to my own voice rather that that of others, it began to take a clear shape. This is the same process I recently went through with the rough cut for the film. I got so many notes, I feel completely overwhelmed, and at one point, unclear about what the movie was about. Then, I took a break and I came back to some clear conclusions about the final edits. It was kind of a grueling process, but it's important to always, always remember your own voice, intentions and goals with anything in life, really. I have a new screenplay I am finishing. It's taken me a long time to be clear about the story, but I finally feel like it's getting there. I definitely will still get notes, but I now know how to parse through them and clearly get the work to be what I want it to be.