I am just putting the final touches on a film script I have been working on for six years. By finishing touches I mean that I have achieved a script that we (writer, director, potential producer) feel is good enough to start thinking about finding some money to make it.

Last week there was a friendly twit-fight between @bang2write and @domcarver about character and how much they are 'you'. I had written something previously about facing up to the fact that you are always writing about yourself that I threw into the mix. Lucy's post about it all is well worth a read.

But it started me thinking about how my work changes when I am direct and honest with it.

Sorry, how many years?

Six, that's right. Six years to get this one to the starting line. I have done other stuff as well mind you, three plays, another movie, a couple of web things, a full time job and a family, so it's not like I am navel gazing.

My previous record for a script from first draft to stage was seven years, but that was a piece of theatre so it doesn't take as long as film :-) There are many people out there capable of working faster than this and often I can work very fast too, but this project has just taken a loooong time to find it's way towards achieving the level of quality it needs to move from 'promising' to 'potentially actually produceable'.

What the back burner is for

Over the years I have realised that I am very cautious about my work. I will often let something sit 'in the draw' for a couple of years before I scrub it up and send it out, or, more likely, just leave it there. It's not very productive and I know it's not a good way to make a career, but I am kinda getting used to it as a working method now. And I have literally not looked at this script for up to a year a couple of times. Sometimes this is just force of other work and sometimes it's deliberate.

The trouble has been with the frame, not the story

We've all liked this script for a good few years, but there have been some structural difficulties which have needed sorting out and it's taken me the last three drafts to sort them out.

The difficulties have been around framing the main story, we've all been happy with acts one and two but it's taken a long time to find an ending and also to frame the 'story in the past' - as Linda Aronsen would call it - with a meaningful bridge into the present. As the film is a rather negative ending coming of age story it really needs a good frame to carry the story into the present - and give the audience a way of digesting the main story. In short you need the frame to make it relevant.

One realisation I had, prompted by my clever producer, was that this coming of age story was not for children, it's for adults. The reason for this is that the film is sexually explicit and transgressive (!), somewhat violent, and it occurs against a background of extreme family breakdown. Sounds like fun eh?! It's set in NZ in the 80's so it's not Meadows territory, but if you took a Meadows style look at the heart of middle class disfunction then that's a close enough picture of the story and it's tone.

So for the last three years I have written three completely different frames and left the middle 70% of the movie more or less untouched, just sharpening various aspects as I went. Producers advice was not to fix the bulk of it because it was not broken! She is very good with scripts and writers, and very patient. Wonderful.

The last version is finally feeling right to me, and it's largely because I have taken the deep dive into my own motivation to write the thing and gone a lot closer to the bone. The story itself is what I would call 'not an autobiography' though clearly the setting is more or less exactly when and where I grew up and the events are very much based in my own upbringing and things that were happening around me (I hear you groan) but it's not autobiography in that it's not 'my' story directly at all. I have used my background to confer authenticity and made up story as needed. Which means, like all good writers transforming their experience into fiction, I have mixed the grain of truth in with masses of poetic license. This is the job after all, chuck it in the crucible and pull the gold off the top.

So I left plotting behind and discovered intuitive and lived emotion as the guiding principle. Actually I don't believe in plotting at the moment, I'll go for wayfinding & storytelling any time, but that's another story...

I have written about the way that I found my new frame by going for a big walk in Scotland so I won't recap on that... but why did it work this time?

Make the bridge about emotion and experience not plot

In the previous drafts I have been solving the story from the protagonists point of view and trying to wrap it all up nicely with a bow. This has lead to some - frankly - mawkish writing and was like putting a layer of marshmallow over the top of a loaf of bread. I decided to stop thinking about the story at all and come back to me. Egotistical? Maybe, but instead of solving the story for the audience I now use my own experience as the bridge to the audience, because any audience this film will get will be more or less exactly like me. Parents trying to figure out how the f**k to bring up their kids.

So the story is about a kid being bought up badly and instead of doing a 'what happened after that day' roundup, my new frame changes the game - the kid who was bought up badly is grown up and now trying to do something right for his kids. Basically I added an old version of the protagonist dealing with the fallout of his past while he tries to help his child grow up. This situation is something that is easy to understand and empathise with. So instead of trying to find a story based resolution I have ended up with an emotional bridge which, as it happens, tells the story enough to be satisfying AND brings the story into the lap of the audience. Yum yum yum, scriptwriting bliss!

Fuck 'what you know', write from the heart with courage and conviction

The big lesson here, and one that I keep coming back to over the last few years and projects, is to write from the heart. I don't mean that you need to 'write what you know' but that you need to 'write what you care about'. So that means you have to write from the heart with courage and conviction. And, funnily enough, finding this courage again and again is the hardest and least teachable part of writing. It is, however, the thing that makes the difference in the end, if only to my feelings about what I am writing. I fully accept this script still has about 5% chance of being made!

So, courage fellow writers, and conviction. And that should flow down into your storytelling and scenes too.