The Movie Inside My Head

Many writers talk about "seeing" a movie of their story in their head. I don't know if every writer is like this, but I'm one of the "movie inside my head" people. It's tempting to transcribe what I'm seeing, but that doesn't quite work. I can tell when other writers do it, especially new writers, because they get bogged down in the details. I tell new writers tat what they're aiming for is a Impressionist's painting of the scene, not a technical diagram. If someone gets to the point where they're mentioning which hand is doing what (His left hand rested on her shoulder as he swept her bangs from her eyes with his right hand.) then they're micromanaging their characters and need to back off.

But that's not exactly what I meant to talk about. Helen and I are in a quiet period with our project because we both have things to wrap up first. I told her I was having visions, which is just another way of saying I'm getting brief flashes of story moments, like teaser trailers in a movie theater. So she told me to go ahead and run with it a bit. This time, for the first time, the movie in my brain is animated. That probably has a lot to do with the genre we plan to work in. We're aiming for Yaoi crossover.

I whipped up four pages on the opening sequence last night and sent them to her even though it will be a couple weeks before she gets to it. Any writer who has been in the thrall of a strong scene knows why I had to write it down. Sometimes after I come back to something I hate it, but this one is in medias res, as any good opening should be. It's got a bit of mystery (several), conflict, danger, action, drama, and shows a glimpse of the main characters in their "normal" life just before everything goes to hell. It is in keeping with the elements we talked about, but doesn't go too far into the story, so it's easily changed.