A Night in Hell

I got Michael Lee's next batch of pages for Hell on Wheels on Wednesday night. This took us about half way through Act II. One interesting thing was an idea MLee came up with to make a certain action sequence more exciting. It was in Act I, but I think we'll end up finding a middle ground between the two versions of that scene (my original, and his altered) for the scene in Act I, and use it as a set-up for the scene that will lead us into the climax at the end of Act III.

So I read through his rewrites on my pages, then went through his new pages, writing in some thoughts and alterations, etc. Then we got together last night (Saturday) to discuss where things stood -- hence the "Night in Hell." It was a great learning experience and hopefully relatively productive. We discussed a lot of things, both minor and major.

For example, I noticed he and I had a few unique writing quirks, which was fun to discuss and work through. For example, though I'm not a total stickler for format, I do hate to see too many things CAPPED in the action element. For me, all I capitalize is the initial character intro (for speaking characters only), sound effects (but not "practical" sound, e.g. a scream), and camera movements (which I keep to a bare minimum, though I might write something such as "we GLIDE over the train tracks"). It reminded me of this post and the ensuing discussion in the comments, over at The Artful Writer.

In addition to our specific formatting quirks, we also had slightly different ways of writing dialogue and the like. Largely this stemmed from our disparate backgrounds -- MLee has been a writer/director while I am a pro script reader. This led to some interesting discussion, but overall I think we worked stuff out and learned some things about our thought processes.

So what did we figure out? Well, firstly, we realized that though we had done a pretty detailed outline, it still made sense to depart from it at times. We discussed one thing we hadn't thought about previously: which scene to use as our "mid-point" scene. Finding the most logical one suggested some shifting of what we already had planned or written. More importantly, we realized that an entire scene (or short sequence) we had in the outline was really unnecessary. Originally we had included it for one primary purpose (showing the gelling of the team of vampire fighters), but we subsequently realized that another scene served that purpose equally well, which allowed us to drop the second scene.

Some other points we discussed... One of the things we have been working on building up for some time now is (main character) Zane's motivation. While there was something there all along, I felt that it wasn't strong enough. It's something we've been working on. Michael came up with one idea, and I wasn't convinced I liked it, though I couldn't figure out if that was because of the motivating element itself, or just the way it was presented. But then we discussed finding a more personal way of expressing the same motivation, and I warmed to it somewhat. So I'm going to try to incorporate that a bit in my rewriting. I'm also trying to keep it to the Enneagram type we decided fit Zane's personality.

Another point I raised was something I've been talking about all along: making sure that both the Western and the Vampire elements are equally strong. I don't want this to just be a vampire story in a Western setting. I hate gimmicks, and while by its nature any genre hybrid will be somewhat gimmicky, it can transcend that if it truly melds the two. So I posed the following question to Michael Lee. If we removed the vampire element (and hypothetically changed it into some other western element like Indians or something), would the story be strong as a pure western? I posed it this way because I felt we definitely had some strong vampire elements, and I wanted to confirm that the western part was its equal.

He pointed out something that I hadn't consciously picked up, but I think it is correct. Our story structure almost works like a swinging pendulum. The first act primarily works to set up a unique western world, and subtly introduce some vamp stuff, so it is primarily on the western side of things. Then the first half of Act II swings us back the other way, towards more of the vampire stuff. The second half of the act swings back more towards western, but definitely begins to meld the two, as if they are colliding. And then Act III is truly an intertwining and collision of the two halves. And on the question of the western aspect itself, we are definitely creating a fresh world, and exposing an aspect of the old West that has not been really shown on screen before. But at the same time, we're certainly grounding it in the familiar conventions of the genre.

MLee similarly eased my anxiety over a few other elements that I wasn't sure if we handled in the best way possible. He explained why he thought they worked as we had them, and it seemed to make sense. So that's a good thing, and I guess it highlights one of the benefits to a collaboration! The bottom line is that while I'm not 100% convinced we'll hit our marks in this first draft, I do feel more confident that we're heading in the right direction with this.

So what's next? I'm going to aim to have my revision and the fresh pages done to get to Michael Lee by the end of next week (sometime on the weekend of October 1st). Though of course the trip to NYC could interfere (I do not own a laptop, which kind of sucks, but what can you do?), but hopefully I'll be able to stay on track (pun intended). My first step will be to revise and shorten the pages we have, and possibly also work in a few minor elements that we're going to need to push ahead due to the dropped scene. Then I will aim to write us through the end of Act II. We're moving along, and it's pretty exciting!

Tags: screenwriting, vampires, western+movies, collaborating, Enneagram