I already blogged about what a great screenwriting book Save the Cat is. Visit http://www.blakesnyder.com/ to meet the author. Blake Snyder advocates pitching your idea to anyone and everyone - if they don't get it, it's not strong enough. Apart from to my writing buddies, I haven't done this yet, through fear, I think. I already invested a couple of months in the Glass Cliff. I don't want to hear that it's lousy!
But last night my hairdresser, male, and another client, male, asked me what I was working on. I took a deep breath and said: 'It's a story about a female chief executive who takes over a company and the bad guys use voodoo to try to get rid of her, but she doesn't believe in voodoo (of course not: she's a CEO!) so she thinks she's going crazy.' And they liked it! They both said things like: Wow, so it's like is she/isn't she crazy? and yeah, something spooky happens and it's like: do you believe the scientific explanation or not? And what if not believing gets you killed? I told them it was called the Glass Cliff - I know this is not a very well-known concept, but they hadn't come across the glass ceiling idea either, which did surprise me. They are both bright guys, so I will put a an explanation of both concepts somewhere in the text.
It looks as if I only did 100 words yesterday - but I did quite a lot of work - I cut a lot of dead wood and cut a lot of woolly descriptions. To start with I write down a lot - there were pages about illegal immigrant workers swarming over the fence of the building site and running away, and the police just watching because they have nowhere to put all these guys if they arrest them. I condensed that to half a page and a couple of good images - but I couldn't have selected the important stuff if I hadn't written it all out first.
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