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Chipping away

This week I've been concentrating on a TV pilot I've written as part of my Masters.  I had a tutorial on Tuesday where I walked aways with 2 pages of scribbled notes and a head full of ideas.

I normally leave those meetings in a state of panic, never sure where to start or how to take an axe to a draft of work that has taken me weeks but now needs refinement.  I let the panic rage for 2 days but as always it's started to settle and today I'm looking at my pen pot of red biros and highlighters and wondering if I should just start tackling the great reshape. 

The structure is almost there but the characters need condensing.  I need to cull at least 3 peripheral voices and make the survivors more distinct.  I need to cut my slug lines down from poetic theatrical essays to 2 lines of action.  I need a tagline (I should've had this before I started writing) and a definite genre - not the 3 that I'm interchanging at will.  But most of all I need a definite reason for why what I've written would happen.  A MacGuffin.  

My tutor cannot say this word enough.  He spent the first 3 months of the course repeating this word but somehow it still I haven't completely got it. 

All of the characters need to be working, to the point of exhaustion, towards this element regardless of what it is - it just has to be something and I have to know what IT is. 

So I'm sitting here wracking my head.  I have 2 options and they would both work. 

But I want a third option.  One that will make me confident that I'm right to base everything around it.  And until I've found that my script is going to feel slightly wobbly and wrong.    

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