On Writing Pt2

As I said in my first post, in the end the page count of my script turned out to be 46 pages. Which while that is short for a feature, turned out to be pretty much the length I had in mind for a certain competition I hope to enter.
The other coincidence, was that I started writing on the 15th of November, and finished the 30th of December, practically taking 45 days to write it all out. But while the average looks like basically a page a day, the reality is way different; also I'll discuss why doing more drafts isn't an issue for me right now.

Just like the treatment, I work chronologically, start at the beginning and end at the end. Stephen King says that really you should just get everything written and out of the way; it might be crap, but you can edit later and at least you have filled your pages.
I myself fall into that trap of writing the first pages, and editing as I go, so that I keep focusing on that first part and not moving forward. In the beginning, I had to really pry myself away from my opening and get the next part done, just so I would get to the end. That's why the first 20 or so pages of my script are the most edited and honed, even though, if you read it, it still seems the loosest. Which brings me to my next point.

The first 20 or so pages are practically all dialogue based. Primarily, this is because I wanted character and performance. My first short film, Special Delivery sucked in a lot of ways, a lot of that to do with the acting, which is the fault of the writer, me, because my dialogue sucked, because I didn't work well with a 10 minute time limit that the competition allowed me. All the dialogue in that was exposition, I had to have the characters tell the story as it was happen, catch everyone up so that we were all finally on the same page when it was over and so the audience really wasn't a part of the movie...
So here I didn't have a 10 page limit to tell an entire story. I had breathing room, so I spent 20 pages on bringing everyone in, letting them be who they were, and really showing how they fit in with each other. One character knows these guys, though one of them isn't there yet, and he doesn't know these other people that are here, but the one he does know is a mutual friend, and really just through letting the scenes run, I could do this without being obtrusive. Just by letting them talk, not talk, fidget and be with each other, the audience would see it without having to be told in an unnatural way. They're in one car, then when the group gets big enough they split into two cars, and they all just talk about stuff because that's what you do when someone's giving you a ride somewhere.

When I write dialogue, I'm basically an actor, improvising a scene, and writing down the dialogue and character actions. The only thing is, I'm playing each character, so I have to get into a different mindset when I'm writing a different character's line.
This takes a lot of concentration, but it's the only way for me to do it without being 1 dimensional. When I'm doing these dialogue based scenes, I'm not thinking as a director, even though that's my intention later on, or even a writer for a director. That stuff I can do when I go back and edit. When I edit my script, I'm then directing the characters in my head like actors, asking for a new take of improvised dialogue, that might need to say this, that, or the other. And with that, I'm acting again.

That said the dialogue, while a lot of it is run on and naturalistic, is still setting up the story in a lot of ways. We're finding out why they're going there just by hearing them talk about what they're doing. We're finding out what they're like, so later their actions make sense. I even signal each death with lines of character related dialogue that just occur in conversation (see Chekhov's Gun theory).
And as much as I want to be naturalistic, my dialogue still has a bit of a stilt, a clumsiness to it, which can be disguised, or made to look good by a good actor, but I am definitely open to improvisation by actual actors, as long as what they say hits the right points that need to be made for the scene.
The intended naturalism is also stylised to an extent. It's streamlined (to a degree of my personal taste). Nothing that the scene doesn't need is there. It's all what is needed to be said. It's why I spent so much time agonising over these 20+ pages in the beginning. Because all this character set up will be needed for the audience, so that they're on board with these people as I kick the blocks out and let the wheels of the plot hit the ground, letting the story take off.

One other point I'd like to make is that I hate it when a story, especially films, has an entire plot that is based on one conceit. I know that technically, that is what fiction is, but I'm talking about if one event didn't happen randomly, then the rest of the movie wouldn't happen. An example, say in a story where a earth tremor shakes a rock loose onto a highway and causes a car accident and then the two people in the accident meet and have an adventure together and learn the meaning of life. If the rock hadn't fallen at the exact moment, there'd be no story. I hate that. I don't want chance, or serendipity, or whatever it is to be required for a plot to work.
If I meet someone in real life who learned some valuable lesson simply by chance, then they're probably the kind of fickle person I don't wanna know. So then I am certainly not going to want to spend time with a fictional character with that trait.
I am much more drawn to a story, where you may even know how it's going to end, but it's on a path that's driven by the characters. They may change by the end, there may be twists and turns in the story, but their characters remain true and the story comes from them, is not just what happens to them.
I'm not sure to what extent my movie could be called "character driven" but I'd like to think the actions they take when faced with the opposing force of the piece, they are true to the characters. When characters are well written enough, it won't matter that they're not audience surrogates (a concept I don't think really works, because even several characters cannot represent an entire audience, many, if not most will feel cheat when these cipher type characters don't do exactly what the audience would), if the audience believes that what the character is doing is true to the character, then they won't feel cheated.

The movie is going to be low budget, and the effects are most likely not going to be all too convincing, so that is why the characters and story are important to me, that they are satisfying. Because in any case, I don't believe that most people need proof to believe in something, what they need is a reason.
It's why people follow different religions, or believe in aliens, or whatever. It's not proof they require, it's a reason. And so even if what is on screen isn't entirely too believable, they'll follow it anyway, as long as I've given them a reason to believe it. And that's having a good story at hand. And that's why I'm so focused on getting the characters down.