13/100, kill your darlings

and kill them quick

Oh nothing makes you kill your darlings as quickly as writing for screen does. You come to think of 80,000 words as not being enough, what used to be intimidating is no longer insurmountable and you look around for your next fix and there it is, 90 minutes to tell a story in and hardly anything to tell it with. You divide that into three acts and you have 22.5 minutes for your first and you have 45 for the next and 22.5 for the last, you have 11 minutes to get to the Inciting Incident and you have 36 give or take to get to the first pinch point and you think it sounds like a lot or you think it sound like nothing but it sounds like being tied up tight and forced to skin it all back, to pare and pare which is just how you like it and every single darling gets interrogated this way, and likely ends up dead, you can become attached to nothing in this game, least of all the hope of making it to screen, it’s a fool’s game and you’re foolish for it, you’re hopeless at it too, that first flush of devotion as if you’ve found a new love and not if, not if at all, just a new problem of structure and maths and no seconds anywhere to spare, a game of economy and logic and you are happy with this in the same way you happily sat at your extra homework after school, thick pads of it for the gifted children and so often you doubted it was a gift at all but rather its opposite but here in the late afternoon as somewhere westward the light is turning towards evening, you are beginning, finally, to think of it was otherwise.