Of Versions and Trying Again

I had the wonderful opportunity to return home this weekend to join my fellow homeschooler friends in a performance of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.

Which was awesome enough in itself, but I also got two 2.5 hour trips there and back, which passed surprisingly quickly this go around, mainly due to the fact that I spent the hours brainstorming, plot hashing, troubleshooting, and generally working through stories.

Now, all this work is cerebral, not actual pen-to-paper, but its definitely worth doing. (Especially when there's not much else to do). I ended up working through several different stories all told, but the one I spent the most time on was the umpteenth version of a story I now call Hoprerise. (To differentiate it from the dozens of other versions).

But to explain what Hoperise is, I have to go back to 2012, to a little story attempt called Deep Red. What started off as a novel, morphed into a Lego stop-motion, transitioned quickly to a Lego comic book and then sat on a shelf for a year, until late 2013, when I decided to try to write a script off the idea.

Substituting walking for planet-hopping, and shotguns for plasma rifles proved a unique challenge, but also provided a place to develop a particularly gritty, almost western-style of sci-fi I found immensely enjoyable to create.

Retitled Hopefall, and fresh off the success of filming Shadowland, I set out to film my new script with conscripted college buddies, locations in and around my tiny apartment, and costume and props gathered from my parent's old stash of military gear.

I actually got one day of filming in before the project flopped. Mainly due to scheduling issues, but there were also problems with the script and my innate tendency to try to do everything myself. After that, it sat on the shelf again until I returned to college in the fall of 2013.

Over the summer, I had written and shot with far more success a short film called Minefield, set in the same world I had created for Hopefall. Armed with that experience, and a shiny new version of the script with most of the bugs worked out, I set out to try again.

One week out from commencing filming, things fell apart once more. Scheduling a film in between multiple college student's classes and other commitments proved to be too difficult a task. After that, I set Hopefall back on the shelf, I thought for good.

However, in my recent forays back into writing, the elements and ideas I had begun working with in those multiple previous versions kept coming back, and I decided to give it another shot, starting completely from scratch instead of trying to retrofit the previous version to fit a new set of criteria.

One of my good friends, after reading many of the earlier versions, had given me his opinion that a story dealing with the Bible as an outlawed, drug-like substance in a dystopian society warranted a far more serious story than I had been giving it. My tendency as a writer is to epicfy things, in the process missing the true point of the tale.

Taking this into consideration has been key as I have re-explored the different pieces that make up Hoperise. And mulling through it over and over again in the car has made me see things I never saw before, as well as realize just how intense the story can be, without adding in action for action's sake.

It's still going to take a lot of work before it'll be ready to do anything with, but I certainly have a better grasp of what needs to be done than I ever had before. I've also realized that setting myself on one outcome will only end in disappointment. So whether the story ends up as a novel, comic-book, film, play or puppet show, or nothing at all, it shouldn't matter to me. My job is simply to tell the tale in any way I can.