A sometimes half-arsed record of the process of writing in its' variegated many forms.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Choral structures, Coffee split, and other tidbits

I realized yesterday as I was rereading The Coffee shop that I really need to work on how I structure choruses into songs. I wrote several songs into the movie, but the choruses (chorai?) only really work for the first one. I have a tendency to just write a verse as the chorus and then call for repetition instead of really building solid hooks that interact with the lyrics. I also don't have the melody in my head anymore for the last song, so it feels really awkward and off kilter. So I need to work on that, especially for the Song Cycle for Lyra, the world's most awesomest niece. I reread the one song I've written for the cycle, and it's not as horrible as my memory was telling me it was.
On a slightly related note, I wrote a concept album when I was 20 with the concept that all of our friends are really strangers. I wrote songs trying to get into what I really knew about several of my friends. Somehow out of the process came the idea to use the chorai (I'm going with that) as verses in a mid and final song. So there are two songs that collect together the choruses (okay, I'm wavering). It actually seemed to work, but my cousins and I only worked up the first few songs, so I never really got to try and sing the choral songs with guitars and such.
As to the Coffee Shop split, the idea being that in order to keep the read through of the original draft of Darwin's Child still a part of the CS, I could split them into a play and a screenplay. I actually think the idea could work within the context of wow look at how crazy I am I wrote a screenplay that leads into a theatrical play moreso than it's actually commercially produceable. That's all just gravy anyway. A writer writes to write, not to be produced. That will be my mantra until I get the chance to sell the frick out.
Anyway, enough on the ranting writer, I was trying to work how the play section would work. Would it just pick up where the movie left off, or how would that whole thing work? So my idea is to make it into a two act thing with the first act as character introductions, basically do some more slacker-like meet the characters as they hang around kind of stuff for the first act. Basically scenes that are missing from the film, and then go write into it in the second act, but really work up the whole meta-commentary aspect. I also want to really edit that stuff as within the script if that makes sense. The actual Darwin's Child has already been reconcieved heavily and partially rewritten, but I do want do decheesify some of the dialogue for the play and film even if it isn't a part of the actual DC stuff. Okay, now even I'm confused.

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