Last week I mentioned I was working on my storytelling skills.  Yeah.  It’s going okay. I’m in the process of developing a few ideas into finished pieces, none of which are very far along.  The stories are all in my head; now it’s just a matter of putting them on paper.

The first is a story I’m writing in prose.  My first draft was nearly 25,000 words.  In the end, I hated it, so I basically scrapped it.  I’ve still got it around, but i restarted the story, now that I have a firmer grasp of the world and the mechanics and what makes a story good as opposed to boring.  The hard part is putting aside time to work on this.  Got plenty of ideas floating around in my head, but this is one of those things that I’m trying to let the story just take on a life of its own and let the inspiration come as I go along.

The second is a short (15-20 minute) musical about a homeless guy.  Should be interesting, but I’ve still got to work on the concepts and work out the whole script.  I’ve got it all storyboarded in my mind, I’ve just got to get it on paper.  Hopefully, this will wind up as a short film to be uploaded online a la YouTube.

The third is a more challenging exercise.  I don’t have a digital camcorder yet, so I’m reduced to using a webcam that I have.  I also don’t have any other actors or local friends who could participate, so it’s basically going to wind up being a one-man show.  The challenge here is to make something entertaining when it’s just me sitting in front of a webcam.  I’ve got some ideas and a rough draft for the first “episode” written out.  I’ve got to flesh it out, tighten up the script, fix the lighting in the room, and make a test run.  Hopefully I’ll have that done by the end of the week.  I’ve got general concepts lined out for the next two “episodes”, but beyond that.. no idea.  I think if I could get some other people with webcams to participate, I could do some cool stuff, but right now I want to see if I can get this one-man, no budget, on location show to work.  Then we’ll move on from there.

One thing I’ve learned recently is that I’m not much of a creator.  I’m much better at taking someone else’s ideas or writings and adapting them or improving them.  I don’t really do a good job when I create things from scratch.  Not sure why.

But maybe this is one of those things where practice makes perfect.  So I’m giving it a shot.

We’ll see how it goes.

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