Nearing the end - keep the momentum (File Under screenwriting part 16)

From AUGUST 2007...

While the tabloids are buzzing about Pam Anderson and Denise Richards posing nude together for Playboy, I am nearing the end of my latest rewrite and it is becoming a hard slog. Not least because I have re-written dialogue where perhaps shifting around beats was more important. But that is sometimes just the nature of doing rewrites. You work and you work just to reach that final moment of clarity. The clarity was there all along, though. All you had to do to find it was to remove extraneous dialogue. That is what I am doing, right now, and I’ve probably got 48 hours of it ahead of me. Still, I realize that momentum is the key - almost like running a marathon. If you can keep the energy up in those last few miles, all the other twenty-something will have been worth it. So that’s what i’m telling you today - in this paragraph-less stream of conscious post. I’m just trying to keep that energy in top gear, because I know it will take me over the edge into a place where I need it to be. In the end, when good sense and logic have failed - momentum is all that you will have. Remember that. When you are in the home straight - keep the momentum up. For that exact purpose I keep listening to JOY DIVISION performing SHE’S LOST CONTROL.

Here is Anton Corbijn discussing the movie of the same name…