From a seed a mighty hibiscus blooms . . .

My lovely wife and I chose to come up with plots for each other for our ScriptFrenzy. Interestingly, each of us are going to use these seeds for a short story (I'd started mine ages ago and never finished it). Here is the plot seed she gave me:

A fat, pink hibiscus flower presses against the window like a prolapse, big and bloated, swollen with colour. The husband is afraid of it and goes on to make a protest speech at the local horticulture club. They are sceptical at first, then they realise that he is right, and there is an intangible evil that can live within flowers. Soon he has a mass of followers. The wife doesn't believe him at all and is eventually alienated from him and his followers. He turns to the dark side and begins exploiting the evil in the flowers. Is he right at all though?

A Frenzy in June

Every year there is an event called the National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo as it's affectionately known. It occurs during the month of November, and during that month, each participant is to write fifty thousand words. Officially, those words are to constitute a novel, however, the judging is flexible and as long as you write fifty thousand words or more before the midnight deadline, you're considered a winner.

Last year I participated and last year I won (there were a number of words that were metatext--notes about the writing that I was doing, but it I did reach my goal).

As a sort of counterbalance, the organizers have developed ScriptFrenzy. The goal of ScriptFrenzy is to write twenty thousand words or more into the form of a stage or screen play.

My lovely wife, as always, is eating through her word count as though the numbers were jellybeans and she were a small child with a sugar addiction. I, on the other hand, am struggling, much more than I struggled last November.

Prose, I have discovered, is much easier to write than a script. Part of it is the formatting. Part of it is the way the words flow on the page. Where I was able to bullshit my way through the word count in November, I find that I'm having trouble doing it now. Action and description are different. Dialogue is different. I don't find myself having the luxury of rambling.

Regardless, I will soldier on. I've got a thousand words under my belt so far. I've got more in metatext that I've been writing to lay out the story or explore the characters. I've never really been good at metatext (it's always seemed wasteful. That's one of the reasons I've always had some trouble with drafts.) That right there is good experience. I've been reading screenplays hosted online to help me develop a feel for the format.