Sparrow
Wednesday, June 11, 2008

When I looked through my old work that I talked about yesterday I became very aware of how looong I have worked on some stories. I will never get my Sparrow sold if I said that I have worked on that for so many years. People will think I am stuck or that I am blind for everything but my project and therefore impossible to work with. Neither is true.

Sparrow is actually the reason I started writing moviescripts. As I have said before I have been writing for most of my life. Novels and short stories that is. Sparrow started out as a novel. But somehow I could never find a form that I liked. I tried different ideas but none worked. I realized that what I had in my head was a movie not a novel.

Movie scripts was a complete new world for me. I started to explore it, learn how to write a script, read scripts for movies I liked. And then I started to write Sparrow as a movie script. Wow! I loved it.

I finished it with great pride. I got a scholarship that would cover the expenses for a shorter class in scriptwriting and showed the teacher my perfect script. He gave me several pages of very constructive criticism. My script was really bad he thought. I refused to believe that. My script was perfect. He was wrong, I was right.

Then I started thinking. He got paid for writing scripts. I wasn't. Who was the most likely to be right about my script? He. So I dumped my dear Sparrow, learned from his criticism and started all over. I even got a mentor for about a year. The new Sparrow was much better. I sent it to a contest: American Accolades Screenwriting Competition . I became among the top 20%. I was all joy. And started rewriting to get among the top ten scripts or even winning.

I had two writing friends. One in England and one in Germany. I listened too much to my German friend. When I sent the next version to England, my friend there screamed that I had made it worse, that I had destroyed the script. And he was right. More than half of the other scripts in the contest where better than mine this time. I hadn't trust my own heart and it was no longer my story.

I tried to rewrite the story but somehow it never returned to be a future winner.

A few years later I started all over with the script again. It's name is not even Sparrow any longer. And this will be winner.