Sunday 28^th June 2020

Oh God, I feel like such a grown up!

I have adulted hard today.

After the discussions yesterday, I labelled something a discussion document and sent it out for feedback.

Several things are obvious to me. First is how happy I feel with this process. After discussions yesterday I had a lot of notes about a potential project. I wasn’t able to really sit down and digest them all. However, I was able to do that this morning and put together the discussion document.

Secondly, was how easy it felt. Pages of notes could have meant an age in processing them and coming up with points for discussion. As I went through them today, I found it was easy to take them onboard, stand my ground where I felt it was justified, but adapt where needed.

The end result was that something I thought would take days, got done in a few hours. I still feel I must have skipped some stuff because of how easy this feels.

There’s potentially a ton of work ahead. The idea is to take the discussion document and turn it into an outline and from there a synopsis. Outline to synopsis I feel I’ve got a real handle on (Secretly, I love that the way I work means that writing a synopsis is now really easy), and hopefully the discussion document should mean a very quick turnaround of the outline.

So for all who are wondering what a discussion document is, let me explain.

It’s basically taking a bunch of notes and commenting on them. The idea is that multiple people can have input. So I might have a note that says, for example, character Bertha needs more agency during the heist scene. I might comment that it could be done and an earlier scene could be utilized to heighten the tension. Someone might comment back suggesting a different scene might work better.

What I like about a discussion document is that it’s collaborative. It takes feedback and offers suggestions rather than solutions. That way things can be explored. I can also state my worries with certain things.

I have a worry about a particular ask because it has the potential to destroy another scene. The long and short of it is that the character motivation would be different in this scene and so the character would no longer do what they need to do in terms of the plot.

I love that I can say that. I love that I don’t have to have all the answers at this stage, that I don’t have to say yes or no. I have room still to explore options.

I’m feeling good about the process which I have to be honest: makes me think that the course of action I’ve taken over the last few weeks has been the right thing to do.