Do you ever get that feeling like you've had a brilliant idea, and it's sitting on the tip of your brain waiting to be thought, but you can't quite get it to take shape and come out in words? Do many people get that? Is it a normal feeling, or is it just me being weird?
Well, in this case it's a whole fictional world that won't co-operate. I mentioned Frozen Bones in passing way back in this post from December, and stated that it had spent quite a while in 'development hell' - film-and-television terminology for the state where you're trying to get a project together, and it isn't working. As often as not this has more to do with a lack of money than a lack of script, but in the case of Frozen Bones it's the script. I've got a load of characters and things, and it feels like they should all fit together to create a strange but entertaining whole, but it's proving perversely difficult to write a story around it.
I'm currently on the second attempt. A couple of months ago I thought I'd got it, and I wrote three episodes, which introduced all of the characters and were intended as the jumping-off point for a longer series. Then I showed them to Tim, and he said it didn't work. And then I re-read them, and I realised that he was right: the first two-and-a-half scripts read like a bunch of introductions, and not much else. There was precious little time spared for either story or humour, which completely defeated the object of the series. There was the odd moment, especially towards the end of Episode 3, but nowhere near enough.
So I threw the whole lot out, re-tooled several of the characters, and started again, and after much brain-racking, I've got several promising snippets for a new Episode 1, but the overall story remains infuriatingly elusive. Grr.
- The Colclough
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