My brain is turning to mush.
OK, not really. But I am in the middle of Script Frenzy right now, so my mind isn’t quite running at full speed at the moment. Also, I seem to have caught a nasty bug and the only thing I can find in the house is some generic cold and flu medicine that expired two years ago…my mom said it was OK for me to take so I took it. Thanks Dr. Mom!
Anyway, I digress. Script Frenzy. It’s uh…well, it’s going. I won’t say it’s going well, but it’s definitely going. I’m starting to get behind on my page count though, so I definitely have a lot of catching up to do before the month is out.
I was talking on my personal blog the other day about a character in my script that is giving me a bit of trouble. The script itself is a ghost story, based on my grandparent’s house. Their house is definitely haunted. I don’t care if ghosts really aren’t real, their house is still haunted. I’ve always wanted to write a ghost story about their house, so I thought why the heck not use Script Frenzy as my excuse?
I started my story out with a young woman who’s leaving behind her life to move back into her grandparent’s house. So the first few pages were basically setting up her life – her job, house, relationships, etc. She had a (and let me try to be polite here) “friend with benefits” that kept popping up from time to time. I named him Ross. I had absolutely no reason to name him Ross, it was literally just the first male name that came to mind.
So I name the guy Ross, and suddenly I’m picturing Ross Geller – a character from the TV show Friends, played by David Schwimmer. Ross Geller’s character is pretty geeky and nerdy. Trust me, I have absolutely nothing but love for geeks, I am one, I’m married to one, I pretty much live in geek heaven. But there was always something about Ross Geller that got under my skin. And since I had Ross Geller in my head after I named this random character in my script Ross, I began to hate my character!
I ended up abandoning the whole love story sub-plot and went straight into my ghost story part. Since I could never get Ross Geller out of my head, I just stopped writing about him. I need that section for the time being, just to keep my page count up until Script Frenzy is over. Once April is over, I’m scrapping Ross and starting over with Act 1.
Has anyone else ever visualized a character and then grown to hate them? Were you able to fix the issues, or just end up scrapping the character?