Thanks Team!

One of my fringe sources sent me this article for my script.

Romantic Breakups Cause Real Pain.

Rejection quite literally hurts — the experience and the memory of getting dumped by a loved one trigger brain regions linked with physical sensations of pain, scientists find.

Why is this significant? Because if Corryn has this disease, and feels the physical pain of it, and Wendy remembers this pain, it could cause Wendy to feel the physical pain as well caused my the memories of the pain Corryn felt. I already added this idea to the script in the second act.

This is why talking helps

I brought up my script idea to my fraternity brother, Chris, and he asked how old Wendy was when she underwent the experiment. I said one or two, very young. I assumed that a baby's ability to take in information was far better at an early age. Turns out, I was right, but for a different reason.

Up until the age of three or four, babies can create multiple synapses in their brains, which allows them to take in and remember much more information. Then as they grow, the ability to create synapses decreases. So if Wendy took in all of this information as a child, she still would have room in her small brain for more information because these synapses would do it. The fact that we still don't know how much brain power we use or what goes on with the rest of it....this could definitely be a working theory.

http://main.uab.edu/show.asp?durki=60790%20

Planning

It's time to reoutline. So much has changed from the original, and to keep myself on track this new beat sheet is crucial. That's the plan for tonight. Tomorrow, the writing continues...

Swing the Bat Often

If anyone reads this blog other than Professor Kaufhold, this may be good advice for you (just read it in my "Buzzmarketing" book while studying for my final).

Swing the Bat Often.

The best "big" ideas don't come in the beginning. In the book, the author gives an example that Henry Kissinger once sent back a paper to his senior writer 5 times with a note, "it can be better" without reading the paper. Kissinger knew that rewrites were needed because it takes time to make anything really good. If you keep throwing out ideas, eventually you'll think of the big one.

Moral of the story, I'm not getting discouraged by my senior project, and no one else should either if they are really putting in the effort. All first drafts are shitty. Take a look at some of the best movie scripts and see how they are different from the films, because they are. Even though this concept is repeated over and over, I still hear from students that they're bummed about their first draft. No matter how bad mine is, I'm still very proud of it, because I know I'm completely out of my comfort zone with this script and that's a good thing for me. Lots of writers are encouraged to write what they know, but nothing is more challenging, more fulfilling, and more FUN than using the imagination.

Minor stuff

Thinking of changing Harvard to Princeton. I want to actually walk on one of these campuses to get a feel for them, and since Princeton is closer, and also has a neuroscience program, it won't be a difficult change to make in the script. It's just hard to write about buildings I've never seen before.

Suggestions?

Even though Wendy is a child prodigy, I'm wondering how mature her speech should be? She is seven-years-old after all. I might need to make her sound younger than she does right now, but it may not be necessary. Thoughts?

Could Be a Good Idea

Sometimes what we remember isn't exactly what actually happened.

Corryn suffers from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), that makes it difficult for her to breath. The medication she takes is called Prednisone, and one of the side effects is mood swings. So...sometimes Corryn gets mad for no reason, especially at her parents.

When Wendy remembers Corryn's memories of her parents, some of them are really bad, but when Wendy meets her grandparents, she learns that they weren't really horrible people after all. This also makes Wendy think that Corryn's memories aren't very reliable, which makes it more difficult to learn about her mother.

New Direction

Even though most of my decisions can be justified, like sending a seven year old Wendy to college, it just doesn't work. So...here are some of my plans for fixing the problem.

The journey is about Wendy getting to know her mother through her mother's memories, so I want the journey to take Wendy everywhere Corryn has been, so the locations and people trigger the memories. Now, the Act 1 decision will be Wendy's decision to leave her home (run away) and find out who the woman is she keeps thinking about.

The journey first takes Wendy to Harvard, where Wendy meets her companion, Sadi, a neuroscience major. Sadi takes Wendy to Ardon's office, and Ardon explains to Wendy that the woman she remembers is dead. He also tells her about the experiment. Ardon wants to run a series of tests on Wendy to see how the experiment worked and how to make it even better. Wendy wants to go home now that she knows her mother is dead and there's nothing to look for, but then Wendy has a vision about when her mother first decided to work on the experiment, because she was dying and she didn't want her life to end without purpose. Wendy decides to continue the journey, learn more about her mother and the experiment, and eventually contribute to the purpose of her mother's life.

Act 2 will end with the new situation: Wendy knows Corryn is her mother and that Corryn experimented on her, but she still doesn't know it's the reason she was born (this will come later when Wendy begins to love her mother...and then BOOM, she discovers Corryn had her because she needed someone to conduct the experiment on, even though there will several risks involved).