Script-writing is a very different discipline to writing a book. When I’ve written fiction in the past, I tend to take a “hammer it out approach” – mainly because I like to have my prose have an immediacy and urgentcy about it. I also get very bored quickly and going back and revising and revising and revising is incredibly dull – books that are written this way are also terrible dull. I think it is because my writing is based in the oral tradition of story-telling rather than the literary world. I could just be a lazy arse and talking bollocks. But the same can be said of my music – I tend to nail things in one take, very rarely relying on edits, in order to preserve the live energy of the performance – so it is really an extension of that. (Plus I get bored real easy)
But with script-writing it is more about creating something that flows, has an internal logic and the dialogue has to crackle. There’s no literary conceits of setting up a scene or filling the page with frippery – it is all done by the eye and ear, rather than the mind and imagination. So I would say it is more like making a sculpture or a collage, you chip away at the idea until you have something workable and then you refine, adding and subtracting as you go. I quite like it because it feels like it the whole tone of the movie could change by adding or deleting a scene – it is a precarious pursuit and I like it.
But back to Melvin, I am only a day or so away from completing it. I need to add one more scene, I think. Then it is all about reading it through and nixing what I don’t like. I know what I’ve written isn’t particular good or original but a week’s work isn’t bad on an idea that came to me on in the bath.
I’ve decided that the film could be subtitled: “A New Zealand Vampire in New York”. Yes, I’ve written a vampire film that bends the rules somewhat and created a world where vampires are too concerned working the 9 to 5 and making money rather than biting necks – and Melvin finds himself the odd one out. The name “Melvin” is a knock on the film “Martin” by George Romero – a horror film oft-forgotten probably because it isn’t a straight vampire movie (the protagonist may or may not be a real vampire or he could be just a kid who has a sexual fetish for drinking blood) but it left an impression and I wanted to honour it in a way.
But yeah, I’ve gone and written a vampire movie…
(And a big hello to the reader from New Hampshire who has been visiting this site two, three, four times in a day. Not sure what I’ve done to warrant such studious attention, but if I were you I’d visit just once a day to avoid disappointment as I don’t always update on a daily basis)

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