The HOST Diaries #2: The Concept Develops

Last time, I wrote a bit about where ideas come from (I don't know) and how to solve conceptual problems (also don't know). Riveting stuff.

That said, that is, indeed, part of the process [1], and I find it crucial to go over the minutiae of the concept before having a script I could ever call a real draft. As a quick recap, I had three problems with the central concept in HOST [2]:

1. I was running long, almost eleven pages, which was way over what I was going for (shooting in one day).
2. The message (”the point", if you prefer) of the script was running askew, as the story seemed to point to a conclusion I did not agree with.
3. Therefore, my planned ending did not work anymore.

Problem 1 was mainly structural, but I left it for last. I believed that once I zeroed in better on the concept, it would be easier to cut the script down [3].

2 and 3 were more complicated, even though they are pretty common. Stories have a way of doing their own thing on their way from our brains through our fingers. The fact that sometimes our characters catch us unaware in what they say or do is as weird as it is true.

However, the story will always point towards a concept, no matter how much you fight it. Seinfeld was famously “a comedy about nothing", but even that was a statement: comedy doesn't have to always be about something, and mean something, and have character development etc.

So when characters spring to life and seem to just do their thing, guiding the story in a different direction, it means two things:

1. The story will still mean something, even though it may be different from what you had in mind when you started out.
2. You will still be responsible for what comes out at the end of this process.

So as I approached HOST from that perspective, I understood I needed to restructure the beats and the tone, so my main character—Alice, the podcast host—still had agency in her decisions while not being held responsible for a systemic issue, and certainly not for crimes she did not commit.

So I was back to the drawing board. I spent some weeks doing a lot of writing, but especially a lot of not writing. I kicked around a lot of bad ideas, but the great thing about writing is that you only need a single good one to make it work.

Once the message felt on target again, I was ready to rewrite what would be the version of HOST that we have today.

Up next:

#3: THE SCRIPT

[1] I've been thinking a lot about friction, and how we tend to see it as a problem that needs to be solved, when it is actually the whole reason why we are doing whatever we are doing. But alas, this is for another day.

[2] Initially I wrote the title in all caps just to make visualization easier, but eventually it morphed into being part of the title itself.

[3] Spoiler: I was only mostly right.