Donkey work
Today: Some more photos from Yialos, Saturday.
On Monday we nipped down to pick up some post which must have arrived on the Friday boat as I don’t think we have had any since. Sunday threw down a storm or two, with thunder and lightning effects and some heavy rain. This has topped up our sterna but also disturbed the water pump – at least, something has.
It’s doing that thing where it turns itself off after use every now and then and even, on one occasion, turns itself on again, taking the toilet cistern by surprise. Often though it’s a case of having to cross to the other house to reboot the on/off switch. Then it’s fine… until the next time. This is the third pump in 11 months, so either there was a bad batch or something is troubling them down there in the sterna. At the moment it’s running (though off and on) so there is no need to trouble our electrician/plumber just yet. Mind you, when it switches off half way through a shower and you’ve covered in soap and the switch is in the next house and it’s seven in the morning and freezing cold, well, that’s another mater.
The other news from the weekend is that I was able to do some more Donkey work. It’s a bit of a donkey work challenge actually. I have the script and characters, but I have to flesh it out in such a way as to make it readable. What I have discovered along the way so far is that I’ve not had to think about the characters’ appearance. What I mean is:
When you write a screenplay you don’t describe the look of a character unless it’s plot necessary – i.e. certain scars, race, anything unusual that is a clue to or part of the plot. You wouldn’t, for example, describe a character as : “Mike enters. He is 27 years old and has blonde hair and green eyes, a striking man with high cheekbones and a permanently furrowed brow. His beard is ginger and his moustache shows as prematurely grey. Although right handed, Mike likes to use his left hand and train it up to one day be ambidextrous. He comes from Wiltshire and was a pheasant plucker’s mate for the first 21 years of his life. He retrained at night classes to become the world’s top computer hacker at 24, and now lives with his collection of stoats on a small island off Torbay.”
For a start, who is this creature? And for a second, where are you going to find someone to play it looking like that? Without a lot of expensive makeup and effects he’d be pretty hard to find. And for a third, you’ve taken up valuable ‘black stuff’ lines and wasted valuable action/movie time. Anyway, there’s no point writing for Bruce Willis (I wasn’t, actually) when you’re only likely to be able to hire Will Bruce. The camera does the work and you say: “Mike (20s, unusual in appearance but with presence) enters.” Or something like that, leaving it open for the casting director to work with the team and find someone the writer hadn’t thought of who can carry the part and improve it.
And what that means is that I came to a part in Donkeys where I realised no one had been told what the characters actually looked like. So, while using a bit of sensible word placing and by dripping description in throughout the text over time, I now have to think about looks, and make sure I keep any descriptions consistent. It was odd to realise, after having this piece around me for so many years (four now, or three?), that I had no idea exactly what the characters looked like. So, while out and about on Symi recently I’ve been keeping my eyes open and making mental notes. One day, when regular Symi visitors read Shocking The Donkeys, they may actually recognise some local heroes in the story.
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