Sunday, April 06, 2008 - 09:22 AM

The Word Warrior
Edition 4 – April 6, 2008
By Dustin J. Allen

I apologize for the long hiatus but I’ve been contemplating my writing future and things have just started to fall into place to get me motivated back towards my goals. Since I’ve discovered this wonderful method, I wanted to share it with you all in the hopes that it inspires others as well.

The Matrix Ultimate DVD Collection has the movies and some extras that come along with them that I’ve owned for quite some time now. I’ve literally watched all of them, with commentaries, and have gleaned wonder amounts of information about my favorite trilogy/movie saga. This commentary fascination has led me to give other commentaries a try on other movies.

A friend and I have recently started plotting out a script for a virtual series that I wanted to write. We’ve failed to have time to get together so I started writing up a script for the first episode and I’m coming up with the feeling that I’m doing something wrong. So, I decided to borrow all six of the Star Wars DVDs to watch them for inspiration (as the series is based off of the Jedi mythos). As of yesterday, I started watching the commentary tracks of the original three movies (A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi) and that helped to spawn an unbelievably great idea.

What if I wrote down the details of my stories as if I were giving a commentary track on them?

There is a five part epic saga (pentalogy) that I’ve wanted to get down on paper for a long time. Inside this saga are themes I want to convey and images to the audience that will bring across certain messages but the sheer size of the project has been holding me back. The saga cannot be stand alone stories and will only make ultimate sense in the scheme of all five parts. So, with such a daunting task ahead of me, how do I lay out the information in a way that will flesh out all corners of character and plot?

I’ve decided to write up a commentary “track” that will help me with all the details.

In a single spaced format, I have been talking to an audience about the series as if it were completely done. So far I am a couple of thousand words and five pages into the description and I’m getting something accomplished. As I lay out the general details, I flesh out some of the finer plot points so that I know where I wanted to go, why I wanted to go there, and what the audience needs to take away from that particular series of plot points. The method is working out wonderfully.

Since my project is so large, my document will be a bit larger than most, but I believe that this method of getting ideas down onto paper will help immensely. I’ve also noticed that it helps to pretend that you are watching this epic unfold as if it were made into a movie and you were simply talking along side the pictures rolling across the screen. Have I gone from point A to point B in a clear line? Hell no, because that isn’t how the story unfolds to me, so why should it unfold to the commentary audience that way? I’ve jumped around a bit with pieces of the story and that has helped to keep themes in my overall story clear as I work out why things happened when and why they do.

Once I’m done with the commentary, I plan to start outlining each part of the series to have a road map for writing. I’ve tried every other way I know to write a book and so far none of them have worked. The only thing left, really, is outlining. After I’ve finished the outline, I’d like to write up a better explanation of the commentary method because I believe that this idea will be great for those who have the ideas, think visually, and really want to see their work go somewhere.

With any luck, I’ve just inspired you to give this method a try with your own project. Don’t worry about exactly how I’m doing it because if you come up with a version that works for you, then I’ve accomplished what I set out to do with this column. Write the commentary and then write the story.

How simple is that?

Think on it.