I like it better when I beat them up

I admit I'm having a little trouble with Jacking. I love the story and I think it has potential to be a great script, but I'm just finding hard to get up the energy to write it.

I usually write stuff with explosions and gun fights and I sail through that shit because it's loads of fun to kill people on paper. Yeah, I said it, I like killing made-up people on paper.

Oddly enough not in role playing games though. I'm always the good guy in those things which I find hilarious since one of my favorite things to do in a script is to brutally murder the nicest person in the story.

Gun and knife fights and zombie battles and giant fireballs and tidal waves are just a blast to write about. I usually run through those scenes in like ten minutes because they're so easy. I get carried away by the coolness of a martial arts move that lands a hairbrush down somebody's throat. And Not Dead Yet was full of those kinds of scenes, which is why writing it was just one awesome day after the other, with the brief exception of the time I got stumped on some technical shit.

But Jacking is different. No one will call this an action script. It's a drama, straight up, and a serious story with no explosions at all. Nobody rams a hairbrush down anybody's throat.

I still really enjoy writing it once I get going, but it's just not the blast of zombie killing. This shit is depressing and it's about teenage Latino males so I'm stretching a bit more when I write. It's harder.

I think I'm doing okay with that, though, because I'm just channeling my kids a little when I write the dialogue. I keep going back and changing a few things to match their style. For instance, most Latino kids never say "Do you have a stapler?" They only say, "You don't got a stapler?" which always makes me feel self conscious, like they're accusing me of not having the proper tools for teaching.

I'm still not used to that manner of speech, but it helped because I was able to go into my story and insert that kind of language to help the authenticity. I imagine I'll still need one of my Latino coworkers to read it for me and make sure my boys don't sound too middle class white lady.

But really, my problem with writing this, once I get beyond the time and exhaustion factor, is that it has no great action scenes. It's a lot of talking.

That's why I wrote so many pages today I think. I just wrote 6 pages in less than an hour because I was writing a shooting. That shit just flies by when I write it, and I very rarely change it much after. The dialogue is much harder than the gun fights, and this script is chock full of dialogue so it's just a little tougher than the last thing I did.

But I'm writing again, at least. I get to write another shooting and a beating tomorrow, so maybe I'll get jazzed enough about the abuse of my characters to really pop out some pages. Because violence is fun.