This week I received a draft of my opening scene and theme graf back from April. We decided that’s where we’d start the work on the full script of the larger piece. It starts off with an image we already had in mind for a bit: two recent grads from high school dancing together at the Pride afterparty this year to Lady Gaga’s Born This Way.
The image ties perfectly into my own history: Born This Way was a song that served as a kind of “detached” anthem for my best friend Lucas and I in high school – we had both come out recently but felt that we didn’t need to be a part of only “gay culture” – we felt we didn’t need that community. The imagery of dancing to the song will start off the journey of realizing that that community is very much needed and very strong.
I also created the theme graf – talking about the small-c conservatism of PEI, with its slow acceptance of abortion access and same-sex marriage. It was great to get these things out on the page and have something really down to start with.
I’ve also started detailing out where all my multimedia will slot into my structure chart – what videos will go where, what photos, what audio clips. Now that I have April’s feedback on these things, I think I have a good launching point to move into the next step: I’ll be filing a full first “script” of my feature for April on Oct 28 – mostly detailing out the narrative of the piece as a whole.
As we launch into the next segment of the MRP course, I’ll look forward to the weekly writing circles. Hopefully it will give us all a good chance to bounce ideas off each other and broaden our ideas as we go along.
It was also great to connect to Eternity on my MRP idea. I feel like my big question to her is the thing I’ve been struggling with most – the idea of putting myself into the narrative is always something I enjoy doing, but I want to avoid centring myself as the fulcrum. Eternity’s wealth of knowledge in queer journalism and first-person writing is really invaluable to me as I continue on with the piece.