this is seriously a journal entry that i’m sure no one outside of myself would even care to read.

Still plowing away at my screenplay. I’ve been outlining like mad, and it’s getting there. I dreamed about one of my characters last night — he was dead in a coffin, and decided that for his last hurrah, he would shake himself from that final slumber and announce, in public to everyone alive who knew him, that he had been in love with another woman for the bulk of his married life. It absolutely crushed his wife, as you might imagine, but made his exiled lover feel like she got the attention she finally deserved.

Nothing like this is happening in the screenplay I’m writing, but maybe it should. From my vantage, it was most certainly an entertaining — and a really creepy — dream!

I know why I had this dream. Before I went to bed, as I went over plot points in my head — rearranging which activity should go where and if that’s the best place to serve the story’s purpose — I kept judging myself. The screenplay I’m outlining is turning out to be very dark. So dark, that I don’t think I’d want to see it, let alone write it.

Maybe there is a way to lighten things up, I thought. Infuse a little comedy. Or, as my subconscious played it, go metaphysical. I’ll need to do something so that when you’re done reading the screenplay, you don’t want to just go out and open up a vein. People in our society generally don’t need help feeling depressed.

At the same time, though, if that’s where this story is taking me, that’s where I’ve got to go. I can always try brightening things up after it’s written.

Then I thought of the Coen brothers — the guys who did Fargo, No Country for Old Men, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Burn After Reading. Their flicks certainly aren’t about fluffy topics. In fact, when I looked up their movies on  IMDB, a few of them are listed as “comedy.”

How does offing people equal a comedy. If you can make a comedy about getting people killed, then what is the difference between tragedy and comedy?

Which gets me to a point that I’ve noticed about art for decades: the treatment of an idea is king. You could have the greatest artistic idea in the world — doesn’t matter if you write or paint or compose or design interiors — but how you express that idea makes all the difference.

Let’s take interior design. You decide your favorite color scheme is black and white. Your room could look sublime in the way that the black and white gets put together, or it could look like someone threw up a checkerboard. What matters isn’t the color scheme — the idea — what matters is how it gets played out.

In fact — and I’ve had this thought dozens, maybe even hundreds of times over the course of thinking about art in all forms — the idea itself doesn’t matter one iota. Constrain Mozart to just five notes, and I’ll bet that man could still whip out something bordering genius. Ask “grandma” to knit you a sweater with the yarn you select, and I’ll bet that even if she would have never chosen that type of material in a million years, given her deft technique with the needles, she could do it. Tell an experienced and talented writer, who has never picked up a club in her life, to go write a piece on golf, and it’s possible to have a bestseller.

It’s not the topic that matters so much as the execution. And therein lies the difference between the novices, the masters, the artists and the geniuses. Each category of creator executes that much better than the rest.

This is the long way for me to convince myself that the topic of my screenplay — no matter how dark it gets — isn’t what I should ultimately judge. It’s the expression of that idea that matters most. AND, I need to stop judging myself while I’m writing. Instead of having a muse, I have a nasty nitpicker sitting on my shoulder. Flick that guy off.