Go Clara, It's Your Birthday

As of last night I’m eight pages into this next script and already the characters are starting to say things that surprise me.

I love that shit. You start with an idea of a character but sometimes they literally take over and start to become a little different.

Maybe it ends up being a bad thing and in revision you have to bring them back to the character you first envisioned. But in my experience, usually it turns out nicely and you get some stuff that, coming from some unquantifiable place in an imagination on the fly and not from the intellectual act of outlining and character sketching in advance, is richer, more interesting and usually more real.

In this script the lead, currently named Mindy, is pretty much what I expected, but the second, now called Clara, has really surprised me.

So have at it Clara. Go girl go.