Like most of you, I too have so many interests and so much more I would like to explore. Picking a niche is like picking a food group you limit yourself with as a professional. It's like having a craving for melted cheese which goes excellent on toast or pizza, but you're only allowed to eat the melted cheese.
Somehow, it is the extras that make the thing you love special. I found, as a story teller, I like editing videos just as much as writing stories. It might be a trust issue as I don't trust others to display the story that I have in my head to materialize in a form which others can relate to.
The Conundrum
In practice, you have to choose. Melted cheese or a well matured, sealed and perfectly prepared blue rare staek. You can't have both...or can you? The entire story creating process gives me a hard-on, from writing the story to colour grading the video footage. At some point, you have to trust others.
At the moment. I'm fulfilling all the roles of creating videos, so I'm the one who need to up my game on all the areas needed to visualize a story.
Lately, In my profession, I had a full spectrum of requirements for my skills. Since they are vast, I had a view interested clients, but most of them that will materialize comes down to who is willing to pay for it. I have a continouis process of learning to improve my video editing skills, although I neglect other journey that is in the back of my mind. Telling other's stories is great, it pays the bills, but their's a journey I'd like to share one day.
My thoughts are that every journey adds to my experience to tell the "magnificent tale" better. I recently took on a free job of reviewing a Spanish script writer's work for a series he intends to publish. It was exciting and I truly love his story, made a few suggestions, but life came into play where I can't pay bills with good intentions. The majority of his problem is that his English isn't that good, Not that I feel mine is much better, but while learning to provide TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) lessons, I found that the Spanish aren't at the same English level as South Africans. The difference might lay in our cultures. Spanish people have much more language specific entertainment than South Africans. We mostly absorb American and Brittish enttertainment.
Regardless, my journey right now boils down to a intermittently advert which keeps the bills paid, a possible project to produce a 90 minute documentary which excites me, a free service of reviewing a series script and somehow, broadcasting while commentating a local cricket tournament. Unrelated, but I like learning how to commentate on sport. I'm not even a cricket expert, but there's no pressure to do well and I learn how to improve as I go along. Secretly, I always fassioned myself as a rugby commentator, but maybe it is more about testing my limits.
Writing my Scripts/ Novel
Maybe due to my own insecurities as a writer, I don't exactly know whether I should write the story which my short stories had build up to as a movie script or as a novel. Obviously, I'm acutely aware that it doesn't matter that much which comes first, but which do you pick. Both are exciting but the story will most probably change as I work on it.
The reason I wrote the short stories initially, was to pan out ideas. I can think about them, but for me, it works better to write the story as it comes into my mind. Planning too much is restrictive for me and feels forced and unnatural. My short stories was as much of a journey to write them as they will be reading them.
At the end, I still want to get this story out, although I only know the beginning and the end, but the journey in between still isn't that clear until I launch the journey. Maybe nobody reads this, but it might be interesting to those who read this after the movie goes viral. I'm on a journey where I basically left my job to create stories. Yes, I wanted to write for magazines to fund my travelling lifestyle, but I'm a dreamer.
Writing fictional stories is what I love, hoping to display them as movies is a dream. Right now, commenatating on sports broadcasts is what pays the bills. My idea is to make enough money to take a break to write this script/ novel which plagues my thoughts. Whether the movie sees the big screen is probably every storyteller's fantasy, but I want to go on this journey to write it. The perfect scenario is to book myself into a cabin next to a lake or river, alone, and for a month, just write. My wife won't agree to this, and in South Africa, there is this problem with electricity and internet, but that sounds like a vacation to me.
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