Writing A Gunslinger's Odyssey

Writing is usually either my favorite part of making a video, or the thing I loathe the most. There's rarely an in-between. The subtle difference between feeling that your video is going to convey absolutely everything you wanted to do with it from the start, or that you're merely fumbling your way through every point hangs on the words, content, and structure you balance throughout. This was no different with A Gunslinger's Odyssey, which was poised to be one of my longer, slower-paced videos to date. There were years of ideas I was stewing on for this video which helped light the path toward the start. But figuring it out along the way proved to be a much greater challenge.

This is where the whole video begins: with the pitch; what I want the video to be. Though no other eyes will lay on it throughout the making of a video, the pitch can come in handy for multiple reasons. At the start, the pitch sheds a light on the type of research I should be doing. In the case of this video, westerns, samurai films, mythology, and Homer's Odyssey (an aspect of the video I ultimately nixed in writing). While writing the script, the pitch becomes a compass, ensuring I never steer too far in any direction from the original vision of the video (you can see I even used some lines verbatim from the pitch in the video, ie "tangled swamps, unforgiving badlands"). And in editing, the pitch is a surprisingly invaluable anchor. When you spend a couple months working on a video, it's easy to forget what your intentions might've been when you wrote a certain line in the script, or what song you were thinking for a particular transition. If I haven't specified what I want on the screen in the script, re-reading the pitch helps return me to the headspace I had on the video toward the start.

Next comes the outline. I usually doodle the very first outline by hand in a notebook, toying around with different organization and structure until I feel it's all been arranged, or is close to, a coherent flow. My attitude is that I'm telling a story. And in a sense, I'm certainly retelling The Mandalorian story, just with context, analysis and supplementary material bundled with it. The show's plot and visuals become the skeleton; figuring out where and when to attach the particular muscles, organs, and nerves of my story is more tricky. Do I arm the viewer with all the information they need to understand and interpret the show from the start? Do I only give them slivers of that information at a time, and space out that educational context through different parts of the video? Do I omit an observation or moment to bring it up later, when it's more emotionally or contextually relevant? These are all things I think about in the outline process. Even if I won't have the exact answers until I'm writing the script, the outline tells if I'm getting hotter or colder.

Above is part of the second pass outline. You can see how some things became more refined between both outlines, and how some ideas were altered, or maybe even dropped (getting into the space western, for instance).

When I feel good about what I've written in my notebook, I take it to the computer screen. What you see above is just one page of a very lengthy outline, going through each of the six chapters of my video and all their components. This is my guide while writing, ensuring that I'm never caught not knowing what to write next. That doesn't mean I won't deviate from the outline, but I'll only do that when I come up with something better (the examples on the page above would be shuffled around a lot while writing the script). 

Finally, the writing! This is an excerpt of the "first draft" of my script, right around the same area as the outlines above. However, as I work my way through a chapter, I tend to edit what I've just written several times until I feel like I can progress. Because this is for a video essay, I read everything aloud as I write it, ensuring it all sounds natural and interesting. Clips or moments of intermission in the video are highlighted in bold brackets. As a rule, I try to never go more than a paragraph without including one; ideally, to keep the audience engaged and break up my long stretches of commentary. Sometimes I'll denote music choices in brackets if I am *very* set on including a certain song. However, as I've learned overtime from making these videos, the song you hear in your head while writing certain moments rarely lines up perfectly in editing... so I try not to get attached! 

With this video-- more than any video I've done-- I wanted to put an emphasis on communicating through visuals. I can't, nor should I, convey every single thing I want to convey through my commentary. Not only can it be monotonous to do that, but I've found that describing something, or attempting to put it into words, can actually undercut its meaning. There are so, so many multitudes to Luke's arrival in The Mandalorian; what that moments represents in the context of the show's conversation on myth, and what that conversation means to every story that surrounds it in the Star Wars mythology. I can't possibly capture those multitudes with commentary. But I can use my words as an anchor, and tether specific images and visuals with their own subtext to that anchor. Afterall-- this is a video essay. If I wanted to communicate absolutely everything with my words alone, I'd be writing a plain old essay instead.  

My entire goal with the first draft (and this should probably go for the first draft of any written work) is just to get to the end of the script. Even if I reach the conclusion, and coil at the thought of all the messy, bumbling sentences that led up to it, it'll still be a success. Because it's much easier to revise what you've written when you have the whole thing in front of you. 

Here is an excerpt from the final draft, taken from that same part of Chapter 1 I posted above. You can see how certain expressions were changed, how details were rearranged, and points further elaborated upon. Not every part of the script changes this much, but this is a good example of how much it can. Some of the changes are motivated by trying to stay consistent with talking points later in the script (and vice versa for later chapters), while other changes are informed by important notes and research I couldn't quite fit into the outline or initial draft.

This was all done over the span of 45 or so days, with over 90 hours spent writing (not including the 100 hours of research that went into this video too), and resulted in a 26 page recording script. This is not a process I've always done, but it's the one I've cultivated overtime, based on my needs with previous videos. 

My hope is that in sharing my process, anyone working on writing of their own can feel inspired to improve how they express ideas, develop their process, or simply write more. 

Thank you for going on this writing journey with me, and stay tuned for more extras on the Patreon. Next week, Tier 2 supporters (BenefacTorrs) will be getting some behind the scenes looks at editing, and my behind the scenes commentary for A Gunslinger's Odyssey!