what i've written

Yesterday I watched a movie that matched in near-perfect detail the story I've been working on for years. I tried telling the host, a dear friend of mine who has been reading as I write, about it, and she laughed at me. The themes are different, she said. The wrong character is moving. There's too much infidelity in the movie, it's more about connection than disconnect--but I continued to insist it was the same story. And, worse, I became convinced that my story only really works as a movie. On paper it is lacking, the pacing is wrong, you can't convey a lot of it.

But it loses everything in the conversion. The theme changes, the characters change places, the story becomes more about connection than disconnect. It was a brilliant film and it was my story, but there was nothing left of the original story there. I still can't quite explain. I'm still writing, of course, especially now that I know how it ends.