Spring forward day.  Translation:  We lost an hour.  It’s gone.  It won’t return until the fall.  Either way, it’s a pain in the !@##$#$ to have to reset my watches.  I have about ten and none of them are digital.  It wouldn’t matter anyway.  The last car I had before my current one had a digital clock and damn it all to hell if I could figure out what to press in tandem with the “hour” button to change the time.  It got so bad, I’d just wait until it was time to change the clock again. 

I’ve actually been pretty productive this past week.  I had an idea for a feature film and I wrote a seven page treatment for it and I also finished a screenplay that had been on the back burner for a while.  Now, I’m working on a pilot about time traveling.  It’s a streaming show, so only about ten episodes per season.  I’m going to have to do some story arcs to map out some direction.  It can be a very daunting process because the details can be intricate; continuity is important.  The story has to make sense, even if I have characters traveling through centuries to try and find each other.  

There were many people who complained that the ending of the Game of Thrones series was completely unbelievable and inconsistent.  Others countered, “You watch a TV show about freaking dragons and you are worried about it being unbelievable?”  On the surface, that sounds like a good critique of the critique but I think maybe there was a point missing.  It wasn’t so much that the complaining audience thought the events were unbelievable; it was more that the events were unbelievable to the world of Game of Thrones.  In other words, dragons are perfectly acceptable because they belong in the story.  Really bad battle tactics by people who had been bitching that winter was coming for almost ten years wasn’t true to the characters.   

Lesson learned.  Make sure your characters are interesting and have dimension.  But once there, make sure they are true and authentic to who they are.  That doesn’t mean they can’t grow and change; it does mean that there has to be a clear motive and a rationale for them to do so.  That sounds simple enough, right?  But if you, as the writer, can’t answer the simple question “But why would he do that?”, then it won’t make sense to the story. 

I am reminded of the much quoted Polonius line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3:

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day 
Thou canst then be false to any man.”

People interpret that quote as meaning be honest to yourself.  But then again, people memorize a few lines of Shakespeare and hurl quotes around like vomit after an all night binge fest. Being honest to yourself implies that you can’t lie to yourself and if that were true, New Year’s resolutions wouldn’t die around January 7th.  

No, I think he’s saying be consistent with your beliefs because if you can’t do that, you can’t make judgements about the people and situations around you.  Polonius is much maligned because after giving his son all that advice about being true to yourself, he sends a spy to look after him.  Well, you can’t really blame him; Paris is a big, big city.  Point being, Polonius’s advice isn’t hypocritical because he is being true to what he believes: that his son isn’t trustworthy.  

So Shakespeare kept his characters believable and consistent.  And then they died. Personally, I don’t think I can do better than that.  

By the way, cats never lie to themselves.  If they hate you, they will let you know.