My Life Story Covered In Blood

This weekend I was working on the script for Sacred Underwear: Nuns and Mormons Revealed. I became quite frustrated by the fact that my word processor can only show me about 2% of it at any time.

"Where am I?"

"Is this part before or after that other part?"

"Where should this part go?"

"What depends on this?"

"If I remove this part, does something else crumble?"

I desperately needed to step back and get some perspective. In frustration, I finally decided to take this need absolutely literally.

I laid the script out on my living room floor and attacked it with a big red marker.

This turned out to be the best thing I've ever done for the story's structure. Looming over it from six feet up, everything started to make sense. I labeled each section by it's theme, "Fall from Grace", "Rituals and Righteousness". Then, the middle section, the part I've been struggling with, finally came into focus ... "Losing Faith!"

Once I realized what it was about, it was easy to move, edit or delete away everything that isn't about that theme.

When I was done, I stood back and looked at my script with red marks all over it ... my life's story ... covered in blood.