After quite a bit of thinking, I realized why there was no “What’s going to happen next?” in the previous drafts of A GROWING CITY; Eddie, the main character, didn’t have any conflict. In other words, there was no motivation for him to do anything and, therefore, nothing could get in the way of his accomplishing his goal. He didn’t have goals. Prior to the start of the script, he had been wandering around as a homeless man. When the story began, he continued that wandering intentions.
To cure this, the next draft will have so much conflict, I’m going to have to make an effort to keep it reigned in, lest it become a Michael Bay movie, for which I don’t have the budget. (That’s no slight on Bay. I really enjoyed some of his movies.)
In previous posts, I said that I didn’t want to make the different version because it diverged from why I wrote the story to begin with. However, when I looked at the story, at what I wanted to ask and what I wanted to say, I found that the core of the story is a question of value. Why do we value some people, some things, more than others? In the new, conflict-strewn version of A GROWING CITY that issue will still be raised. In fact, it might even be more prominent.