More time has passed and there you are (are you?) waiting for me. Oh my. Well, this is not a diary, this is supposed to be written in pursuit of ideas. I wake up with loads of them. It's choosing that's hard, and finding time is harder. Okay. I woke up early yesterday morning rewriting in my mind some scenes from a TV show I had scarcely watched the night before (it was a re-run and I was reading something at the same time). The fault I found with the scene I was going over in my head is a common fault: there's no follow-up. Lots of scenes have an improv quality; they start and stop with little relationship to what has gone before or will follow after. What happens after the close-up on the kiss or the knock-out or the walk-out? Cut to another scene vaguely related, but only vaguely to what just happened? Audiences have been trained to make leaps in time without filling in the blanks. Most blanks are easily assumed. For example, on Wednesday a character says, "I'll see you at the dance on Saturday," and the writer doesn't have to slog blow-by-blow through Thursday and Friday to Saturday night. Just cut to MUSIC OVER before the balloons or decorations appear and a woman is fixing her hair in the women's room, and we know it's dance-time. But sometimes we have to know what happened right after that close-up. After the kiss, did the couple part or go to bed? After the knock-out, did the character lie unconscious, or go the hospital or bleed out? I know, I know, there are times when less is more, but sometimes more is necessary. You have to spell it out. More anon. I had a lot to do yesterday.