September 2020. I consider it the true beginning of it all: of this path, this journey, this relentless artistic pursuit, where discipline and consistency became the two primary tools I wouldn't dare abandon even for a single day or weekend. I can't be certain of the exact day I first opened WriterDuet, created a file titled Blackbird Whisper, and wrote the very first scene. The opening scene had never been the issue. I had known exactly how the story was meant to begin ever since I conceived it in the form of its very first seed, back when the storyline was still supposed to include a mafia subplot.
The opening of Blackbird Whisper, across both mediums and languages, has always remained consistent.
A man, or rather the shadow of a man, whose facial contours and physical features would remain unreadable to the audience beneath streets drowned in dusk and a sky illuminated only by moonlight, stands on the edge of a rooftop as the relentless downpour soaks him to the bone, where even the outerwear he had left on the bench of the hospital rooftop would make little to no difference.
I had carried this scene in my mind ever since I was eighteen, long before the logline and synopsis of the story had even come to me.
Prior to this screenplay, I had had neither experience nor exposure to screenwriting in the English language. What a surprise it was to witness, with each passing day of September 2020, page after page accumulating before my eyes, word after word continuing to build upon the last.
True, there had already been almost a year's worth of labour behind me, spent working on the same story in Russian. Nonetheless, very little from those drafts survived into this newly found artistic tongue.
Don't get me wrong. That is not me implying that everything which came before September 2020 had been wasted, nor am I positioning it as useless experience or discarded knowledge. In fact, I would be more blunt and honest if I said that everything leading up to that moment is precisely what I have to blame for what I was about to commit during the autumn of 2020, decisions that would later redefine the trajectory of my life, where every bridge to my former self was about to be burned, every opportunity to reconnect with the past severed... and all forever.
Whatever mental collapse knocked on the door at eighteen, the door of my heart, and then upon the window, the window of my soul, before tearing apart the curtains of my mind so it could finally force its way inside, everything it set in motion prompted my nineteen-year-old self to act exactly as I did. And the way I acted at nineteen directly shaped the behaviour of my twenty-year-old self. Instead of falling out of love with the core of this story, I dived deeper. I dug further too.
Slowly but steadily, I didn't even notice, or perhaps, if I dare admit it, paid no sufficient attention to the practical and material aspects of my life.
I had always been creative, ever since I was a child, but still conscious, still aware of the real world around me. Yet at twenty it felt as though I had lost almost all ability to remain pragmatic.
The university studies were put aside, and that I had done so I told no one, unlike what I should have done, unlike how I was supposed to act.
An all-encompassing feeling. Have you ever felt that? Have you ever felt yourself drowning beneath the surface of a vast body of water, be it the open ocean or a quiet lake, yet instead of suffocating and gasping for breath, for the very first time in your life it felt as though you were finally breathing, breathing naturally, breathing as yourself? Have you?
Once you begin thinking and analysing things rationally, you know that you are not "allowed" to feel that way, to be that way. It is almost unheard of for a human being to swim beneath the water the way marine creatures do. Consequently, the longer you continue thinking, the smaller, more foolish, and more inadequate you begin to feel. But then, at some point, you simply switch gears and silence the flow of thought altogether. And in that state, something entirely different takes place. You simply move with the current, without questioning it, without demanding concrete proof as to why or how everything is supposed to work out in the end, without allowing dread to take command of the wheel of your life.
The more negligent I became toward my studies, the more devoted I grew to art and to everything I created. It was the beginning of the fatal metamorphosis into what I have remained committed to even to this day, whether for my fortune or my curse.
By the end of October 2020, I had completed most of the final draft. Yet I still struggled to type the essential words, The End, at the bottom of the first screenplay I had ever written in English. At that particular chapter of my life, I could not afford to waste even a single day by being unproductive. The stakes were unimaginably high.
Before my secretive, private, self-isolated artistic pursuit was unearthed and brought to light in its ugliest and most humiliating form, rather than the triumphant one I had originally hoped for, before it became visible to both those close to me and those far more distant, I needed to make it work.
I moved on to my next screenplay, which, by the end of December 2020, was completed as well, together with Blackbird Whisper.
I suppose it was an inner sense of urgency that made everything unfold with such impeccable timing.
As 2021 arrived, the finished, polished drafts were submitted to competitions. Throughout that year I wrote several other variations and versions of Blackbird Whisper, which were also sent to other contests, the most reputable ones my research had led me to.
I won none of them. There was not a single competition in which I managed to advance even one round. Every single time, I was eliminated at the very first stage.
Once, in April 2022, I finished the last screenplay I would write for quite some time, namely WTM. From that moment onwards, my ability to produce screenplays at such a remarkable pace, though never matched by the pace of external progress, disappeared as though it had never existed. It was as if everything I had accomplished throughout those previous two years had existed only in my own imagination, my own carefully constructed illusion. As though I had not created screenplays at all, but merely created the very idea, the very act, of creation.
The story, the idea, the connection to Blackbird Whisper, everything that I had regarded as magnificent in May 2022, having only just turned twenty-two, seemed to make no difference. It offered no opportunity, no impact, and perhaps, at that particular moment, no meaning either.
I could have begun writing novels immediately. But at twenty-two, I simply didn't know that it was something entirely within my power to accomplish. More importantly, I needed time to recover, to heal from all the disillusionment that the summer of 2022 had brought upon me.
The risk I had taken had been immense, and so too were about to be the consequences of such a naïve leap of faith.
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