Please help me improve this sentence...
In a first-person narrative, I’d like to use the following sentence:
It took me nearly a decade to write this script, and now I’d pitch it to the top producer in Hollywood.
I’m not following strict grammar rules here (for starters, I should use “It had taken me”), but I’m going for a tone that is both informal and immediate.
- Assume this sentence appears in a novel written in first person (narrated like a memoir), so the speaker talks about something she expected to do at that specific point in time.
How could I improve this sentence with these goals in mind?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/1962. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
I think you could also make it more immediate and informal by getting rid of "decade" - "It took me ten years to write this script, and now..."
The length of time and the role of expectation also suggests the sentence could be made more immediate by expressing something internal, or psychological. Is the speaker expressing frustration? "It took me ten fucking years to write this damn thing, and I was ready to shove it down the throat of the first producer I saw..." Excitement? "Ten years of hard work, and I was finally rewarded with a meeting at Hollywood's top studio." Note that you're doing that anyway: getting excited about going to the "top producer" adds a shade of naivete to the speaker's voice.
The biggest confusion comes in the second part of the sentence, where the the modal "would" introduces another temporal element. "Would" indicating imperfective structure (an ongoing action, brought from the past to the present) is different from the conditional. So you could either be saying:
"It took me a decade to write this script; now, [after I finished] I would [shop it around]."
or
"It took me a decade to write this script; [conditional upon its completion], I'd pitch it to the top producer in Hollywood."
It's the "now" working with the "would" that does it. Short answer: I think it'd be more clear if the temporal perspective were firmly established by the grammar; since it's memoir, you could just stay in the past.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/1968. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Ten years of windup. Today was the pitch. I was going to throw Hollywood a curve ball like they'd never seen.
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