A while ago, my son asked me to tell him a story. So I told him a story I called "Two Old Cowboys," a version of Chasing Daylight for a two year old but not so much that it lost the grit.
"Whaddya think?"
He said, "I like it."
"Can you tell me the story?"
He said, "One cowboy pushed another cowboy and he didn't like it."
My version for him lasted minutes; he trimmed the whole thing back to its setup in one sentence. It wasn't so much that he said something profound but that he pared all the flourish down to the two main characters and it made me think. A chance to go back and edit with this in mind, an urge to let more of the script fall away in order to simplify down to the characters and what's at stake.
