One of the most important parts of writing is receiving notes. You work so hard on a script and become so immersed in it, that for a while, it is all you can see. Getting those drafts read by other people whose opinions you value (people who don't jut pat you on the back and congratulate you on your accomplishment, but actually critique the work) becomes integral to developing, writing, and completing an industry-worthy script. That entire notion is why, years ago, we formed The League.
Last week, we held our monthly meeting. Though I hadn't submitted for a while, my 30 Day Screenplay Challenge script, a demon thriller, was subject of the meeting. Like dutiful group members that they all are, the Leaguers read the material and gave me feedback. Sometimes, I go into these meetings with specific notes for the group. This time, though, I only had a general notion of wanting to know whether or not the script was working, if it was slow or confusing at any point, if anything was missing, or if the rules of the world lacked clarity.
On the whole, the group provided some very useful feedback. They told me what was working, what was falling short, and what they liked. For the most part, though, with the exception of the introductory scene, they didn't target specific portions of the script as needing a lot of attention. That makes my job both easier and harder. On the one hand, the rewrite becomes about an overall finessing of the script, which means that I can add, subtract, and edit as need be. On the other, there's nothing in particular to concentrate on now, which could make focusing on a start point for the revisions easier.
Either way, it's great to have notes again and to be able to dive back into a rewrite.
After about two months of having two to three projects going on concurrently, I'm down to a lull of zero. Well, that's not technically true. At present, though, I have had to table writing any more on any of them for various reasons.
The post-Apocalyptic spec that my team and I were talking about converting into a comic book probably isn't going to progress in a different medium at this point. We hoped that we'd be able to get a short comic book story related to the script out soon, and we still might, but the timeline we were going to have to commit to was a lot longer than we had wanted - by about a year. My thinking is that, in a year a lot can change. Another project could take off, which would revive interest in the script. More than that, though, I'll need to focus on new material during that year, rather than on something that's been tested and hasn't taken off. So, that's on the back burner.
The demon thriller spec, which I worked on for the 30 Day Screenplay Challenge, is out to the League for our meeting next Thursday. I'm eagerly awaiting feedback, but I won't really touch the script until I get notes. That, too, then is just sitting idly by the side of the road for the next week.
Finally, the sci-fi collaboration is moving forward, but also in a way that I have to be hands off with for a little bit. My writing partner and I went back and forth for a while one notes, getting to the knit-picky stage to help address any potential questions that might arise, before we sent it off to our producer for her to take a look at. This incarnation is very different from the last one she saw, but my partner and I both agree it's also a lot cleaner and clearer. I hope she concurs. If she does, then I'll dive into pages as soon as we get the thumbs up. It'd be great to start them well before Labor Day.
With three projects off to the side for the next week or so, I can take a breather. I don't really want to, though. I had an idea for an alien invasion project - might even be a book or a comic book - that I think I'm going to start trying to work out a bit. I've had the creative juices pumping through me for so long now that I don't want to lose the momentum.
Two weeks ago, our 30 Day Screenplay Challenge ended. I decided to work on my demon thriller for the month in question, despite the fact that I went into it with an incompletely revised outline. The end result, though, was a full draft of a script I probably would have still been putting off otherwise, so who can complain with that?
One of the very first things I do after I finish writing a draft is I reread the script from start to finish. Well... first I take a few days to a week off and enjoy being done. Then I print and read through the script. My finished scripts tend to come in somewhere between 95 and 105 pages. Drafts, much like this one did, come in about 10 pages more than that on average. When the Challenge was over, I had a 114 page draft to contend with. The page count didn't matter to me quite as much as the placement of key scenes did.
For example, of 114 pages, my midpoint came in at 65. Frankly, that's 7 pages too late. A midpoint is often not one specific instant or line in a script, but rather a scene or even sequence that can be drawn out over 5 or more pages. I came to terms with the fact that my "midpoint" would not be an altercation between the antagonist and protagonist, but rather the event that immediately preceded and led to their fight. The fight concluded on page 69; the earlier event on 65. There was no way I could have 65 pages before the midpoint and only 49 after it. That would just be way too unbalanced. Also, the moment of despair (which Blake Snyder likes to say should come around page 75, and I now agree with him) - the low moment when everything that didn't crumble at the midpoint just comes crashing down, leaving the protagonist with little to nothing - hit on 80. My Act Two turn into Act Three was about on target at 92, but considering the fact that the inciting incident was not a traditional one and ran onto page 12, I knew that I needed to get those big beats in place. Standard format dictates the inciting incident should come on 10, Act One should end on 25 or 30, the midpoint should be on 60, the moment of despair is on 75, and the turn into Act Three falls on 90. I had to achieve that, yet I didn't have a lot of wiggle room that I saw in the first half - there weren't many gratuitous scenes at all.
So how to go about shrinking the script and getting the beats to land where I wanted them? First, I went through and took a fine look at the dialogue. I often over write lines, reiterating things to make sure that the point comes across, saying in three lines what I really only need one or two to do. Step one: excise extraneous dialogue. Next, I went through and looked for any hanging words. Basically, those are words that sit on a line of dialogue or description by themselves, especially short words. If I see a "one" or "car" or "her" or "did" or anything of the sort taking up its own line in the script, I do back and find a way to trim a few characters out of the lines above in order to consolidate. There's no reason those should hang alone. And it's pretty amazing what cutting a few of those will do.
I use Movie Magic 2000 when I write, which affords a maximum of 57 lines per page. Depending what comes next after a page break, stripping one line of text from a page can bump up nearly a tenth of a page. For example, if a new scene begins on page 10, the program might cut page 9 off at line 53 in order to preserve the intro to a scene. The software won't allow a slugg line with no text after it on the bottom of a page. I can't ask page 9 to end with INT. BAR - NIGHT and start page 10 with the scene description. Even if it's only one line of action or description after the slugg line, the program is designed to require something immediately following the slugg line. Scenes that open with a lot of description will necessitate more space at the bottom of a page. That's why, of 57 lines, if 4 are free but I need 5 to accommodate the intro to a new scene, I will go back and look for hanging words.
All in all, merely by consolidating some dialogue and cutting out most hanging words, I was able to drop the script from 114 pages to 106. More than that, my inciting incident came to a close on 10, the midpoint bumped down to 59, the despair point hit perfectly at 75, and Act Three began on 89. This was huge for me and made me much more comfortable with both the presentation and the structure of the script. Though the beats themselves might need work (I'll get the League's feedback in two weeks), at least I know they're where they should be. And that is always good.
With the 30 Day Screenplay Challenge out of the way, I was free this past week to focus on the two other projects I have going at the moment: my sci-fi collaboration (still in the outline revision stage) and discussions about adapting my post-Apocalyptic spec into a comic book. I made some good headway in both of those this week.
First, the sci-fi project. My writing partner, W.A. and I have been going back and forth on outlines for a few months now. I write them, based on notes and discussions we have, and then he sends his comments. I revise, we meet if need be, and then we show the latest incarnation to our producer. Maybe a month and a half ago, we got some note from her that spurred on a major overhaul of the outline. The result has been a drastically new version of the script, albeit with the fundamentals still in tact, which W.A. and I are both very keen on. He got me some notes on it two weeks ago, and yesterday I was finally able to get the edited copy out to him. I know that W.A. has already mentioned the project to some industry people in general meetings, and there's been interest. He's a bit of a known commodity, so it's nice to already have a bit of an in with it. Either way, I hope to be able to start writing pages soon. Once he - and our producer - gives the thumbs up for the latest draft, it's off to the races.
The post-Apocalyptic spec, meanwhile, is still on its unending and varied ride to a (hoped-for) sale. After being on the market a couple years, it still hasn't sold, much to the bafflement of my producing team. At this point, we're looking into adapting it for the graphic novel medium as a way to generate some "source material" that might make buyers more comfortable with the big budget project. We've been in talks with an artist, who is interested in working on the project. More so, though, we've also had meetings with an editor who works for a known (though not upper echelon, DC or Marvel type) publisher. All in all, the team has managed to get some interesting ideas circulating.
One approach, and perhaps the most obvious, would be to literally convert the script as is into a graphic novel. This would be nearly a page for pag adaptation of the project. It wouldn't be very different (maybe a bit streamlined), so the work on my end would be minimal, but it would require a lot of time and commitment from an artist. We have also talked about doing a full length graphic novel, but a different version of the story all together. This, though, would essentially necessitate me writing a brand new screenplay for a project that's already been tested on the market, which I'm not so sure is a wise investment of time. My producers agree; if the script hasn't sold in two years, and I have other projects in the works, then why focus on rewriting the script for another medium without a guarantee that it would even get picked up in that industry?
The third (though not final) option that we're starting to gravitate more and more toward is that we do a one-time short story related to the world and characters of the script. If we can produce and print, say, a ten-page story set in the post-Apocalyptic world and use that as a means to attract attention, then why not? We've already found - through that one editor - a means to do it in a way that would enable us to pay the artist (and therefore lessen the extent to which he would require some sort of creator credit). The periodical prints, publishes, and gets distributed, so it's a better bet than self publishing a story. And, we'd have something visual to put before buyers. Given that it's a short, there also wouldn't be an overwhelming time commitment on my end, which is another plus.
We haven't locked into anything yet, and there is still a ton up in the air, but it's exciting to be exploring these alternatives. Who knows what will come of them.
The 30 Day Screenplay Challenge officially ended on Wednesday, July 18. When I woke up that morning, I essentially had a full, 114 page draft completed, with three missing scenes. All I had to do then, on that last day, was fill in the blanks.
I really hate gratuitous scenes. I don't mean ones that are overly or unnecessarily violent, but rather ones that don't have a place in the script - scenes that needlessly take up time and pages just to extend an act. When I sat down to fill in the three gaps, I seriously had to consider the relevance and importance of each scene I was adding. Sure, in terms of pacing, I needed something at the designated areas, but what content was necessary? There's little as annoying as a scene that's predominantly dialogue, which accomplishes nothing and, even worse, simply rehashes events that have already happened. I knew I did not want to write anything like that. I needed some spacing and buffer between beats already on the page, but the filler content had to be more than just filler; it had to warrant its existence.
The first scene I wrote felt natural, which was good. It was a logical extension of something that preceded it, but it covered new ground and forwarded the plot (I think/hope). It served as an effective time out before other major events, which had to unfold soon thereafter. It was short, succinct, and achieved a small objective that I hadn't known was missing, but which proved itself important. One scene down.
The second scene veered slightly more toward plain filler. It's a fun scene involving a tertiary character, but it's very much in the spirit of the rest of the script. It handles some elements that I had touched on but glossed over earlier. Can I cut it later? Probably, if it comes to it (and probably really means certainly, since anything that doesn't have to be in the finished draft should go), but I don't think anyone will hold it against me for the time being. My only concern is that it might be too great a deviation from the main characters and too much an out of the blue focus on someone whose fate we're not really interested in. Again, that will be seen later when the League reads the pages for our August meeting.
With the third scene, I hit a small wall. The same characters were in both scenes that bookended the gap, having nearly the same conversation. What can go between these two scenes, that doesn't involve those characters, which would organically bridge their conversations? Ultimately, it hit me - nothing. Not only was there not a single scene that truly fit between those two scenes, but there was also no reason for those two scenes to be two scenes; the solution to that problem lay in merging the scenes. I'm a firm believer in consolidating as many scenes as possible, though when I outline, it's easy to allow myself subconsciously to fall into a trap of writing out more beats than I need that all work toward the same objective. The way to solve that problem is to look at the content of the scenes and, if they're the same, merge them together. So that's what I did.
Three missing beats, replaced by two scenes and the combining of two others to eliminate the need of the third beat, and I was done. For the first time in quite a while, I have a brand new draft of a new project on my desk. It's 114 pages long, which is longer than I normally write, and I'm pretty sure I can trim 10 to 14 pages, but that's not the objective for the moment. For now, all I need to do is read through it again in a few days when the dust from writing settles and begin my edits. At the end of the day, the Challenge proved fruitful for me - I know I wouldn't have driven myself to force out a draft at this time had I not been prompted by the exercise, so despite the quality of the product, I'm pleased. Challenge met!
Curse you, Act Three! Two projects I'm working on this month, and on both of them I slammed head first into a very big and seemingly insurmountable wall after wrapping Act Two. The torture! Three days spent staring at a blinking cursor on the demon thriller, writing a couple lines for some throwaway description, only to follow it up with the ever-depressing...
BEAT HERE?
...as my next slugg line. From page 90 on, my script looks like a dalmatian. Every other page is dotted with bolded question marks and stopgaps to remind me to come back and focus attention on them. On Saturday morning, I churned out 6 rapid fire, usable pages. On Sunday, I scraped together 2. Monday saw 1, which I know is going to get deleted right off, and I think I got through 3 on Tuesday.
It's not so much the low page count that irks me, though, as it is the fact that Act Three should write itself by this point. When Act Three is on the fritz, the problem is inevitably embedded in Act One. There are three other BEAT placeholders throughout the earlier portion of the script, and I have a very good feeling that some B or C story should fill those holes. More so, I know that whatever goes into those beats will lead to a successful third act. I hate adding what I feel are gratuitous sequences or even scenes, though. "Why is this in here? It's not furthering the plot." Breaking up beats isn't a sufficient answer, but if your ending's not working, you can bet that you're missing something earlier on.
There was some good to come out of the week, though. I "finished" Act Two for the demon thriller (finished is a relative term, since I know I'll have to do rewrites), so even though I'm kind of stuck now, I'm about 10 pages out from the end and I have almost a week in which to finish it. Yay for that. Also, I finally got the revised outline to my collaborator on the sci-fi project. I kept hitting the same late Act Two into Act Three obstacles with that project, but I think I sort of came upon a solution this week. We'll see what my writing partner says. And, if nothing else, that's one project temporarily off my desk, which frees me up for undivided focus on the intractable demon thriller for the remainder of the 30 Day Screenplay Challenge.
We're going on our third full week of the 30 Day Screenplay Challenge, and let's just say this - they don't call it a challenge for nothing. I'm 79 pages into my demon thriller and still going pretty strong, averaging slightly better than four pages a day. At that pace, I'm right about on target to plop out a 120 page draft by day 30. Of those 120, I'm sure there are at least 10 or 15 that can be cut, and another... 100?... that will need to be rewritten.
The Challenge doesn't allow a lot of time for rewrites, but that's also not the point of it. All it is there to do is get us writing again, which is something that I personally hadn't done in a while. By July 18, less than two weeks from now, I should have a full first draft of a script that I probably wasn't going to dive into for months yet to come. There's nothing wrong with that result.
Many of the pages are turning into fluff. The dialogue isn't great by any stretch of the imagination, which is unfortunate most in the sense that the dialogue is one of the intended big selling points of the script. It's supposed to be snappy and witty and riddled with subtext, but the pressure of a deadline has rendered it fairly prosaic and on the nose, much to my disappointment. Granted, rewriting it after the challenge ends isn't going to be a dire process, so I'm not too concerned about that. I'm also discovering a lot about the plot and characters as I write (oh, so much yet to discover about my characters), so hopefully those realizations will inform draft two.
I've had to start waking up early in order to manage my time better and get more out of my day. In addition to the demon thriller, which I work on for an hour a day (not including necessary outlining at the office so that I can complete pages at home), I've also been re-outlining the sci-fi collaboration. Originally, I intended to get the new draft to my writing partner before he left town yesterday, but that just didn't happen. Though I hate missing deadlines and dropping off the radar on a project, it wasn't until early this week that I had some big ideas for that project. I've outlined a quarter of the script a day the past two days, and hope to wrap that and send it off to him tomorrow at the latest, which would shift something off my plate. And, I'm still working with my team on possibly turning the post-Apocalyptic spec into a comic book, and that venture has required calls and meetings that have dipped into my time and concentration now and again.
So, basically, I'm busy. And it feels good. Interestingly, though, there was a very poignant article recently about claiming busyness. If you haven'r read it, check it out here. I don't tend to include links in these Writing Weeks, but I feel like this article is particularly appropriate and relevant to all of us writers. Maybe you'll get something out of it, too.
June 18 marked the start of our 30 day screenplay challenge over here at the League. As of Monday, I was 30 pages into my demon thriller script, just having crossed the bridge between Acts One and Two. Today, I'm on 49, cresting toward the midpoint and realizing a few pivotal things about the script.
For one, though I understood his comment months ago, I don't think I quite saw it the way he did. When I showed my manager an earlier version of the outline, he told me that thought the demon portions of the script were really engaging and unique, the sections that dealt with humans were a little more hackneyed and thus slowed the momentum. I could see where he was coming from theoretically, but it wasn't until I began writing twelve days ago that I actually saw that in practice. I won't lie - the human scenes strike even me as more dull than the rest, but because Im not quite half way through the script yet and the days are counting down, I don't have time to go back and address that yet.
Also, while I normally like to write as compactly as possible, I'm noticing that this draft is already shaping up to be one of the longer ones I've produced in a while. Granted, that's not a problem, especially given that it's a first draft, but I'd be surprised if it weighs in anywhere under 115 pages. On the one hand, it's great to know that I'll be able to cut a lot upon the first read-through of it. On the other, it makes me wonder if maybe I've stacked too much in the first half, particularly in the first part of Act Two. I've written it so that there's a lot that needs to happen and I'm discovering more as I go. Though I generally love to have a tight outline before I begin writing, I didn't have that luxury with this script, so perhaps that's partly to account for the longer draft. THen again, I also don't have time to censure myself too much as I fly through the draft, so I'm putting a ton of crap down on the page that I know will have to go - especially dialogue.
The final and somewhat expected, though not to this degree, result of the challenge has been that I haven't had time for my other projects at all really. We're talking about turning the post-Apocalyptic spec into a graphic novel, which will require me to change a few things and get some edits going. I've had time to be on the calls and do some minor research, but I have yet to really begin thinking about the story changes. Same with the sci-fi collaboration I'm working on. I'm disappointed with how much I've set that aside and I need to get back on it, since my partner is going out of town toward the end o next week and I want to get him a new outline before he leaves.
So, lots to do, but it's great to be busy. Now if only I had 30 hours in my day...
Something unusual and unexpected occurred at last week's writers group meeting. No one had any pages to present, so we had decided to meet for dinner and just talk about our current projects and anything else that was on our minds. Toward the end of the meal, Austin (aka Zombie) mentioned that he had decided to do a 30 day screenplay challenge, and he was wondering if any of us wanted in. The goal: write the first draft of a new script in the next 30 days.
I jumped on board before he was even done pitching it.
For months now, it seems, I've been stymied when it comes to fleshing out new material. After a couple comprehensive yet flawed outlines, I've gone back to the drawing board to work on character backstories and development for the sci-fi collaboration I'm working on. My demon thriller is basically the Swiss cheese of outlines. And let's not even touch the potential page-one (as a comic book) rewrite of the post-Apocalyptic spec I'm looking at. I felt as though I was mired in the world of endlessly blinking cursors and text pages offering little plot advancement to speak of, and I needed a kick in the pants. Austin's drop of the gauntlet was exactly the elixir I thirsted for.
Last week, after the meeting, the four of us who decided to embark on the challenge shot messages back and forth to one another in an attempt to settle on the rules. Beginning today, June 18, we would have until end of the day July 18 to write a full - or as much of a - first draft of a project. Unless we feel the overwhelming need to, we won't meet too regularly about our work. We'll check in once a week to note progress and talk through any story issues any of us is experiencing, but since we're in a time crunch, we're not going to devote our evenings to lengthy meetings and psychiatry sessions.
I've decided to push ahead on the demon thriller for my project. I had a pretty thorough outline until I received feedback from my manager on it. I agreed with his note, and I'm excited about the possibilities for change that come from it, but at the moment, I'm going into this month-long experiment with a fairly coherent understanding of act one, and not a whole lot beyond that. My fear is that the fist draft is going to be one of the more poorly written pieces I've turned out in a long time. On the flip side of that is the fact that it will also be the fist new draft I've produced in a long time, so I can't argue with it too much.
I generally prefer to have the backdrop of a much more solid outline before I begin on pages, but the time crunch doesn't allow for that now. My nights will be spent producing actual pages (fingers crossed), while I'll pretty much have my outline and notes open all day long at the office, and any down time at the day job will go to working out that night's beats and story problems.
I'm excited to see where this takes me. Mainly, I'm just eager to be writing again. I feel as though the grey matter between my ears has been a bit dammed up as of late, so hopefully this will open the floodgates, and I'll come out of it with both material and a surge of creative juices to pour into the other projects on my desk.
Let the challenge... begin!
