Back In The Groove

So I had one of the best weekends I've had in a long, long time.

I wrote. A lot.

Ironically, the thing that kicked it off was the return of the low-pay rewrite that I keep doing for my producer friend; I've probably done 4 drafts now, and the little checks he sends me still only add up to the three digits.

But I'm not complaining, because I enjoy it, and it's a great experience, for the following reasons:

-- As has been talked about before, because it's someone else's script, I can be merciless in losing the things that don't work, and revving up the things that do. It's a freeing experience (which makes it easier to do to your own script), while there's no question that it has improved the script immensely.

-- The core storyline of the script is the original writer's, and it is solid enough to where the bulk of the writing is just coming up with new setpieces to hang on it, and better characters and character moments. The premise lends itself to imaginative ideas, and I've been coming up with a lot of them.

-- This is the first time I've ever worked with a producer in shaping something, and it has been a great experience. We talk on the phone, hash out ideas, then I bang stuff out, and he generally likes it -- and when he doesn't, his objections are usually right. Plus I find that turning stuff around for someone else makes me more disciplined, something that I'm hoping will translate easier to my own stuff.

Plus I've been elevated to a "revised by" credit on the screenplay itself, probably the first step toward actually getting credit on the damn thing. But at this point, I'm unconcerned (I probably should be, but I'm not). If it ever sells, great. If it doesn't fine.

Because it has gotten me off my ass and writing again.

So after doing phone calls with the producer all week, and reworking some of the first act, I buckled down on Friday night/Saturday and did a cover-to-cover polish, working in changes we had talking about, tightening down some incredibly fatty scenes, and adding two fairly major setpieces along the way.

The climax still needs to be figured out, but that's for the next phone call. At this point he's reading the rest of it, in preparation for the final polish.

Then Sunday, with that off my desk, the wife out with a friend for the day and little paying work to do (ah, those good-old summer doldrums), I tackled my supernatural thriller, which for the moment is still called "Hiding Billy", because A) Everyone seems to remember the title, and B) No one has come up with one I like better yet, at least none that have stuck.

I've been frozen in mid-rewrite for a few weeks, so I printed everything out, took it to a Starbucks, and just spent the afternoon going through it with a pen, cutting what needed to be cut, moving some exposition around, chopping out two entire subplots that never really worked and fixing the last (hopefully) batch of stubborn typos.

Then I came home, curled up with the laptop, and stayed up until after midnight, making all the changes, until I was left with a complete draft. Rough, but not-that-rough; hopefully it's in the get-a-few-notes-from-friends-before-the-final-polish zone, and I sent it out to a few.

If I smoked cigars, I would have smoked one.

So, amazingly enough, my comical treatment for "Alligators in the Helicopter" was only the third-best bit of writing I did all weekend.

It's become clear to me that this needs to be my time; this needs to be my push. I've been noodling around as a writer for two long; spent too much time licking my wounds after I couldn't get an agent in the big push of 5-6 years ago.

Suddenly, the window of opportunity is opening for me, and I have to seize it. Turns out becoming a Nicholl quarterfinalist is huge for someone like me who deals with people in the business, because suddenly I'm not just a reader who, like everyone else in town, has written some screenplays. Now I'm a writer who has been annointed capable of writing (though I acknowledge the crapshoot of it all -- I personally read a half-dozen scripts that didn't make the Nicholl cut that were as well-written as mine).

Suddenly I have people offering to get my scripts to agents -- people who actually know agents. And between my Nicholl script, my supernatural thriller and my frozen-time script, I actually have three solid scripts to go out with, plus the thing I rewrote for the producer, which nothing might ever happen with but it's out there too, and who knows.

It's all coming together. 15 years of screenwriting, about a dozen scripts (many of which suck and have been properly relegated to the bottom shelf), and a monster education in screenplays by being a fulltime reader for 15 years. On the downside, I'm 43, and if I don't do it now, when?

So even if I don't make the Nicholl semis, this is my time. This is my push.

Stay tuned.