It's Usually A Marathon, But Sometimes It's A Sprint

An important thing for all aspiring screenwriters to understand is that good screenwriting doesn't come overnight. There really aren't all that many examples of people who have written (and then sold) a great script off the bat, and usually those stories have some other hook to them; it turns out that the writer had written a bunch of shorts, or cut his teeth on something else.

This business is a marathon. It's not really a business for the "I just wrote my first script, who do I sell it to" people, though lord knows they are out there.

It's about writing, and writing regularly, and learning through writing (and reading, and watching movies).

But sometimes, in the midst of the marathon, there are sprints.

I find myself in a strange place right now. As a Nicholl semifinalist, suddenly I have a little cachet. Aside from my Nicholl script, and my frozen time script, I have a supernatural thriller that I'm polishing up. I have a lot of ammo to go out and get an agent.

Yet oddly, at this very moment, there's this weird lull in my entire life.

My supernatural thriller is out to my most trusted readers, to get notes on, but who knows when those notes will trickle in (nag, nag). My very-low-paid rewrite is still in the hands of the producer, and I'd be perfectly happy not to see that for a while. I was working on a horror script, but as I mentioned in the last post, I'm tired of killing people every 10 pages.

But the Hollywood lull continues. I literally have no paid work to do.

So last weekend, I came up with an idea for a comedy, and I did some early brainstorming with my wife as we drove around the Valley (she even came up with one good story idea for it). Sunday and Monday I jotted down notes, and all week I've been pounding them into a 6-page "Blueprint" (which is a lot messier and less polished than a treatment).

Yesterday, I even went online and did (yes! no!) some actual research.

The result isn't fully realized, but it's coming together. At first, the point of it was just to get all these ideas out of my head and into a rough treatment form, so that at some future date I could pick it up and be able to run with it, or at least have something to pitch.

But then last night -- still with nothing to do workwise, and wanting to keep the whole writing momentum thing going -- I mustered my discipline, sat at my laptop, and knocked out the first 11 pages, in a little over 2 hours.

They're rough, and I've already thought of ways to rework parts of them, though I'm trying to be more of a get-the-first-draft-on-paper guy and less a fiddle-with-the-first-draft-and-get-stuck-in-act-one-forever guy (though both are better than the find-the-story-as-I-go-along guy I used to be).

But it feels good to create; I've been doing much too much rewriting of my own (and others') stuff recently, and just not enough pure creation.

I think my record for pounding out a draft of something is 8 days, though that was a page 1 rewrite, turning my vampire script into a werewolf script; I wound up changing 98% of the stuff in the script, though. The result wasn't great, but it wasn't bad for 8 days.

In terms of pure creation, I think I did the first draft of my frozen time script in just 10 days of actual typing time, though I had completely roughed out the story beforehand, though that itself was a process that occurred shockingly quickly.

But now I'm back in the sprint. I know that soon work is going to come crashing down on me (which is good; we need the money), but until that wave breaks I'm going to pound away at this script as much as I can. And hopefully I'll get myself in a groove where I can continue to devote an hour or two to it at night, every night, and wind up with another script in my arsenal for the big agent hunt.

I'm going back to it now.

For the screenwriters out there, what's the fastest you ever knocked out a first draft?