Updates
Tonight, I finished a draft of the best thing I’ve written thus far. All that’s left to do is go through is make sure my action lines are tight, there are no spelling errors, and that the action lines are all consistent. The draft took me five or six months — I started working on it in June, and I would have finished it in less time had I not had that mini-crisis about what I was meant to do with my life after PreGame got twenty-six festival rejections in a row (only to get two acceptances in the same week). If there’s anything I’ve learned from this, it’s do the flipping work regardless of the wave I’m riding at the time. Lord knows where I could be in my projects had I decided to keep working during that difficult time instead of getting majorly discouraged. A good lesson to learn.
Anyway, after doing a final pass, this will be the first project I feel comfortable showing to representation and submitting to contests. I’ve written six previous screenplays (four of them where I was actually trying something with an emotional and cinematic intent, not just trying to get from point A to point B) and this is the first thing that I feel is good. If the average screenplay is 120 pages, that’s 720 pages of crap I had to get through before writing something I feel shows real ability. And this doesn’t mean I’m done writing crap either — I haven’t written enough good screenplays to know if my success is due to the idea, story points, writing ability, or a combination of all of these. Anyway, I feel like creating a good story depends successfully executing the project/idea itself, which requires its own treatment independent of other projects — the story points aren’t going to be the same, for example — so I feel like with every new idea, I’m always starting over. This is a wonderfully freeing thing, as I don’t feel I have to live up to past successes, because I can’t.
Anyway, it’s not like this thing is produced, but it’s the first thing I feel comfortable having in my portfolio, and I’m pretty stoked. I was trying to figure out what to do after I had come down a little from my sense of accomplishment, and the only thing left to do was get back to work. I’m working on a treatment/script for one project, and I need to start developing my other idea after this next draft gets done. And watching movies, reading scripts, analyzing Shakespeare, writer’s groups, and storyboarding are other activities I’m doing to try and develop my storytelling abilities. Some days it feels like a lot, but I feel like this is what’s necessary to help me in a very competitive field.