It was a weekend of fits and starts
Friday was tough, but I scraped out four pages of the screenplay. It was hard, and afterwards, I thought about why it was hard.
And I realized that I had a problem with the story. Because nothing was happening. Oh, the two leads were still lots of fun. But there just wasn't enough plot to go around.
So, I knew I needed to fall back and regroup. I didn't want to get bogged down too much in details, but I did want some kind of roadmap.
That's what was going through my head on Saturday. When I didn't get any writing done. I didn't even sit down to write.
I'm not going to beat myself up over this. I got back up on the horse - more about that in a minute - and I need to acknowledge that days like Saturday are going to happen. It wasn't a horrible day. It was just a full day. And it kept me from sitting down and getting the writing done.
Not something I want to happen again. But I'm running 15 to 1 for days hitting my target versus days not. And most importantly, I think I'm developing the habit. Not writing didn't sit well. The exception seems to have proved the rule.
Sunday was regrouping night. I pulled back, looked at the screenplay, and mapped out where I want to go with it. This will involve some back-tracking - there are elements I now know will need to be inserted into, or between, scenes already written.
I definitely didn't want to do anything as detailed as a treatment, or even a formal outline. I just gave myself some key points. Obstacles the main characters will encounter. Things that need to happen. Scenes I want to write.
The whole thing certainly didn't come to 4 pages - which is moot, since it wasn't screenplay format. But it was over 250 words of prose. So I'm counting Sunday as a success.
Tonight: Back to the screenplay itself. 4 pages a day is once again the target.
At that rate, I can still have a first draft by mid-May. That's my goal.
This is raising some related issues for me, about some of the other implications and obligations of de-erstwhiling. I hope to blog about them this week.
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1 comment:
The best part of this is that you're NOT beating yourself up over missing a day. And you got right back into it the next day. Not only that, you seem to be actually working on something that's going somewhere. The few times I've attempted to return to the writing life, the stuff I wrote was just..."stuff." Just me carrying on about nothing. So it's great that you've been getting some REAL writing done.
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