Putting Down a Marker

For if this screenplay ever gets finished

If I ever get this screenplay written, I want to come back to this post and remember how upset I was with the whole thing.

I seem to be able to put several good days worth of work in, and I think the story is going somewhere, and then I get two rough writing days in a row where I start worrying if I have enough story, if my characters are interesting enough, if I’m going to be able to put this whole thing together, and I start panicking.

The thing is, I need to keep reminding myself that I’m in a first draft. I don’t think the story beyond the outline is supposed to be that cohesive. The story is being sketched out. It’s nowhere near done, and I’m trying to compare it to some of my favorite films and television shows. I’m definitely not being fair to it.

The land of the wood devil…

If I could give myself a pep talk and some tough love right now, I think it would sound like this:

You’re expecting far too much of yourself if you’re only putting one hour a night into this. If you want it to be better, you’re about 100 hours away from something solid.

That was a massive undercount of hours. I just looked up how long the average screenplay takes to write. It’s anywhere from twelve weeks to six months. Twelve weeks of eight hour days is 480 hours. Four hour days? 240 hours.

You’re what, 40 hours into this? Maybe 60? And that includes the time you spent on it in years past. This new push has been 24 hours tops.

You seriously need to get pro on this, bruh. Get pro. Spend three solid hours a day on this. At least spend two. If you can do three, three hours times two months is almost 200 hours.

Talk to me when you have 200 hours in and then see if you don’t have some of the story, the characters, and the monster more defined.

My bet is you’re going to have a pretty miserable first draft, but you’ll be able to hang your characters on it and see what else you need to add to define them better.

Now get back to work.