Today for some reason 'outlining' seems a better description than plotting.
To be honest I'm now planning to spend a week or so outlining this project (rather than the three days I was talking about). Still have momentum and it seems to be coming together fairly quickly. My rule is, if I feel I'm losing momentum or getting stalled, then it will be time to start the draft, even if all the pieces aren't in place.
Also, as you may have noticed, I'm no longer posting on the days I'm not writing. As I felt my working practise was getting better it's stopped feeling necessary. So for now on I'll only be posting on writing days (but if I'm going to be away from writing for more than a couple of days I'll post letting you know there'll be a gap). If my work ethic starts to slip though I'll go back to daily posting.
3 days ago
10 comments:
Does this mean you are going to change your name to 'The mostly daily screenwriter'?
It does sound fascinating what you are doing. Kind of force-feed writing if you get my drift. If nothing else I think it would be an interesting way to clear the head from what you have just done.
The good news is that i am two scenes away from the big climax!! it is very exciting. I am at page 115 and i have four scenes yet, three short ones and the big climax. I am still looking at 125-130 pages which is way too long, but at least it will be on paper.
Thanks blofeld. It's working really well so far, I feel like I've cracked outlining in a way (touch wood!) And I am definitely being propelled along by the enthusiasm of new ideas. If it keeps going along like this I'll be very happy. Congrats on your progress! Almost done! And it really doesn't matter if a first draft is too long.
Nah Sean. Still daily. Most days. It's an imperfect world... You can give me grief if I start to slip though!
The world is imperfect! When did this happen?
By my reckoning... about the time James Cameron was crowned king of the world for Titanic.
Or maybe it was when Josh Friedman stopped posting on his blog.
Or maybe it was when Life on Mars turned into Ashes to Ashes.
Or maybe it was when...
maybe I better stop now.
Okay, something weird just happened, hit 'publish' on a comment from df mamea and the comment seems to have instead disappeared into cyberspace. (I am writing a cyber thriller right now so maybe the universe is trying to tell me something?)
Anyway, df, re your comment about how cool it is when you're juggling multiple projects - yeah, it so is! And it's great that the two projects I'm juggling are both new - such a nice change from wrestling with ideas that are pretty old and tired workhorses from back in the day.
Okay, so I typed in four pages last night. That takes me to beginning of page 51. Which was my target for the end of the week, so I've accomplished that.
But more is ahead... I'm intending to have a finished draft in just over two weeks, and expect it to finish about page 90. So I need to get my skates on! But I think it's do-able.
My plan over the next week is to write the rest of the script longhand. Then I'll blat it into the computer over the following week, and tidy it up.
Wish me luck!
Good luck Sean! Forty pages in a week... that'll be some seriously impressive productivity. I'm interested that you prefer to write longhand first - why is that? For me, once I'm onto a first draft, there's nothing more beautiful than Final Draft.
Hmmm, why do I write longhand? I've been talking about it with Helen, and I think there's at least three stages to writing the scenes of a first draft.
1) the plotting/outlining, whatever you like to call it - figuring out what's in the scene at a general level
2) the structuring of the beats and lines of the scene - how the scene goes from the beginning to the end and what happens along the way
3) making sure the lines work when they're on the page - giving it all a sense of flow.
I prefer to break all these stages up. Writing longhand gives me a chances to do point 2 before I take on point 3. I find trying to do it all on the computer in one take too challenging personally.
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