Sword of Dissent

I have been working on a screenplay for about a year. This is longer than I normally work on a piece. I feel as though I’m a bit behind on it. There are reasons for why it’s behind, but it’s still a bit frustrating to me.

I started writing this piece last year. I got about 30 pages in before hitting a wall. I wrote my lowest point about a quarter of the way in. That was way too soon. That’s not good. That’s very much not good. I would need to pad it out. So, after setting it aside for a few months, I went back and re-wrote several scenes. That worked out perfectly. It helped me to craft the story to completion.

Than I realized the program that I was working on would constantly shift page numbers on me. I was quickly twelve pages over. That is not a good thing either. Actually that’s really bad. Twelve pages can be several scenes. That is a lot to need to prune. At that point, I needed to switch programs so I would be able to accurately prune scenes.

The software was changed and it wasn’t quite twelve pages. It was still more than I would have liked to have trimmed. Luckily, I had found plenty of excess actions and dialog. That made the process so much easier. I also re-wrote some of the dialog and split it up more. I managed to successfully prune the screenplay.

Now it’s complete and being edited to start keying up for a possible professional reader and/or getting ready for a final draft.

While I also do a pretty brutal edit just before I work on my final draft, I also need to step away from it for a bit so I can distance myself from my story. That way I can look at it with a new set of eyes and not the eyes of someone saying, “This is my baby”. While I was away from the final draft edit I started on the second part of my story arc. Now that’s written into the corner. And some of the feedback was exactly what I was expecting as it was what I had feared, some of the characters need to be fleshed out better.

Now, that’s not a huge setback, however it is something that I need to do before the final draft. I know that and it’s something that I somewhat anticipated. Now it’s time to roll up my sleeves and start fleshing things out.

I guess this isn’t too long an amount of time to work on your first film opus. Considering that I’ve written the first draft of a 30 page screenplay in a week, it’s a little disconcerting. In the end, I think when this is done, all the time that I’ve spent on this will be more than financially worth the time I put on it.