How to Face an Empty Page
30 Day Screenplay: Day 2 — January 3rd, 2022
This post is a part of a series on writing a movie quickly, see the first post here.
In writing anything, you can probably break it down into 3 “sub-skills”.
- Outlining
- Drafting
- Editing
For the purpose of this challenge, which is just a rough draft, we can ignore editing and get to just the first 2.
- Outlining
- Drafting
Yesterday was outlining. Today was the day I started putting pen to paper. Pencil actually. So we need to talk about the “drafting” step.
“2 hours sitting down, but the computer was there and I started later in the day than I would’ve liked. Got 3 pages and like 1 or 2 lines of the 4th.”
My plan at this phase was very basic. Just do as much as possible with 2 hours of deliberate focus on the project each day. Once I have data on how I work within that constraint, I will make adjustments.
For a while I’ve had the theory that 2 hours is the optimal time to do anything. The idea is that movies and concerts are often good to be in the 2 hour range. I extended that to 2 hour long TV show episodes, or 4 half hour long episodes, or 2 hours should be enough to reach significant progress in a video game.
For entertainment it is a way of not going overboard, but for productive things, it lines up with the idea of flow states or Cal Newpot’s Deep Work. The upwards limit of how many flow (or Deep Work) hours EXPERTS can get is 4 hours. So until you have a lot of practice, 2 hours seems a reasonable goal.
So it makes sense that I would put the writing session in those terms.
But it didn’t go well.
“It was really slow, even though I knew this scene, I didn’t finish. Maybe because I didn’t know where it was going. Feel like a better outline would help.”
The only scene I kept and remembered and even then it took a long time. I did change it quite a bit, but still 3 pages in 2 hours looks like 12o pages in 80 hours. More than 2 hours a day, and that was the high end of what I thought I could consistently hit.
So I returned to the 2 parts.
- Outlining
- Drafting
The point of drafting is obvious. You get to 120 pages by drafting 1 page at a time. The point of outlining is less obvious, but at a high level it is to make the drafting easier. My idea was that more detailed outlining would give me some things to build towards.
“Tried more outlining, but didn’t work great.”
I guess that didn’t go well either. Probably because it can be hard to outline specific stuff at the beginning while the middle and end is so vague. You outline everything at once and things are slightly better all around, but returns are diminishing the more you zoom in on one area of the story.
3/120
Read the next post here.
