My Plan to Write a Screenplay in 30 Days

30 Day Screenplay: Day 1 — January 2nd, 2022

This post is the first part of a series

January 2022: I asked myself, can I write a movie in 30 days?

Now not consecutive days mind you, I don’t have the discipline for that. Rather, by finding spare days throughout the year.

Throughout 2022, I tracked my progress, taking notes each day that I worked on it. This post is those daily notes, with added reflection and commentary. In italics are original notes. Otherwise I am mostly reflecting after the fact.

Finish a solid 120 page draft of James Blond in 30 days. That’s the goal, let’s define the terms.

Defining Success

SOLID: By solid, I mean that I can’t just write whatever if I get stuck. It should all be recognizable as a movie and have a complete story.

DRAFT: Not a final product in quality, just in length. After the 30 days are up I’m gonna edit the heck out of it. This is the other extreme. I expect it will have plot holes, and setups that go nowhere and flat characters, but you can’t edit a blank page. It’s not that I want those flaws, but that they aren’t a deal breaker. For my short stuff the first draft is easy and usually good enough, but doing a lot more, those things add up.

JAMES BLOND: As mentioned, I’ve had a fairly clear idea. An action movie with certain characters and plot points that have been floating around in my brain, you’ll have to trust me on this. Basically I’ll stay on this project, not turning it into a different movie halfway through.

30 DAYS: Just that, not even consecutive days I saw a video where a guy wrote a screenplay in 48 hours (he did 90 pages). Obviously 15 times faster is more impressive, but I wanted to do this in my free time, 1 or 2 hours a day, and show that others can do it too. Also, I doubt I’m that level yet, but maybe one day.

Starting Point

I got about a third of the way through once before I stopped. Around that same time I did a lot of outlining work that I seemed to have lost. That’s alright with me, because I want to start more from scratch than that, which will be better for my current brain and anyone trying to replicate my process.

“Scratch” means not reading even the old stuff I have and relying on what I remember: a list something like this.

• James Blond is a James Bond parody replacing spy tropes with hair care things
• James’ character arc is basically going from cocky to humble
• Partially he’s humbled by a better spy named Ian (a reference to Ian Flemming, creator of Bond)
• The spy organization’s name is HAIR (can’t remember what it stood for)
• Villain is a red headed guy named Edward Rubyskull
• First scene was a fight in museum where James is backup and accidentally gets the main agent killed

So no pages, no outline, only ideas.

Other than that, I’ll only use my intuition from reading fiction and watching movies which is average, my writing experience which is probably a little more than most for my age (19 at the time), and what I’ve read and studied on story structure which is admittedly a lot more than most, but I’ll try my best to explain whatever I use.

Method

I’m going to do this draft by hand. I could write a whole post on why I’m starting to transition to analog. But, I am. The notes that I take on the actual day are also handwritten in a notebook.

Step 1) Outline for theme

An outline in the broadest sense, I don’t trust myself to keep a good speed without a plan. Usually I would outline the big plot points first, that is kind of the premise leading. But there’s also the obstacles that make the drama so maybe that should lead. Or, the protagonist’s goals and personality could control the plot.

The thing that would lead them all is the theme or the message. I knew pride was a theme, but that’s pretty vague so I just took that and brainstormed.

“Sat down with a yellow legal pad to think about the overlap between the spy movie genre and pride. Got 2 pages worth of thoughts.

Step 2) Outline for tone. And for worldbuilding?

“Also started outlining with sticky notes, grounding some things that felt too cheesy, and matching plot to theme.”

And then the more outline-y stuff came. I used the Dan Harmon story circle concept kind of as a clock with page numbers. You, Need, Go, Search, Find, Take, Return, and Change each being 15 pages. More on this structure soon.

On some sticky notes I reworked some of the really cheesy things I remembered to be more subtle, and to me personally they ended up funnier. Even got on a roll and added a few more original ideas.

At the end of each post I will mark my progress with the page count and a little graphic. It has 120 tiny slots that will fill up with page icons as I write them.

0/120

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