I Spent $600 to Start Screenwriting —Was It Worth It?

In the middle of a writer’s strike, no less

My script in Final Draft 12 (a.k.a. $200 I’ll never see again)

There’s something about the way a screenplay takes up a page: the margins the size of my palm, that comically huge typewriter font, the ALL CAPS words thrusting their chests out on every line. It reminds me of being a 10th grader, fiddling with the settings on Word, thinking, “Maybe Mrs. Carpini won’t notice this ‘five-page’ paper is in sixteen-point font?”

It feels like cheating.

I love it.

You may be assuming, that I’m a Dawson-eqsue cinemaphile. But I’m not. (And yes, I just made that reference, and you now know exactly the sort of middle school girl I was. You’re welcome.)

Truth is, I don’t have a trunk full of pored-over bootleg scripts. I never made a student film. I don’t even really know the plot of The Godfather.

I wrote a TV pilot for the simple and probably stupid reason that I really, really needed to finish a creative project for once, being both desperately stifled and also really bad at finishing anything. And I thought 25 pages with three-inch margins would be easy enough.

And for a little while, it was.