Is This the End for Our Script?

I'm at 50 pages now. Halfway there. I have 9 days left. And I think I'm calling it quits.

I'm just not enjoying this particular screenplay, and I have too little time to work on it. I end up feeling resentful of work and my family, because I don't have time for creative pursuits. Like last night. Edythe's working on a molar and an incisor. She was up until 10 in pain and screaming. Christopher and I had to have a Big Talk about whether he's going to school full-time next year or working full-time next year, involving spreadsheets and budget analysis. I went to bed at midnight with an again-screaming baby, with no writing done.

Tonight, instead of finishing painting the bathroom, or cleaning up from dinner, or folding laundry, or actually spending time with my husband, I'm in front of the computer again trying to accrue pages on this project I really dislike. And why? I already know I can write something long, in a limited amount of time. If I'm going to dedicate the time now, I need to enjoy myself doing it (or at least feel like I'm working out some compelling artistic problem). This feels like torture, and pointless.

I hate giving up on things, but sometimes it's worse not to.

I guess I'll sleep on it, see how I feel tomorrow. If I quit, I'll take a break for a few weeks, and then start on a smaller, less ambitious project without the deadline.

Inch by Inch

I made a little progress today, while Edythe was napping. I'm at 42 pages now. I should be at 63, but since I started at 28 today, and made so much progress, I have hope that I might actually finish this thing by the end of April. Maybe.

I Hate Celtx and/or My Laptop

I had a long day of training. A really long day. I didn't sit down to write until 10:15. I wrote furiously for 30 minutes. I wrote 5 pages! I saved them twice.

When I shut down Celtx, it asked if I wanted to save my pages.

Yes! I said, although I'd already saved them twice.

And then my pages were gone.

I am mad. And I am much too tired to type them all again. I am so far behind already, this makes me furious. I don't have the time or the heart to retype them now, and by tomorrow they'll be lost from my brain for good.

Away

I'm out of town at training, with long days and no computer. So I'm trying to cram a lot of writing into a very short time late at night.

The good news is, I think I'm to the point of not caring how bad this project is. I just want to get to 100 pages and finish it.

Total so far: 28/100

Need to Go to Bed Now

Got some good ideas while out walking today.

Watched The Office and 30 Rock. Great shows. Hilarious writing. How did they think up Dwight?

Wrote some pages. Now need to make lunches. Feed cats. Wash dishes. Stop talking like cave woman.

Page Count: 10/100.
Should be at 33.4 today.

Progress

Okay. I have an outline. I have a bunch of index cards with scenes, settings, objectives, and arcs written on them. And now I'm starting to work on writing the screenplay. Again.

I think I have a much better idea of what I'm doing now, though.

Page Count: 4 out of 100.
Should be at page: 30.
But it's okay, I can catch up. I think.

Oh Thank Goodness

For the past few days, I haven't been posting about writing, because I haven't been writing.

I've decided that the screenplay I started wasn't worth continuing with.

I got through NaNoWriMo and wrote a novel, knowing it wasn't very good but wanting to see it through to the end, to prove to myself that I could complete it. This time, though, I want to devote my energy to something that might, possibly, produce a finished product I'd be willing to show someone. At least to my husband.

Over the past few days, I read a lot of scripts. I read Blake Snyder's Save the Cat. And I pitched a lot of ideas to my husband, in between entertaining his mother, who's in town for the week, switching day care providers for Edythe (a trauma unto itself), continuing with bathroom repairs, and having more of our ever-popular "what are we doing with our lives?" conversations. It's been a fun week!

But tonight I had a breakthrough, I outlined a plot I really like, I have an idea I'm passionate about, and I think things will progress better for the rest of the month. I hope so, anyway.

Slogging On

I've been reading screenplays during lunch every day, on daily script. It's a fascinating exercise, because screenplays and stage plays are paced so very differently, with much shorter scenes and all the point-of-view and shot information included in the screenplay. I'm finding I really have to have a picture in my head of what the finished product would look like, not just what the dialog would sound like. It's a good challenge.

But reading really excellent screenplays every day can give a beginner a bit of a complex, a bit of a feeling that what I'm writing is real crap.

But I'm slogging on, there's no other way to improve.

Today's count: 4 pages out of 3.33 needed
Total of: 11 out of 100 written

No Foolin'

I wrote 7 pages today. Pretty good! Of course I'm suspicious as to why it's all going so smoothly (am I writing crap? I am! I know I am!), and I'm worried that I'm spending too much time on exposition, but that's what a second draft is for, right? Fixing things? For now, I'm just trying to get it all on paper.

Script Frenzy is a little different than NaNoWriMo in that the goal is a daily page count, not word count. With NaNo, I needed 1667 words per day to make my goal of 50,000 in the month. For Script Frenzy, I need 3.34 pages per day to reach my goal of 100 for the month.

So far, so good! This actually seems more natural to me than novel writing, for some reason. Maybe it was all those years of script reading. Or of movie watching. At any rate, I'm having fun.

Total Pages for today: 7 out of 3.33
Total Pages written: 7 out of 100

I have to say, it did help that Edythe is feeling better and did not spend 4 hours screaming like she did last night. A healthy, sleeping baby definitely helps with the productivity. Supportive husbands who do many chores while I write are extremely helpful as well.

Onward

My current project is actually an old project, a play I've been working on for several years in fits and starts. I love the source material, a sprawling and delicately wrought 19th-century novel. But the beautiful language is also my hang-up. How can I turn 720 pages of novel into about 120 pages of script? My inclination is always to make the dialogue more terse, and in many ways, it needs to be. But how can I keep the flavor of the original? How much of the dialogue should be the original author's words, and how much should be my own?

I'm working from the following basic outline:
120 pages total, 3 acts.
Act 1, pages 1-29. BIG EVENT occurs on page 30, heralding the beginning of
Act 2, pages 30-89, with another BIG EVENT on page 90, beginning
Act 3, pages 90-120.
And there should also be plot shifts at pages 10, 30, 50, and 75.

See, I like this kind of structure, although it's very different from how I approached the novel this fall. My past stabs at this play have involved poring over pages of dialogue and trying to write scenes, but without any sense of overall structure. I think I got up to 45 pages of dialogue from 200 pages of novel, and I wasn't even into the really meaty parts. I think there will be some dropping of sub-plots, some tightening of focus. We shall see. It's fun to have a new project, at least.

A Good Story, Well Told

That’s what it’s all about, this writing thing.

Lately I’ve been stuck on the good story aspect. I hear so many stories at work, but of course I can’t use those. And besides, there’s a difference between hearing an interesting story and really understanding it in your soul. Good writing makes you feel the latter. I’m always afraid of not getting the details right and having my stories come across as inauthentic.

Sigh.

Christopher even set aside time for me to write last night, offering to do all the dishes, and I felt awful because my mind was a total blank. How boring.

Maybe I need to stop trying to write something serious or meaningful, and write something funny and vapid.

Criticism, Contd.

Given yesterday's topic, I had to share this quote from Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire, which I'm reading and really enjoying. Note that I say reading; it takes several weeks (or even months) to get through a book now. I used to read most novels in a day. Sigh. Anyway, I thought this was great:

"Stinging words! You're critical of everyone," observes Iris.
"Oh, not everyone," says Clara in an offhand manner. "Only everybody who's alive as well as most people who are dead. I feel quite neutral about anybody not yet born."

Now don't you be critical of the formatting of the quote. For some reason when I include tabs they don't translate to the published post. :P

On Criticism

Someone—I will not say who—has lately been accusing moi of being overly critical. Me? Critical? Never!

Okay, maybe a little.

It’s good to be critical sometimes, like if there’s a document to be edited for work. I’ll never forget the day I discovered that a former boss, rather critical herself, had sent out a letter to tens of thousands of subscribers likening a character in the current stage production to the children’s game of "Hungry Hungry Hippies".* For some reason, she was not appreciative when I pointed out the mistake. I think she was just bummed that she’d been out-criticized.

When writing a first draft, it’s necessary but hard to turn off that internal editor, or superego, or whatever one wants to call it. That little voice that says, “You don’t know anything about writing fiction. You should get a degree in it before you even start this project!” or “Even really good writers who have worked at this for years and years can’t get their novels published! What gives you the right to waste everybody’s time?” or “What you wrote tonight is crap. You’d have made better use of the last hour of your life if you had done the dishes like you were supposed to. Now you’ve wasted everybody’s time and let your family down.”

My internal editor speaks in italics a lot.

One should note that I chose to spend my lunch break writing this blog entry about being critical, rather than actually working on the novel. It’s much easier to write critically than creatively. Which is probably why we all do the former so much more often than the latter.

*Details of the incident changed slightly, to protect the critical, but the gist is the same. Wouldn’t Hungry Hungry Hippies be a good game, though? Picture the little plastic bearded and dreadlocked heads munching on organic granola, or, in a pinch, Ho-hos and Doritos. Give ‘em some snacks, man!

Finding the Time Part 2

As my aunt pointed out, I neglected to mention one key component of the time management equation in my previous post. And that, of course, is my husband.

He has a strange and demanding schedule, to be sure. I like to think of what we do as shift parenting. Christopher works 30 hours a week, spending two or three long days in the office, and telecommuting the rest of the time. He also stays home with Edythe while I go to my day job, for approximately 36 hours a week (9 hours day/3 days week). And he takes two classes, for a total of six hours a week.

So that's what, 30 + 36 + 6 = 69 hours/week, not including commuting time and homework time.

Basically, we just see each other on Sundays. And once in a while on a weeknight. So that's one reason I can find all this time to write while Edythe is sleeping. Christopher isn't home either, so it isn't as if I'm missing out on family time. On the other hand, I really should be picking up more of the household chores.

My current duties are:
Working full time (being the primary breadwinner)
Handling virtually all the night wakeups
Solo parenting on Saturdays and several weeknights

Writing this, I feel quite lazy. Christopher is unbelievably and unfailingly supportive of my writing efforts. He reads this blog every day, even when I don't post. He encourages me and doesn't pester me about reading what drivel I've written. Some of my friends and family are rather critical, so having someone be so unashamedly supportive of my efforts is a rarity and a blessing indeed.

Shhh, don't tell, but the cats and I are getting him this for Christmas, as a special thank-you.