If you’re serious about screenwriting, you have to be serious about making the best use of your time. There are very few screenwriters who get to sit in their beachfront windows working away on their own projects undisturbed by the need of pursuing other work. In all likelihood, you’ll be further away from the ocean, and with much smaller windows.
Writing takes time, and considering our nervous systems are now inextricably linked with all the internet machines, carving out the space needed to mull over and write our screenplays has become more difficult. There is also far more work involved in building a screenwriting / film career than just the scriptwriting aspect of it.
But the good news; opportunities to see your scripts get made into movies, or making them yourself if you’re so inclined, have increased dramatically in the democratising digital and internet age. Camera kits on which you can acceptably shoot a feature film in 4k can be bought for €2,500. You can crowdfund the film online, meet fellow creatives who are drawn to your idea, and build a readymade audience for it.
Whether you’re involved in film production or just a writer, there are many ways to break through and see your film out there, but only if you stop putting the brakes on your writing.
The Need For Speedwriting
Every writer needs to get as much done as possible in the short spaces of time available to them. If that means completing a feature screenplay in a week off, or beating a competition deadline by working in sprints on the mornings or evenings around a work or school day, so be it. It’s not a crazy idea. It may be the only way to get your scripts from A to B and complete the enormous amount of work involved in a writing career.
As a professional or produced screenwriter, you’re expected to finish feature film drafts quickly, to keep the plates spinning on a few projects at once, to write production and reference notes to help a producer, director, and all the talent under them gain a clearer picture of your script’s intentions. ALL must be done apace.
Now maybe you are in the minority who will reach perfection by endlessly mulling over your one pet project, carefully scribing every page over the course of months and years, rewriting time and again before you trust it can survive the light of day, or a trusted reader, but more often that’s how projects get stale and uninviting even to yourself.
And who else is going to make your film if you’ve lost enthusiasm to push for it?
So how fast can you write a feature screenplay? What’s your page count an hour? How many hours can you work in a day before your head quits sending coherent signals to your typing / scribbling fingers? Test yourself.
I recently discovered my average writing speed of four pages an hour could be increased to fourteen pages in an hour with a simple trick. Try writing a script with the barest minimum of action / character / location descriptions. All can be filled in later so as not to interrupt your flow at the vital stage. If it doesn’t come quickly, skip it.
The vast majority of any script is dialogue. Such speedwriting can’t be sustained for long, but sometimes you only have an hour! If you can get a few scenes on paper in that time, it keeps your motivation ticking over, and you can surprise yourself by taking a break from all that procrastinating and just allowing your characters to speak to each other.
Sylvester Stallone (not my screenwriting hero, just an example) claims to have written the Oscar-winning Rocky in three and a half days once inspiration struck after watching an underdog go the distance with Muhammad Ali. It’s been said John Hughes wrote The Breakfast Club in two days!
These two examples have in general been put forward as anomalies in how screenwriters go about their work. In truth, when you subscribe to the idea that to do is to learn, they’re great examples to beginner screenwriters. The quicker you gain experience of where you’re at and what you want to do as a writer, the better.
Too many writers fail by overthinking, overwriting, and losing the thread of their stories because of constant breaks in their inspirational flow. These breaks happen when a writer’s mind and their script is overloaded with information they feel the story needs to convey, but also because… life finds a way of interrupting you.
It’s not always easy to escape life into your scripted fantasies. It drags you back.
The Seven Day Screenplay
Seven days to complete a draft of a feature screenplay is a perfectly reasonable goal. There is no magic trick to it either. Not to sound morbid, but we all have limited time. Within the realm of spec or semi-professional screenwriting (where you may have many projects you want to get written), super-quick drafting of a screenplay should be a regular occurrence, especially if you’ve been sketching out your idea and playing it over and over in your mind for a while before finally sitting your ass down to write it.
Bad habits die hard, but they need to die fast. You need to put aside the bad habits of amateur / beginner screenwriters:
getting stuck on page 30-something (forever),
continually rewriting the first 15 pages (forever and ever),
and being unwilling to even call yourself a writer…
…because you’ve never finished anything!
The truth is… you will doubt your abilities as a writer. It’s natural. To a greater or lesser degree, everyone does. But you need to recognise all that self-doubt for the absolute waste of your time that it is.
JUST WRITE! FINISH YOUR DRAFTS!! GET IT DONE QUICKLY!!!
The first step to feeling like a writer is having completed something; a story told in full, not just a beginning fragment of your idea. If you decide writing isn’t for you then, fine, you’ve learnt from doing. A worse position to be in is thinking you have something that could be good, but feeling… you just don’t have the time.
You have the time. You just need the method.
14 pages a day x 7 days = feature screenplay.
Someone may come along with a six day screenplay idea, but I’d rather not think about it right now.
Even if your screenplay is rough / sketchy / mostly dialogue / unnamed characters, once you’ve sat down to do the writing, let it flow. The action, descriptions, and minor details are often what bog people down in writing a script, and let’s be honest, cause the vast majority of scripts to be shelved before a first draft is completed.
Inspiration Over “Perfection”
Simply put, you can spend an enormous amount of time making every little detail perfect and it can come out completely lacking in inspiration or writing / reading flow. Inspiration and writing / reading flow are exactly what can come from blasting out a script in a short timeframe, and essential for anyone judging your script after that.
LET IT FLOW!
I’ll write more soon on approaches you can take to plan a session for writing a screenplay in seven days, and also look at how established story sequences can be twisted to create artistic-minded screenplays away from the rigidly plot-pointed formulae.
With inspiration, should come freedom!!
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