At the end of last year, on one of the screenwriting blogs I follow: Go Into The Story Scott Myers posted a great 10 part series about goals. Here's part 10 with links to the other 9 inside. It really got me thinking and planning. I needed a more solid goal than write X by X. I also needed to get better at working on more than one project at once and I needed to get better at *finishing* them. So I came up with a plan for the first month and year.
I've decided at the end of every month, I'll evaluate the goals I set at the beginning of the month, what worked, what didn't, what I need to change, etc etc. This month, I had 2 main goals. Finish my second first draft to a point where I felt comfortable with it...and outline enough of the next script where I could start writing on it.
I succeeded with the first enough to be okay with it, which is a big step. I think I'm going to put it away until at least after TF..although the third act isn't great...it needs a few more scenes, so perhaps I'll add those and *then* put it away. ....*don't pick at it!* ....yes mom.
The second is a not so much. I mean, I feel pretty comfortable where things are heading. I have all three acts broken down and I have the major plot points mapped out, so I could start in on the first act. Actually, I take that back, I'm totally going to start writing on it. My issue last time was that I outlined and outlined and reoutlined and didn't start writing until it was almost too late. So, my second goal is accomplished as well. Go team. Since I don't have the first act mapped out as much as I'd like to, I think I'll just start with the first few scenes and see where it goes. I know where I need to get to at the end of first act and I have the midpoint, plus I know who I need to introduce and why. So enough storyboarding, let's go shoot something. My boss had that cartoon in her office for the longest time....
What I've learned this past month is I need a better way to schedule my hours. I had a bit of a paradigm shift when I started thinking of writing as a job I'm not getting paid for yet. If I want to prove I can get paid for it, I have to put in the hours, like any job. I tried doing at least 2-3 hours each night having written a page and outlined some. That was great until about it got to be exhausting (and, ahem, I got sucked into a book or two) I ended up feeling bad if I didn't put in the hours each night, then things would snowball and it'd be 3 days later and I'd have to give myself a firm talking to and no biscuit. It was just a bad system overall...no rewards with plenty of self-induced punishments..and not in the good way.
So the new plan...weekly page count and hour goals. If I need a night off, if I'm tired, if I want to play videogames or play with friends or play videogames with friends, that's fine, but it means I gotta make up the time later on or preferably beforehand, but it has to be made up before the end of the weekend. I'm also left with a question of what's the total number of hours? Should it be 15? That's only 2 hours a night, which I can do and still leaves time to make up. But it's only 60 a month...which seems more like an intense hobby. If I kicked it up to 80 a month, that breaks down to a little under 3 each day. I think I can swing that if I have a "hard" hourly minimum of 2 hours/day writing/oulining and the other as "research" reading scripts, books & screenwriter blogs...hey just because it's fun doesn't mean it doesn't count.
And of course the final kicker, I won't know at all if i can keep that schedule until late March as TrueFalse is starting to kick into high gear. Only 30 days and there's a lot to do. I'm cutting back on some duties this year, but picking up others. Scheduling and training videographers, doing the same director skypes that seem to come up every year and then doing a bunch of other technical things here and there. I'm so glad Greg Babush came on board a few years ago. Now he's taken over so much in the projection area I can focus on what I'd really rather being doing...and am actually qualified for. Back then I was mostly winging it based on knowledge I picked up at my day job. Which was it's own sort of fun. But now I get to enjoy TF during the fest, rather than after.
Oh wait...Feb's goals. 15 pages &....30 hours? on the screenplay. I'm assuming I probably won't get anything done on it past mid-february so if I can get that finished in the next two weeks I'll consider myself gold.
And somewhere in the next few months I need to make time to get back into shape as we're doing some Grand Canyon back country hiking in May....which should be awesome. Kat's been playing around with timelapses and I'm jumping on that bandwagon. Hopefully, by May we'll have a timelapse dolly that we can take down with us and if our shots are even 1/10 as good as what Tom Lowe gets, then we'll be in good shape. Here's a trailer for his film, TimeScapes, coming out this May
Current music: Twister by Mark Mancina which always makes me think of double features in KC with Eric. And now that I link to amazon I find it's kinda expensive and out of print. Glad to still have my copy....or, I suppose, the internet:
Thanks for the shout-out...those were the days!
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