Holiday Wars

Today marks the half-way point of Script Frenzy so I thought I’d share my stats (as of yesterday). As you can see I quickly got ahead of the page count and then stalled and finally picked up writing again. So what happened?

Normally when I write a screenplay, I finish Act I and then go back and start re-writing Act I because the first time through you normally discover a lot of things you hadn’t originally planned on. So I like to re-write and get my ducks in a row before tackling Act II. Since one of the big rules in “Script Frenzy” is “don’t waste time re-writing” I didn’t bother going back to square one, but I did have to spend a few days really looking at the overall story and restructuring from my original outline.

The biggest change I discovered was with two supporting cast members. One was supposed to be a POV character and the other was supposed to go missing. Only once I started writing they switched places! So I had a new POV character who needed stuff to do throughout all of Act II. In addition there were some character things that needed to be changed with the main cast to make sure thematically they fit in with all the other changes.

So over the next week I’ll be making my way through Act II. Act II’s suck. Act I is the set-up and Act III is the resolution so pretty much every scene writes itself. Act II is the heart of the story and where things can go very wrong. In fact when re-writing I rarely touch Act I and Act III. Normally all of my re-writing is spent trying to fix all the problems that arose in Act II. So this next week will not be fun.

Ideally for a finished draft I’m aiming for 120 pages (normal screenplay length). I have a feeling though that this first draft will run around 130-140 pages. Then with re-writes I’ll cut it down till and cut it down till it’s a reasonable length. Though the supporting cast has a much larger role in Volume 2 so it may end up being longer than Volume 1 which was 116 pages.