After an exciting Friday of script analysis and feedback, it was time to get to work. While the three screenplays I had entered all had various final deadlines for resubmissions, the contest with the most promise, Page Turner, also had the earliest.
For the next 17 days, I was under the gun.
The first thing I felt I needed was to be able to have the entire script in front of me at once. While I could skip to wherever I wanted to in the screenplay with the software I was using, I could still only view one, maybe two, pages at a time. I felt it would be important to be able to look at multiple pages throughout the script where a character showed up to see if they were always adding new information or advancing the story. I wanted to make sure details or actions I gave didn’t become repetitive. I wanted something that I could mark up with notes.
And…I suppose I wanted to feel like I was working with an actual script, something tangible that I could have in hand, flip through.
I have the worst luck with printers, probably because I always splurge on the cheap models at Walmart. And this time was no exception. Hey, I didn’t need top of the line quality, I just needed something that could get the job done today.
After a brief excursion to buy a new one, I got to work right away. I made notes on everything in the script that had come up in the phone consultation the day before: recording the number of flashbacks, recording the number of speeches, recording the number of long action paragraphs, recording the number on oners (lines in a paragraph that only had a word or two). All of the problematic things that were brought up in the consultation, and the other two notes of feedback from the other contests, those were singled out with a red pen.
I also made notes of every character’s intro, and ideas I had to improve them if I felt they were weak. I made notations for where I felt I could incorporate some of the other feedback I had gotten.
I had a hard time sitting still, partly because I always do, but also because I was excited. It might sound crazy, going through your work and highlighting all the problems with it, but I thought it was great. Everything I found felt like it was bringing me one step closer to improving the script, and bringing it into the best shape it could be.
It probably took me over three hours to go through the entire script this way. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was four. And I definitely felt like I had put in all I could after reviewing, analyzing and pinpointing all the examples of weak points that the judge’s had spotted in my script. But I also felt really accomplished.
Even though it wasn’t the two and a half hour positive phone consultation from the day before, I felt this was the second day in a row I’d made great strides in my writing career. Even as I shut down for the day to relax and get ready for tomorrow, my mind kept churning out more and more ideas of how to take the notes I was given and improve my script.
For the second night in a row, when my head hit the pillow, I couldn’t wait to get back to work tomorrow.