It wasn’t easy making the decision to no longer pursue adapting Dig Down into a screenplay as my first screenwriting credit. I had been following this path of adapting my first two novellas into scripts for about two years at this point, and while I had placed as a finalist a few times in some screenwriting contests, after this Zoom call discussing my script, I understood that this was as far as I was going to be able to take these stories in their current state.
So that left me with an important question I had to find the answer to…
Where do I go from here?
At the time, I felt I had the makings of a new story, one that would actually be the length of an average novel. But while I liked the story I was outlining, I also knew that I would be under the same time constraints to write it as I had been experiencing last year. I also knew writing and self-publishing another book wouldn’t generate attention alone. Part of the appeal of writing screenplays, in addition to being quicker to write than novels, was that if they were optioned, the audiences they could reach were more likely to be bigger, and this in turn could finally draw attention to the books I had already published.
But where did that leave me? I felt trying to adapt I’m Not My Father was likely to lead me to the same destination, collecting some accolades, but hitting the same ceiling because judge’s would recognize it as an adaptation of a book.
I didn’t reach the conclusion right then and there, but the seed for what I would do next was ultimately planted in response to this question. The course of action was to come up with a new story. Not the book I was planning to write next. A story that I was specifically going to write as a screenplay. This would help me avoid the pitfalls I was experiencing from trying to adapt from a story I’d already written in a different medium.
For the first time in over 15 years, I’d be writing a story with the intent that it would be a screenplay. If I was going to make an adaptation in the future, it would be from a screenplay instead of to one.
But I’ll have more on that later.
Because the next thing I did in my screenwriting journey was attend film festivals.