The Toronto International Film Festival was a wonderful event and a great distraction to the latest challenge I was facing in my screenwriting career: coming up with a new screenplay idea. I had slowly been gravitating towards the understanding that I would have to write a new story if I was going to continue down this route rather than adapt another one of my books, and attending TIFF at least allowed me to feel I was doing something toward my career, though not as much as I would’ve liked as the writer’s strike was still ongoing.
Once I returned from the festival, my focus shifted to two main goals. The latter was continuing to develop an outline for a new book, the first novel I was intending to publish. Although I was still interested in furthering my screenwriting, it wasn’t my intention to do so at the expense of the rest of my writing, and I felt I had an idea worth fleshing out and drafting a manuscript for.
You might be asking if I was already outlining a new story, why not just write this as a script? The reason is that the story I had in mind would have been too massive for a script. Keep in mind, it was only 3 months ago that I had been told that I needed to shorten my screenplay of Dig Down to 90 pages, and the story I was cultivating currently would be at least double the size.
Focusing on outlining a new manuscript was worthwhile to me because I don’t view working on one story as an impediment to other ideas, but rather something I’m doing while I’m waiting for them to materialize. Since my goal was to come up with a new story idea to turn into a script, and I didn’t have one, I felt the wrong thing to do was sit around waiting for the right idea to strike.
I also felt the worst thing I could do was try to force coming up with a new idea.
So I continued to work on and craft different ideas to pour into this manuscript, as once again I could at least point to some progress being made in my writing. Meanwhile, it would actually be the other goal I was working towards during this time that would lead me to my next steps in my screenwriting, and it had nothing to do with writing.
That goal was running in my first marathon.