I was starting to feel the pace slip out of my control in the first act of my Western. I liked how the individual scenes were reading, with a lot going out that would allow the audience to learn about and feel immersed in the world I was creating, but I was still in the first act. There was a lot that I wanted to have happen, both vital to the plot and in terms of set pieces. If I was shooting for a screenplay that was about 90-95 pages, I couldn’t devote more than was necessary to what was essentially the setup for all of these bigger story beats.
I felt like the story allowed for a bit of a reprieve from the longer sequences that I had been writing that was introducing a lot of the characters. The next two sequences, both of which were nothing more than scenes, would only feature two characters. What’s more, the two characters had already been established. I wouldn’t have to take time introducing them to the audience. I would need to build on what the audience already knew about them, but that could be done naturally in the story.
I had wanted the sequences to not really last more than the two pages of notebook paper I was using, which was really less than half of a page of notebook paper, as I was using half of the page to note the importance of what I was including in the first draft of the script. I didn’t quite hit that target, but I didn’t miss by an outlandish amount. I think both sequences were about 4 pages apiece, maybe just dipping into 5 at the most.
Again, writing in notebook pages that were smaller than regular screenplay pages, and only writing on one half of the page, and double spacing, meant that when I ultimately converted my handwritten draft to an actual script, it would be much shorter than the 4-5 pages I’d jotted down in the notebook. I felt this was getting me back on track.
This was important, because I was approaching another sequence that was meant to be long.
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