I had mounting concerns about the western I was writing a screenplay for. I was still in the early stages of act two, and I felt that the sequences were starting to get repetitive. What was more, I could foresee some of the repetition occurring later in the screenplay as well.
On top of that, I found that most of the sequences I was writing had run long. And by that, I mean that I think the sequences I’d been writing were going long. With my own – very unique – method of writing the first draft of the Western, I actually didn’t know how many actual script pages each of the sequences were taking. For all I knew, I was actually well within a reasonable number of pages for how far I had gotten in the story.
But that didn’t shake the feeling that I was running longer than where I should have been. I was convinced that if I transcribed what I’d already written into script format that I would see that I already had about 45 to 50 pages.
And that was a problem, because that was half of the pages I was shooting for for this script, because when I looked ahead to what I had planned, even if I was halfway through the story, the sequences in the latter half were supposed to be even grander than what I’d established so far. While this was still the first draft, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t in a good place, and carrying that mindset with me through the rest of the draft wasn’t going to be good for the end product.
On top of that, the questions that I had going into the start of the draft, mainly about the main character’s motivations, still weren’t any clearer, even after getting deep into the story.
I took a step back to assess where I was at in the writing process. I felt I had once again outlined a scope much grander than the medium I was trying to write in. This felt like something I would have to fit into a 120 page script, possibly even cramming it in to do so, and that was much longer than what I felt I needed to submit as someone considered to be a first time screenwriter looking to get a script optioned for the first time.
As much as I loved this story, I felt that for the time being, it was time to move on until I could some up with the right way to tell it.
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