admin

I remember when I saw the email from the 13Horror screenplay competition with notes on my script for Lock the Doors. I was scrolling through my emails on the weekend when I saw the message waiting for me, and my first thought was ‘I don’t like where I am, this isn’t the place to sit and read an email about the career I want to get into.’

The NEXT thought I had, once I had moved to another room, was ‘These are going to be good notes.’

I’m still not sure where that level of confidence came from. I know that I also had some doubts about how the script was going to be received. It was one of the first scripts I’d ever written (the third overall) and the only other script I had written that anyone else had ever seen had not been selected in the one competition I had entered it into fourteen years prior.

Maybe it was because this had already been worked on, and polished when I was working with my editor on the novella. I knew it had really good pacing (even after all the times I’d read and re-read it while working on it, its the one that surprised me how well it moved the first time I’d read it after I had published it), and maybe that was another reason for my optimism.

Whatever the case, it looked like I was right. I felt the notes were predominantly positive. But there were some areas where the judges felt it could be improved. And only a week to address them and re-submit.

I’ve had deadlines before when working with my editor, and getting the book ready to be published on Amazon. Yet for some reason, this deadline felt different. Maybe it was because, although I was paying them for the entry and the feedback, I wasn’t hiring them the same way I hired my editor, where we were working together to get the best version of the story out there.

And honestly, that terrified me a little.

But the notes were focused on specific things to improve the script. It was what I’d been hoping to achieve by entering the contest in the first place.

My first read through of the script post-feedback was marking down all the times I had directed the action with eye movements. I got such a kick out of it when the judge said my style of writing was more suited for a novel, and I thought it was a credit to how insightful they were. It’s actually been a note I’ve been cognizant of ever since, something I focused on when re-writing Dig Down.

Running through the script a second time, I then focused on replacing all those eye movements with just describing what I wanted the characters to do. I found the story lost nothing, since the screenplay is supposed to describe what will be on the screen, and so there was no point to show a character looking in a direction and then to see what they saw. Just cut out the middle man.

The third run I did through the script looked for those blocks of text and just hacking them down. There were several action blocks that were three and four lines (big no-no), and I worked to shave a line off each of them, at least.

One last run through the script to clean up any spelling and grammar issues I found. It all seems quick as I described it in less than four paragraphs, but by this point, my week was almost up. This was because I had taken a day assessing the notes and feedback and formulating a plan of how I was going to tackle the revisions, and each read through I had done constituted a day so I could reflect on the changes I’d made and how I felt about them.

I ended up re-submitting my script on July 22, a day before the deadline. Now all that was left was to wait for the results, and while the waiting was its own brand of nerve-racking, just like when I first got the email that the feedback was available, I felt good about where I was at with the script, and this time, I actually knew why. I felt I had done everything I could to address the areas identified that needed improvement, and left nothing on the field.

Until next time.

This was the first ever feedback I received on my screenplay for Lock the Doors, and the first feedback I had ever received on a screenplay:

You’ve got a couple of great ideas woven together here – the
effects of not taking the medication and how this creates the
character of The Boy, plus the confusion around the two
identical cabins. It’s darkly comic and a brilliant way to
subvert the idea of home intrusion. It’s also very cleverly
done and you’ve obviously put a lot of thought into how the
circumstantial can be used to create such drama.
There’s something compelling about The Boy’s reasoning and
paranoid but convincing intelligence. It stirs up a mish mash
of Of Mice And Men, the British film Dead Man’s Shoes, Thomas
Tryon’s novel The Other and even Fight Club.
You have some very nicely worked horror set pieces embedded
throughout. My only concern is that on occasion you wander a
little too far into a style of writing more suited to a novel
than to a screenplay. Yes, it’s nice writing and it’s great to
be visual but you need to balance this against the pace and
the flow of the screenplay. Be savvy. Try and find a way to
make the scene direction dynamic. Blocks of prose permeating
each scene can be a slog to get through. Screenplays are not
books; they are meant to mimic the feeling of watching a film.
If something exciting is happening, it should be written in an
exciting way to try to suggest how intense the scene will be
once filmed. There is no hard and fast rule here, but large
chunks of no-frills scene direction are extremely scarce in
professional screenplays.
Consider the number of times you’re referencing what your
characters’ eyes are doing: Eyes lighting up, eyes gleaming,
eyes widening, sweeping, shutting, opening, filling with
murderous fury… things like these feel well overcooked. If
you can address this and tighten things up by focussing on the
germane rather than the superfluous then you’ll turn this from
a good screenplay to a great one.
Great idea which has been for the most part very well
executed.

After putting aside the setback of losing my first draft of the Dig Down script and adapting Lock the Doors into a screenplay, I found myself at an impasse of what to do next. I can almost hear the suggestion: start pitching to studios, or hire an agent. And those were both things I definitely wanted to do.

The problem with going that route is that although I had a completed draft, and one with a few rounds of edits under its belt, I still had no idea where my script stood in terms of being on a professional level. And a pitfall with this industry is that you may only get one chance to pitch your story to a studio or agent. If it doesn’t come across as polished and professional, you might burn through a lot of potential opportunities.

I felt the best course of action was to enter Lock the Doors in some screenwriting competitions. This method wasn’t pitching to get representation or a deal done, it was a way to determine how my screenplay compared, not only to industry standards, but against other hopeful screenwriters.

I opted for the 13Horror.com Film & Screenplay Contest because it also offered feedback and notes on entries, and if I submitted early enough, would have the chance to make revisions based on their notes and recommendations and resubmit. I felt this would be extremely beneficial because not only would I see where I ranked against other entrants, but I would also receive critiques that pinpointed what I did well and what I needed to improve on.

On July 15th of last year, the lead judge got back to me last summer with the much anticipated notes, which I will share in a post later this week. To summarize, there were some good notes, and to be honest, more than I expected. Aside from adapting Dig Down, I had only ever written one other screenplay, another thriller called On the River, and the only feedback I had ever received on that was that it was not selected when I entered it into Scriptapalooza.

In short, even adapted from a story people enjoyed, I’m not a screenwriter, and I do find shifting from an author mindset to that of a screenwriter an adjustment. So this was huge to get some positive notes.

However, there were also areas that I needed to address, which again, to me is fair, given I was stepping out of my comfort zone. And the deadline to re-submit was midnight on July 23rd, leaving me just 8 days to take their critiques, decide what I wanted to implement, and execute on this new vision.

More to come…

Even after the devastating realization that I had lost the file of the screenplay I had been working on for Dig Down when my barely year old laptop crashed, I didn’t let that deter me from continuing to work on scripts. While I couldn’t bring myself to start over from scratch with Dig Down right away, I was able to focus my energy on converting my second book, Lock the Doors into a script.

After completing the conversion, and a couple rounds of polish, I actually felt that this turn of events may have actually been an odd blessing in disguise. The reason for this admittedly bizarre point of view was because I had been attending free webinars on screenwriting, and one of them had to do with writing a horror franchise. The webinar started off with the statement that Hollywood studios were actually always in the market for horror because they were cheap to produce (a big reason why there’s 10 Friday the 13th films).

Lock the Doors could absolutely be made a shoe string budget because its slasher DNA – isolated cabin in the woods, a small group of friends that get picked off one by one, and a silent hulking killer. Lock the Doors was my love letter to the genre, and also a unique take on it because it flipped the genre on its head and told the story from the killer’s point of view.

While I’m admittedly anal retentive and want everything done in the proper order, I did feel that working to get my books produced into movies out of order may have been more beneficial in the long run. Studios would be more willing to take a chance on my story if the cost was low enough (even with rampant inflation, I feel you could make it for around a million, maybe even less, the cabin is the only major expense I can see).

I also felt the bar for success would be very low. I’d be a first time screenwriter, and if my script was made into a movie, I now had a film on my resume, and hopefully some decent buzz and returns to go with it, I would have an easier time pitching my next screenplay.

There was still one last hang up…I wasn’t really a screenwriter.

Even as an author, I worked with an editor to make my stories as good as they could possibly be. But I didn’t know anyone who edited scripts, or even where to look. So when I found a screenplay contest devoted to horror, AND it provided feedback and scoring, I jumped at the opportunity.

I’ll share more on that experience…next time.

For the past three years, I have been working on converting my published novels into screenplays. I made the decision to pivot away from novels for the time being to screenplays in an attempt to reach a wider audience. Books are where my heart lies, but I also love movies, and there’s something about seeing ‘Based on the book by’ in the opening credits that I think goes a long way towards creating a new audience for a book.

The decision to go this route was motivated and inspired by all of you. There were so many readers who told me when they were reading Dig Down and Lock the Doors that it was so well paced and that they could see it as a movie that I decided to explore adapting the stories to this new medium.

During the pandemic, I was taking several classes through Udemy. I had been laid up on my couch for months years prior, and although that eventually led to me finally writing and submitting Dig Down to an editor to see if I really had the writing chops I always believed I had, I also how miserable I was feeling that I had wasted so much time, and not wanting to repeat that experience, I was always looking for things to keep myself active and engaged during a time of heavy isolation.

One of those classes was a course on how to write screenplays. There were several great resources provided, including where to find copies of existing screenplays, as well as screenwriting software that was recommended. This was how I found the program Fade In, which I’ve been using draft my scripts.

As I said, I’ve been working on these screenplays for the past three years. This is in large part to the bumps and hiccups along the way. I had first worked on the screenplay for Dig Down, typing it up on a new laptop I had bought, only for the entire computer to crash just a few months later. Sadly, I had not backed up the file outside of the laptop I had written it on.

While I was slightly deterred from starting from scratch, I shifted my focus to drafting and revising the script for Lock the Doors (and sending myself a file through my email) before eventually returning to Dig Down late last year.

I now have two drafts, and a good sense of where they stand in terms of marketability. But I didn’t always have the latter. Despite my confidence in writing novels, I consider myself a novice when it comes to screenwriting, and was looking to change that last year as quickly as possible.

My solution to that was screenplay competitions.

More on that, next time.

Hello everyone!

I’m pleased to announce that I was able to complete the first draft of Between the Maws & Claws. I had given myself a revised goal to have it finished by the end of 2021. Although I did not make this second self-imposed deadline, I was able to wrap up the initial draft of the manuscript on January 2nd, so all things considered, even though I missed the mark, I wasn’t too far from hitting it.

I actually really enjoyed the momentum that I had attained as I was closing in toward the end. Throughout writing the first draft, I had alluded to the average time that it takes me to write a page, which was roughly a half hour, and that for most of this manuscript, it was taking me the better part of an hour for large sections of the manuscript. As the finish line starting coming into view, my pace really started to quicken. Not only was I writing pages in about twenty minutes, sometimes I was sustaining full hour writing sessions, resulting in typing up three pages in one sitting.

It might be too bold to state that my overall average for writing pages actually got below a half hour, but I don’t think its too presumptuous to believe that in the end, my writing pace rounded back into its usual form.

So, what’s next?

Well, with each draft I write, once its completed, I force myself to step away and take some time from the story. If you’ve been following the chronicling of this story from the beginning, you know that I have been focusing on telling this story for over five months now; three months devoted purely to outlining, and another two months writing the draft. There are definitely shortcomings, areas that need improvement, and areas that need to be hacked with a machete. But at the end of the first draft, with so much time spent with this as my primary focus, I’m too invested in the story. Everything about it is my baby. I need the separation of time to provide some distance from it, so that I can observe it objectively, assess what still works and what doesn’t, and take the next steps to start rounding it into shape.

So for the first time since the summer, I’m taking a break from the project. Again, this is routine, and what I did for my three other books. And once enough time has passed, that I’m not only ready to return to it, but can view it with the shrewd objectivity it needs and deserves, I’ll be back to work on it again.

Until next time.