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After two straight days of working nearly twelve hours on my script of Dig Down, while simultaneously working to keep water from accumulating in my basement, I felt oddly refreshed going into the second – and final – full week I had left to make revisions and re-submit my screenplay. I’d definitely had less grueling weekends that left my exhausted when facing a new week, and yet, even after such a focused and disciplined two days, I felt eager for the week ahead.

I think this could be attributed to a couple things. The first was that I was doing what I loved, working on one of my stories, and with a clear direction of how to make it better and bring out the best of it. The second was that I had made a lot of progress over the weekend and felt like I had the finish line in sight.

My second set of weekdays working on the script was very similar to the first, only this time, instead of chiseling away on minor improvements, I could see the edits starting to take a real shape on the screenplay as a whole. And that just fed my motivation more. With each passing day, I came home from work with the intention of just fine tuning a couple of small things in the script, much like I had done the week before. Only this time, I could see that each change I made brought me one step closer to my goal, a goal that was becoming clearer to see.

And that just drove me to work on Dig Down a little bit longer.

Much like the weekend, social plans were forgone to work on the screenplay. This even included meeting up with my writing group for the sole purpose of dedicating an hour to writing – the time to get there and back, and the half hour to an hour we would talk afterwards would just cut into the time I could spend actually working on the screenplay. I even skipped my usual runs on Tuesday and Thursday, originally just sacrificing the first because I felt I would be done by the second. (I was close in my estimation).

As the week wore on, I think I was even starting to regret that work was getting in the way. But by Thursday night, when I once again worked until I looked up at a clock and realized how late it had gotten, I knew it was a moot point.

Dig Down had incorporated the feedback I’d gotten from the three contests I had entered. For me, all that was left was to give it one final readthrough.

Although I wouldn’t say I was dallying, after one full week devoted to edits and rewrites of my script for Dig Down, I was really starting to feel the looming deadline, just 10 days away. While I had been making incremental progress, I felt I was nowhere near capturing anything close to all the areas that were covered during my two and a half hour phone consultation just the week before.

I knew that I needed to make the most of this upcoming weekend.

While it was daunting, it wasn’t all bad. I didn’t feel close to finishing, but that was because I had invested a lot of time during the week towards identifying the areas of the screenplay that needed improvement, as well as brainstorming and drafting several ideas to implement those improvements. I had come up with new character introductions that I believed captured them very well for a first impression. I also had drafted a few new scenes to showcase characters that might have only been referenced in the script (and the book) to help better convey who was beyond some of the obstacles that Rob would face during the story.

One character of note was Ruth, who in addition to being only briefly featured in the book, something that I believe worked to the strength in that medium, barely had any screentime, something that was a criticism in all three forms of feedback I’d gotten. I had come up with a brief storyline to weave in through the early going of the screenplay to give some context to who she was.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t all good either. The temperatures picked up, so all the snow we’d gotten in the middle of the week began to melt, and most of it found its way into my basement. While I had a five gallon bucket there to capture the water as it came in, it would fill up every fifteen minutes. This meant if I wanted to keep pace with the water coming into my house, I would have to break away from my work every quarter hour to empty it out.

It wasn’t ideal, but this was what I ended up doing throughout the weekend. I’m an early riser, so I would wake up, empty the bucket, replace it with a smaller bucket, and wet vac my floor until it was just damp (essentially emptying out the wet vac at least 15 times). I’d replace the 5 gallon bucket to collect the water, shower, go to the basement to empty it out again, have breakfast, empty out the bucket one last time, and then get to work.

I’d start my revisions/edits around 8 in the morning, and aside from taking a break for lunch, I rigidly kept to a schedule of going through the script and implementing changes, heading downstairs to the basement every fifteen minutes to empty the nearly overflowing bucket again, and keep to this routine until 8 at night. Yes, you read that right. Aside from a lunch break, I would work nearly 12 hours straight throughout the weekend.

My mind would be swimming by the time I logged off. My body sore from stooping over to lug a bucket to my sump pump four times an hour. A social life was non-existent, and I knew Monday morning it wasn’t going to feel like I had any time off. I felt like I worked harder than I did at my job.

And while it may have been grueling, I can’t say I hated it. I wasn’t thrilled about the basement, but to me, this was something I’d worked my whole life to achieve. Putting myself in a position to be working on my story, a story that people were praising and wanted to see it elevated to what it could be. Yes, it was tough, but it was what I loved, and to me, how could I not work hard, put in the work that was necessary for something that I loved.

I was thoroughly worn out by the time Sunday night rolled around. Yet as my head hit the pillow, willing myself to get mentally prepared to start a new week of the work the next morning, two things brought a smile to my face. One, as tough as it was, I had loved the experience of locking myself in my house just to work on one of my stories.

And two, for the first time since the phone consultation, my script was really starting to take shape.

After a focused weekend in I performed a deep analysis of my script of Dig Down and then started reading and analyzing other scripts, I unfortunately had to return to my regular schedule. That included work for a good portion of the day.

Despite not being able to devote this chunk of time to revisions, in which I was already under the gun and down to just two weeks left to re-submit, I was still filling up all of my free time with working on the script. It was the first thing I would work on when I woke up, as I tried to put in as close to an hour of rewrites before work, and when I got home, this was the focus.

The only problem was work wasn’t the only obstacle that week.

My writer’s group met on Monday night, and although there was a storm coming that prevented me from attending in person, I managed to connect online and got a couple of pages down in the hour we set aside from writing. That storm was the big one for the year, so I worked from home the next day, so I didn’t have to worry about spending time on my commute, short as it was.

While the storm first helped out with the rewrite process, it soon became a huge hinderance. My house has a high water table, and as the snow began to melt, it just kept coming into my basement. I set up a bucket where the biggest leak into the house was coming from, and even though it could hold more than five gallons, I was down in the basement emptying it out every twenty minutes when I was home. And this doesn’t include the time I had to spend with the wet vac to remove all the water that had spilled over while I was at work.

Mornings were getting tougher to face as the week went on. What started out as me having concerns for how far along I was coming along turned into questioning whether I had the energy to get out of bed to keep up with the water in the basement and still put in some time to work on the script. Looking back, its not surprising that I had doubts about the new scenes I was looking to add to flesh out characters a bit more as well as the ending I was revamping for the script when I was exhausted from having to empty out a bucket of water 3-4 times an hour when I was home.

A full week was down since my phone consultation to review the Dig Down script, and while I wouldn’t say my progress was limited, I definitely felt like I was behind. Thankfully this was still mid-March, which made my next decision easier, which was to commit the weekend to working on rewrites.

I’ll get into how that went, next time.

I took a different approach to my script of Dig Down the following day. One of the things that was discussed in the phone consultation was applying the right tone to give the screenplay the feel of a film noir. Tone was also one of the things I was scored on in the Santa Barbara Screenplay Competition, and so I felt this would be a good thing to focus on next: not just individual things throughout the script, but something that would impact the entire story.

In the phone consultation, the judge had said that word choice was a great way to set the kind of feel I wanted for my story. He had even given some examples of writers and some excerpts of their writing style to give my some guidance. Additionally, he had given the suggestion beyond excerpts to read through scripts of the genre I was looking to write in so that I could get a feel for creating tone in more than just a few passages.

So I downloaded a couple of screenplays, Chinatown and Bladerunner 2049, and sat down to read the latter as it was the more recent (the judge had said that the general writing style of screenplays changed every couple of years – five, I think – and so I felt it was better to read through a script that had been written in the past few years).

Although not to the extent of yesterday, I went through the script, taking notes of word choices and descriptions used throughout to create a tone and feel of the story. I felt I started to get a sense of how this could improve my own screenplay, and was even starting to get ideas for description I could use in Dig Down.

While it was a big of a light day, and although I hadn’t made any revisions to my script in the two days since my phone consultation, I felt I had never attained this level of analysis on my story, and that included all the re-writes I had made just to publish it, as well as the serials and short stories I had written about characters in this world. Though any changes I had made were superficial, I felt taking the two days to get a deeper understanding of the story and my script would help me immensely going forward.

After an exciting Friday of script analysis and feedback, it was time to get to work. While the three screenplays I had entered all had various final deadlines for resubmissions, the contest with the most promise, Page Turner, also had the earliest.

For the next 17 days, I was under the gun.

The first thing I felt I needed was to be able to have the entire script in front of me at once. While I could skip to wherever I wanted to in the screenplay with the software I was using, I could still only view one, maybe two, pages at a time. I felt it would be important to be able to look at multiple pages throughout the script where a character showed up to see if they were always adding new information or advancing the story. I wanted to make sure details or actions I gave didn’t become repetitive. I wanted something that I could mark up with notes.

And…I suppose I wanted to feel like I was working with an actual script, something tangible that I could have in hand, flip through.

I have the worst luck with printers, probably because I always splurge on the cheap models at Walmart. And this time was no exception. Hey, I didn’t need top of the line quality, I just needed something that could get the job done today.

After a brief excursion to buy a new one, I got to work right away. I made notes on everything in the script that had come up in the phone consultation the day before: recording the number of flashbacks, recording the number of speeches, recording the number of long action paragraphs, recording the number on oners (lines in a paragraph that only had a word or two). All of the problematic things that were brought up in the consultation, and the other two notes of feedback from the other contests, those were singled out with a red pen.

I also made notes of every character’s intro, and ideas I had to improve them if I felt they were weak. I made notations for where I felt I could incorporate some of the other feedback I had gotten.

I had a hard time sitting still, partly because I always do, but also because I was excited. It might sound crazy, going through your work and highlighting all the problems with it, but I thought it was great. Everything I found felt like it was bringing me one step closer to improving the script, and bringing it into the best shape it could be.

It probably took me over three hours to go through the entire script this way. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was four. And I definitely felt like I had put in all I could after reviewing, analyzing and pinpointing all the examples of weak points that the judge’s had spotted in my script. But I also felt really accomplished.

Even though it wasn’t the two and a half hour positive phone consultation from the day before, I felt this was the second day in a row I’d made great strides in my writing career. Even as I shut down for the day to relax and get ready for tomorrow, my mind kept churning out more and more ideas of how to take the notes I was given and improve my script.

For the second night in a row, when my head hit the pillow, I couldn’t wait to get back to work tomorrow.

This felt almost incredible. In late January of last year, I had entered my script for Dig Down into three screenplay competitions, and in just over a month, and in about the span of one week, I had gotten my notes on all of them.

I was still coming off of the high of how great my first ever consultation had gone for my script, and yes, I still felt elated, even after the notes I had gotten from the Santa Barbara Screenplay Competition. Writing this story was still a journey, even though I had already published it four years ago, because I had taken up adapting it into a new medium, and I felt it was important to recognize the high points along that journey.

But not to dwell on them.

Tomorrow I would need to get back to work. And from the notes I had gotten from the three competitions, I had my work cut out for me. Yes, the notes had been positive. Even the Santa Barbara feedback had still scored my script a 79. I did feel it could be higher, but I also recognized there was room for improvement, and there definitely were critiques that I agreed with.

The thing to do now was to take stock of all that feedback. My purpose for entering multiple contests was to get a collective, objective opinion on it – both good and bad – to narrow down what worked and what didn’t. If I entered just one, I risked making revisions based on the whims and preferences of one judge. But with multiple sets and sources of notes, I could hone in on the similarities, prioritize those, and then take on the remarks and comments that only appeared in one set of feedback based on how I felt they would impact the story.

I also had to be cognizant of the deadlines that the three competitions had. While they were running concurrently, they each had their own final submission dates. Both Page Turner and Santa Barbara had only a few weeks remaining – for Page Turner I only had 17 days left to submit a revised draft – but I still had a month with Finish Line.

I decided to prioritize Page Turner, both because I had gone the extra step and had a phone consultation to cover my script, and because there was a lot of overlap between the feedback from them and Finish Line, and I felt addressing Page Turner would also cover a large part of the revisions for Finish Line.

It was Santa Barbara that I chose to forego. There deadline was a little after Page Turner, and while some of their feedback was similar, I felt it raised points and areas of improvement that didn’t mesh with the other two contests, and given the timeframe I had to work within, I didn’t think I could make revisions that took the script in two different directions – it wasn’t exactly like creating two completely different versions, but it would be tailoring two different drafts of the same story to submit to two different contests – wasn’t the best use of my time.

I was essentially opting to sacrifice the results of one contest to improve my chances with the other two.

With a gameplan in place to work on my revisions, the next thing to do would be to prioritize the feedback to address. And as my head hit the pillow for the night, I resolved that the following morning, I would start to analyze my script.