Blog

After an intense two weeks of revisions on my script of Dig Down, I definitely found myself enjoying the downtime afforded to me now that I wasn’t staring down the barrel of a deadline. My phone consultation to review the screenplay had been on March 10th, and because I couldn’t submit it before midnight because of the obstacles I described in the previous blog post, I submitted my final entry in the wee hours of the 25th, the day before the final entries were due.

I enjoyed the ability to relax after pushing myself to that level of rewrites, and I had a strong sense of satisfaction. I felt I had left everything out there when making the edits. There would be no second guessing of ‘Should I have also made those revisions’ or ‘I wish I had taken the time to do…’.

Don’t get me wrong, as a writer you’ll always debate decisions you make and weigh them against the creative choices you didn’t take. But when I’m speaking to is a belief that I had addressed every area that could be improved that was covered on the call, and what I had spotted while reading and re-reading my script through the editing process. While I don’t think I or anyone ever makes all the right choices, I can at least say confidently that I worked to improve them as best I could.

What a difference the rest of this weekend was compared to the previous. There wasn’t any resemblance to the twelve hour days of writing with the constant interruptions of going down to the basement to empty out the ever filling bucket of water. The only exertion I faced was Sunday morning when I got back on the indoor track to run, the first time all week that my writing schedule had permitted it. That’s honestly all I remember from that weekend.

All I had to do now was sit back and wait for the notification of the results. And that wouldn’t be long.

The deadline for the contest was Sunday night. I would get the results Tuesday.

Two full weeks after the phone consultation for my script of Dig Down, I was ready to finally submit my revised draft…almost.

As most writers will tell you, even when they believe they’re done, they’ll probably want to give their work one last look over. And this was certainly no exception. I’d gotten the most in-depth analysis to date on any of my stories, and if nothing else, the last week in particular demonstrated just how serious I was taking it.

I was pleased with how far I’d come taking in the feedback and critiques and applying them to improve my screenplay. I’d been very driven in the past when it came to my writing, achieving goals and deadlines I’d set for myself. But that was just it, they were targets I’d set. If I missed it, all that I really lost was a bit of my pride.

This was an actual competition, with a hard deadline. If I continued to make minimal progress, like I’d done that first week, and either re-submitted subpar work, or didn’t re-submit, I could actually lose out on where I ranked in the contest.

One last read through seemed more than warranted.

I had only expected it to take me two hours. Each page of a screenplay roughly equates to one minute of screentime, and I was just shy of 120 pages. I figured this would account for encountering those pesky spelling and grammar errors that have managed to survive endless rounds of edits and skims.

But, as was the case with the week before, we’d gotten precipitation, which was now finding its way into my basement. It wasn’t as severe as the previous weekend, but I still found my readthrough of Dig Down interrupted at least every twenty minutes as I trekked down to the basement to empty out the bucket that had been collecting water before it could overflow.

And…there were those pesky typos. More than I would’ve liked.

All told, it ended up taking me over three hours to go through the script one last time. Despite the errors I found, I was satisfied with where the screenplay was at.

All that was left was to attach a pdf of the latest version…and then work out the formatting kinks in that. Some of the words were in different languages, either Spanish or Italian, and they were now either expanding across an entire line on the page, or had a hideous gap separating itself from the word before it.

None of this was what I needed, let alone expected. This had all been smooth in the version I had saved to pdf prior to these last edits.

Thankfully, it only took me…a half hour to resolve these new problems.

And when I did, and found the right email chain I wanted to attach the screenplay too, and after TRIPLE checking that I had attached the right version, at the crack of dawn, I submitted my screenplay.

All that was left was to wait.

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.