FINDING TIME TO FINISH YOUR SCREENPLAY
It took me 24 hours, 51 minutes and 34 seconds to finish the second draft of my screenplay.
My screenplay, blech. The word screenplay feels tainted to me, I think we need to call it something else. It gives me visions of sitting in a coffee shop, wearing a beanie and looking around to see if anyone is noticing me working.
Anyway…
This is the second entry in my This Little Piggy production diary (I’m writing in my diary about my screenplay) where I’m documenting the eventual making of my film This Little Piggy.
24 hours you say! That’s great! You knocked that out in what? A week? Maybe two? No, no dear friend. I appreciate your faith in me, but I started working on the second draft of This Little Piggy on Monday, November 22nd, 2021. That’s 155 days from start to finish, which means I only spent, on average, about 10 minutes per day working on this thing…
That’s not enough time!
Don’t get me wrong, it’s enough time if that’s all the time you have, but that’s not all the time I had, who am I kidding? The good news is, I think, I discovered my problem and a potential solution.
TRACK THAT TIME! BUT ALSO…RELAX
I am a very task oriented person, if you’ve seen any of my videos you can probably tell that I love a good plan. I love checklists and Asana boards. Which is great in a lot of ways, it helps me stay organized and get a lot of stuff done during the week while still managing to have a life outside of my computer. I even track all my time, that’s how I know how long it took me to finish the second draft.
I use a free platform called Clockify and, listen, I understand that to a lot of people time tracking sounds like some kind of fascist nightmare and you’re not wrong, I have experienced that with some places I’ve worked; however, I will say when you’re doing freelance creative work it’s a really useful tool to figure out a rough estimate of how long things will take you so that you can set realistic expectations with clients. And for managing my own expectations with how much I can realistically get done in a day. So just try it…
just try it out…
go ahead…
do it.
BUT problems can arise with a big amorphous project like a screenplay. Things without any kind of real deadline because what does done really look like? And yes, I can set my own deadlines, but I know those deadlines aren’t real! I can blow past self-imposed deadlines and very easily rationalize it to myself.
“I need more time to CREATE!”
My point is, there’s so much to get done during the day that my mind tends to talk myself out of the tasks that are too open-ended and focus on the things I know I can complete, the things I know I can check off my list.
FINDING MY OPTIMAL WRITING TIME
So, part one of what I did was I took some advice from the Max Joseph video “BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content” and I started giving myself a “mandatory” deadline of writing one sentence per day.
One sentence! How could I not write one sentence everyday.
That way I could appease the task monster inside my brain and check something off my list and since the actual act of starting is oftentimes the hardest part, I would inevitably write way more than one sentence.
My schedule has been weird ever since we had our second child, I used to have a very strict morning routine, but that very much changed when our daughter was born and around the same time I quit my 9-5; it has been a learning process…or a relearning process of how I handle my days.
I thought that my best option was, after my abbreviated morning ritual, diving right into any client work that I had to get done. My morning hours, between 4 and 7 am are my best hours, my most focused and productive and so I thought it was best to start with that work.
I would say to myself, “I'll finish this and then I can get my writing done in the afternoon when all of these tasks are completed!” And when all those tasks were completed I would say, “Well I might as well get started on these next tasks for tomorrow, THEN I’ll have lots of time to write because I’ll be so far ahead. I’ll just write as much as I can today, tomorrow.”
It’s amazing how many times your mind can trick you into thinking something.
“I’ll definitely write tomorrow because Tomorrow Chris is much better than Today Chris and I’m taking care of all these tasks for Tomorrow Chris, Tomorrow Chris better get his shit together and get to writing.”
Needless to say, Tomorrow Chris kept doing the same thing as Today Chris. So, the fix, like I said I like to wake up at around 4 am.
Like to is probably too strong, I love having that time in the morning, but if I had my…druthers…I’d probably sleep till about 7am. And lately it’s really been closer to 530am.
My family starts to need me about 7am, so I have dedicated those hours, 4am to 7am to writing, nothing else.
And it has worked! Most of that second draft was finished in the last week or two of writing. Honestly it’s pretty easy in those quiet, early morning hours before the rest of the world has started to ask for my attention. In fact, I’m writing this right now.
And the funny thing is I’m still right where I was with client work, “losing” those 2 or 3 hours in the morning hasn’t affected that work at all.
So, now that draft two is complete, I’m putting it aside for a month. It still needs a lot of work. I think on this second draft I got to the heart of who these characters are and really defined them in ways I hadn’t on the first pass, but now going into the third draft I need to isolate each scene and really make sure that each one, each scene has a purpose in the story and that it’s all driving towards the conclusion. Right now, even as I was writing, there were some moments that felt a little aimless, like “What is this scene really doing?”
But that’s for June Chris to figure out.
