My Day-by-Day Thoughts When Writing a Screenplay
I recently blogged about the commitment to write something of value daily in 2022. Today marks day 13 and we’re on track, although it’s already been a struggle to commit to after a long day of work and trying to have a life outside of work. We’ll see how daily writing turns out! I’m no stranger to quitting if your goals have adjusted. I don’t want to be a slave to the sunk cost fallacy.
Side note: An upcoming blog will tackle the tension between when to quit a project, and when to persevere to the end. This is a topic that’s been on my mind a lot lately.
Anyways: I knew that my first major writing project of 2022 was going to be my third feature-length screenplay. I’ve already written 2 other screenplays which—one day—I will share with you, or at least share about.
This screenplay’s story was one that had been brewing for in my brain since August of 2021, so I was excited to finally get it out of my head and onto paper so that I could stop thinking about it and explore writing other stories. Yes—I have lots of ideas in this big head of mine. If I succeed in my commitment to write something of value every day in 2022, it will most certainly involve producing more screenplays.
As I was writing this screenplay, I decided to also jot down a few sentences of how I felt after I finished that day’s writing. I thought it might be interested to document the rollercoaster of emotions your brain goes through when sprinting through a 107-page screenplay in 12 days.
I actually only started writing down my thoughts when they started to sour; then I retroactively documented how I was feeling on the days before. Despite my turbulent and unstable feelings during writing, I had committed to finishing the screenplay—even if it quickly started feeling like garbage—because I believed there was probably going to be value in seeing this particular project all the way through to completion.
Read below to see if I was right.
Day 1: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
Oh man. I love screenwriting. So exciting to see this project finally starting to come to life!! I’ve only written the opening scene—6 pages—so not super deep into anything yet but it feels good. Can’t wait to get back to writing tomorrow.
Day 2: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
Hooo boy. This is going to be a lot of work. I’m still feeling good and still feeling motivated. Although after another hour of writing, to only be at 12 pages, reminds me I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me between today and when this is done! The scenes are progressing quickly and sort of starting to flow right out of me, which is great. Except they’re not very long… Is that more good than bad? Less fat to have to trim later?
Day 3: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
Things are still going well. Gotta keep my hand to the plough. Just gotta keep going. Was able to almost double our page count today (wrote 10 pages in 90 minutes or so) so chipping away just a little bit more. Feels good. I need to pick up the pace of my writing and slow down to not blast through scenes in so many pages… all at the same time. Sort of a contradiction but I think I can pull it off.
Day 4: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
Definitely was right in calling daily writing a discipline. Definitely starting to worry I won’t have enough pages to make this a full length screenplay. Maybe only 50 pages or so? And I tried so hard (for months!) to outline this thing and flesh out enough scenes to get me at minimum 90 pages. Heck, today I’d settle for 80 and I can add more later. I am making too much progress. The scenes are too short and I’m writing them too easily. Not feeling good.
Day 5: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
Going to be really honest: today, I don’t want to write. What I wrote yesterday honestly sucked. I tried not to go back and re-read too much because I know I just need to keep pushing through. But I definitely am starting to feel like this story wasn’t worth writing. Or it just wasn’t ready yet. Did I plan enough? I thought I over-planned, but today I’m really not sure. It’s hard not to get too up in my head about quitting. Trying to just focus on writing what I wrote in my outline, and trusting past-me that he knew present-me would just have to follow through and it would be ok. But right now: not sure I trust the guy.
Day 6: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
I could stop writing today and no one would care. I’m the only reason I’m writing a screenplay. Is it worth continuing to do if it makes me feel this bad? Doesn’t that sort of defeat the purpose of writing? If I call myself a writer because I love writing, and this is writing, is this proof that I actually… don’t like writing? I have an entire week of writing (at least) ahead of me. I just want to watch a movie tonight instead of writing. Is this still fun? I will admit: what I wrote today was better than yesterday at least.
Aidan: don’t give up. Try again tomorrow. If you get this far (45 pages) and quit now, it’ll haunt you. You’re already going to make it past 50 pages. Maybe 80 isn’t unattainable. Don’t stop yet.
Day 7: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
I’ll admit: today was a good day. The scenes felt less like sludge when I wrote them, and felt more natural and just like something I do all the time. Am I writing anything that’s good? Will I want to keep this screenplay when I’m done? Don’t know yet. Can’t slow down enough to care right now. Even if I burn it, delete the file, move on with me life, the experience will be worth it. I’ve gotta focus on cranking this bad boy out—I’ll worry about it later. Tonight I actually wrote the most number of pages in a single sitting that I’ve done so far (12 pages). I actually felt like I could’ve kept going if it weren’t so late at night. I even invented 2 new scenes that I hadn’t included in my outline, and I’ve been making positive notes on things I’ll come back and edit later in Draft #2. Feels like a smart compromise to record my edits in a separate place but keep writing what I’ve outlined so that I just have something to edit. Like I tell my staff: you can’t edit what you haven’t written. I think I’ll have enough pages to make it to 90 (the real goal). We’re… doing it!
Day 8: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
Today was a great day. I feel like I’m crafting a more cohesive story with ever new page. 2 sentences in my outline spiralled into 15 pages of screenplay today. My brain is in the right headspace that I’m thinking of things I’d overlooked until right now. It’s really that simple. I’m feeling good. No slowing down.
Day 9: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
I expected a difficult day today and got an easy one instead (much better than the inverse, I think). I’m starting to get into the climax of the story and I feel like it’s just pouring out of me: the pages come so easily. We had a late night hanging out with friends (virtually because of COVID) and I still disciplined myself to write despite wanting to just hang out on my laptop before bed. I started out with the intent to only write 5 pages and I wrote 9. The story is becoming more and more clear in my mind the more I write. Definitely is going to need a lot of work later—and I sense that my edits will be much more substantial than edits on my previous screenplays have been—but I’m just trying to write as far as I can. It’s a balance of the story in my outline and the one that’s pulsing under my fingertips.
Also trying to maintain the Hemingway approach where you stop at a point where you know what’s coming next, so that when I start tomorrow it’s less of a hurdle to clear. It keeps momentum between days. Self-doubt is starting to creep in (starting to?) and the only way I know to outrun it is just write as fast as I can. I’m finding writing rhythms I have never experienced before. I can’t wait to eb done but I am gleaning so much joy from the process. Today is a good day.
Day 10: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
We are in the thick of it. I’m starting to get excited about other screenplay ideas bouncing around my head (more than anything, it’s probably just the excitement of giving my mind a break from the effort of writing a screenplay, and this one in particular, which I’ve been mulling over for months). We’re getting there, though. Today’s work might need some rewriting eventually, but the end of this screenplay is actually sort of (surprisingly) in sight! I think. I’m feeling OK about the screenplay today. 88 pages.
Day 11: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
I’m starting to panic.
I’ve painted myself into a bit of a corner with the plot here. I’ve sort of cut across some of my original ideas as outlined in screenplay. Well, more accurately, I’m hitting the “minor” gaps in my plot and being forced to sort them out right now. I don’t know how I’m going to hit (what is actually) a major plot point that pulls together the whole story and explains much of what’s been going on. Is it even possible to fix this without rewriting huge chunks of the screenplay. The end is so close and so far. It’s really hard not to feel discouraged today.
Day 12: Thoughts after writing today’s pages
Had no choice but to spend the first 30 minutes of my “writing time” today just thinking of ways to fix the hole I’ve dug for myself. I’d brainstormed a few different ideas about what to do. Completely make up an alternate ending? How far back do I have to cut the story? I think I lost a bit of sleep last night trying to process all of this and getting nowhere. Even the idea of “just write what you wrote in your outline and fix it later” feels impossible because there’s no logical way to bridge what’s in my outline and where my story is right now.
When jotting down a handful of the different approaches I might take (most of which involving major rewrites), it sort of finally clicked how I could finish this thing with only reasonable edits. I started writing (well, first I started re-writing about 4 of yesterday’s pages) and hallelujah—I did it! In 2 hours, I’d added an additional 14 pages to the length of the screenplay and finished it. 107 pages.
I had to add some parts to Act I but otherwise it wasn’t that bad to clean up. And we have a screenplay! Which feels really good after silently panicking for the past 2 to 3 days trying to rework my ending. I actually thought of Adam Savage’s advice: calm people live, panicked people die. And I think that helped me find the ending of my story. Not without needing some editing later, but an ending nonetheless.
Overall reflections on the process
Assuming you took the time to read all of that, you’d see a pattern that went something like this:
🟢 Day 1 - Day 2: Strong start, feeling good
🟡 Day 3: A bit of a slog
🔴 Day 4 - Day 6: A huge decline. Really not good
🟢 Day 7 - Day 9: A noticeable improvement. The worst is behind us
🔴 Day 10 - Day 11: This is awful. I’ll never finish this
🟢 Day 12: Surprise. You figured it out
That’s quite an up-and-down to have to ride out. Wasn’t a huge fan of the lack of confidence in… myself.
Before I began, I expected to start out strong, feel a decline, and feel a bit of a rise until the end. I wasn’t really prepared for the second wave of panic which was arguably worse than the first because it dealt with much bigger issues than “I don’t wanna write today.” When dealing with a plot that feels questionable, and being so invested into the process, that’s a much scarier place to be.
Keys to success
If I had to summarize how I think I made it through, here’s what I’d tell you (or myself the next time I write a screenplay):
Write fast enough to outrun your self doubt. In every creative, there’s the kid and the adult. When the kid is out to play, the adult needs to be out of town. You can’t let him come knocking or he’ll ruin the tower your inner kid is trying to build. How do you keep that adult out of town? You write fast.
Stop when you know what’s coming next. Hemingway was right. Part of the reason the number of pages I wrote in a day flexed so much was because I always tried to hit a minimum number of pages for that day (dictated by how much time and energy I had left to write), but I never wanted to stop when I didn’t know what was coming next. If I sensed I might struggle to pick up again tomorrow, I kept writing until I was in the middle of a scene (or train of thought).
Write yourself a note for tomorrow. In the same vein as the Hemingway approach, I also went to the degree of writing myself a really brief (4-5 sentence) synopsis of what I knew I needed to write when I opened up the document tomorrow. This helped alleviate the pain of starting when you’re cold. It was the warm up before the work out, if you will.
Track your progress. When you start adding up how many pages you’ve actually written, it does help you feel more committed to finishing the project. Although, this might not be true for everyone. I know writers like Stephen King have thrown out hundreds of pages because they didn’t know what to do with them. What a tragedy.
Outline well. Unless you’ve got so much God-given talent that you can be a gardener, most writers should be architects: where you draw up the blueprints of your story before you start building (a gardener). My outline saved my life so many times—especially given the genre I was writing. It might’ve taken me months to come up with an outline I was happy enough with, but this blog reflecting on my journey would be very different if I didn’t spend all that time chipping away at my story. If I’d rushed into writing, I’d have failed quickly.
Don’t skip a day of writing. This is very similar to #1, but it’s different enough (or at least important enough) it bears its own explanation. When I started writing on January 1st, I knew I wasn’t going to stop writing daily until the screenplay was done. Even if I give up on the rest of this year, I wasn’t going to give up on writing daily for the project at hand. Even when I stayed up late hanging out with my wife or catching up with friends, I still wrote a few pages. I can’t overemphasize how important this is.
Don’t stop your writing project until it’s done. Even if you fail at taking any of the other advice here, assuming you aren’t ready to quit on day 2 of your 500 page novel, don’t stop writing your project until it’s done. There’s no one saying you can’t change your outline as you go along, but see it through to the end. Even if your subconscious is screaming at you that you’re a fake. We all are until we do it.
In summary:
Writing this thing was a ton of mental work but is very satisfying to be done (or “done”, because draft #2 I’ll get around to in a number of weeks).
If you’ve been sitting on the idea of tackling a writing project but you’re not sure if you have it in you: go for it. You never know how brilliant you are until you try it.
