Writing again
It’s good to be writing again. I took about 6 weeks off from my morning routine while I was doing development and pre-production for The Deadline.
It was just too much to wake up at 6am, write for an hour before work, do a full day at the office and then come home and work for 2-4 hours on production prep. There was a massive amount of work that had to be done with meetings, planning the shots, breaking the script down, scheduling, finding a location, hiring crew, paperwork, project management and so many emails. You only get one shot at production so better to prioritize that over writing.
Right now I have three feature screenplays in various stages of rewrites, ranging from 2nd or 3rd drafts to “done.”1 And then I have about ten other projects that have been waiting on the backburner: a short that I’d like to shoot when I’m in Europe this summer, a short doc about my friend’s dating life that may or may not have legs, a one-act play that I can knock out in a week, a book adaptation that I’m not ready to write, two bigger-budget features that I’m not ready to make, and four narrative features that are actually feasible to write and shoot on a low budget.
I’m going to take a few weeks to outline one of those features (I have about 30 pages of notes and ideas already) and then try to write a script really fast, just to see what happens when I write 90 pages in two weeks. In the meantime, I’m talking to some producers about getting one of the written scripts into development.
If I stick to writing every day, I should have 2-3 features that are more or less ready to shoot in the spring.
They’re never really done until the film is shot ↩