Week 9: Review/Preview
Reflecting on progress for the week of February 28 through March 7, and previewing goals and tasks for the upcoming week.
Photo by Hakan Nural on Unsplash
Good news for the week is that I got my first does of the Pfizer Covid 19 vaccine. Felt a little sluggish for the day, but overall no adverse reactions/symptoms. Feels good to know there’s some kind of resolution to this year of mess.
Since January 3rd (according to my notebook), I’ve been working on my new pilot. An hourlong supernatural drama about a guitar prodigy teen who learns his long thought to be dead father is still alive. There’s a some twists and turns that deal with imaginary friends, punk rock, and a demon. It’s kinda like FROM DAWN TO DUSK but a TV show with music.
Usually I rip through scripts so that I can spend a ton of time working on revisions and edits. But, this year I want to really develop my craft more. And, I realize that there’s a lot of problems I’m fixing in pages that could’ve been fixed or address in the planning phase.
As of the writing of the blog post, I’m currently wrapping up a few more character development exercises while wrestling with a brief synopsis of my pilot. I have a lot of ideas, but I have to start making decisions about what THIS script is about.
I think now would be a good time to stop and reflect on the tasks/exercises and resources I used to help me brainstorm this concept and develop the characters.
I’m using Pilar Alessandra’s “The Coffee Break Screenwriter” (non affiliated link) as my “guide” because it is FILLED with short exercises that are meant to stimulate your creativity and generate ideas for your script. It’s kinda like an entire screenwriting course in one book.
Here it goes…
The Story - all of the following exercises and prompts are meant to help you hone in on what your story actually is about. Each one of these tasks really helped me think about my story from a variety of narrative/functional perspectives that pushed my thinking. I’m not going to go into detail on each one. Buy the book. It’s worth it.
Emotion Tells the Story
Character Flaw Tells the Story
Premise Tells the Story
Secondary Characters Tell the Story
Complication Tells the Story
Synopsizing Tells the Story Resolution Tells the Story
You Tell the Story
The Characters - these exercises and prompts help you thinking about and create characters that are real, flawed, and complicated. I’d say this is the largest section of my notebook so far.
Character Flaw/Skill Balance
Character Spectrum
Character Biography
Character Rules
I know it seems like I’m taking a bit of a formulaic approach to developing this project. And in some ways I am. But the really function of using this book is that it’s helping me slow down and really think about what my story is about who the characters really are.
Since I started screenwriting several years ago, I’ve realized the importance of building your writer’s toolbox and developing a process/system that helps support the writing. It doesn’t create formulaic stories; it creates systems and routines the push your creativity and craft as a writer.
Successes for the Week
Wrote a really shitty draft of my current pilot’s synopsis. I need to do some heavy edits/revisions this week because I’m supposed to submit to my accountability group for feedback.
Met with accountability group and gave some feedback on a few writer’s work.
Completed a few more modules of The Craft Course from ISA. Been working on sequencing and how to to use sequences to structure your screenplay. Super helpful stuff.
Worked on my CASUAL pilot analysis. Currently doing a scene-by-scene breakdown. Hopefully I’ll have everything ready to share by the end of the week.
Designed/re-designed a few pages for this website - behind the scene type work. I have a lot of ideas and content that I’m working on that I can’t wait to share.
Created some character rules for my current pilot. I’m getting the itch to move past character and concept development and getting to writing pages, but I know this project will benefit from holding back just a bit. Sometimes not writing is better than writing.
Misses
I still can’t write a daily blog post to save my life. Sheesh. At some point I’m going to get this routine/habit down.
I didn’t work on my current pilot as much as I wanted. Lot of work stuff and family stuff that’s been taking up time and mental capacity the last few weeks.
Goals/Tasks for the Week
Write more blog posts! Write more blog posts!
Meet with accountability group on Thursday and get feedback on my pilot synopsis.
Submit my pilot synopsis to my accountability group by Tuesday so everyone has time to read it.
Meet with my new writer’s group on Fri.
Read and prep notes/feedback on two scripts for peeps in my writer’s group.
Finish (hopefully) my CASUAL pilot analysis.
Work on current pilot - still have some character development ideas to jot down/work on as well as implementing the feedback I get from my accountability group.
