psst! want a challenge?

One Slack Martian posts recommending the The Screenwriting Fortnight: an endeavour open to anyone who wants the challenge of attempting to write an entire screenplay in 14 days. It’s based on the successful NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) model.

As it happens it’s landing very close to my schedule for my horror script. It would require me to finish my current one faster, and shorten the time I’d alloted for creating the outline.

I’ll consider it.

The best way to approach that kind of exercise is to bind and gag your inner critic.

Sure, it’s quite likely that some (OK, a lot) of what you’ll write will be shite, but that’s not the point of the challenge. The point is to relax, write, and hopefully have fun. You might even surprise yourself.

Once you have words on the page you can set about the hard job of crafting them into an enjoyable and engaging script. That’s when you unleash the inner critic, blinking and pissed-off by its confinement, upon your work.

It’ll be mean, judgemental and aiming to draw blood–that’s fine since it will have a script to demolish.

That’s better than not having a script at all.