Monday, April 29, 2013

SCRIPT FRENZY 2013: Here we go again..!

My wife is a champion of the annual on-line writing challenge called National Novel Writing Month or, the more popularly monikered/acronymed, NANOWRIMO. The challenge is this: to write a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days, specifically from November 1-30. She has successfully participated in this venture for the past several years.
I emphasize that it’s a challenge and not a contest. The only thing you can receive upon successful completion of the writing goal is a certificate that says you successfully completed it. When I tell people this, there is usually a question about, “Well, how do they know? What if you just type 50,000 words of gibberish or the same word 50,000 times?” I guess technically these questions raise a good point, except for the fact that the entire concept is designed to MOTIVATE writers who have wanted to write something but never sat down and tried.
That’s why it is NOT a contest.
Also, the OTHER thing you have, beside the certificate, is the satisfaction of having a first draft of a 50,000 word story you wrote — in 30 days!

If anything, NANOWRIMO is a sort of self-help website with an infrastructure of assistance.
Perhaps you’ll finally write that story within you if thousands of others are doing the same thing. In November, the website offers weekly e-mail pep-talks from published authors to motivate you to stay on track with your goal. There are additional helpful things on the website like plot generators and various message boards, etc., as writers commiserate with other writers about their individual writing problems or share their successes that they’re all experiencing daily during the month-long task and creative journey.
I personally have never participated in this event. I’m not so good with writing prose. Well, I can, I think, but it comes with much effort. 
However, after a few successful years of NANOWRIMO, the website launched a new challenge in April: SCRIPT FRENZY. This was designed as an on-line challenge to write a script (play, screenplay, graphic novel) in 30 days. Unfortunately, after a few years, the organizers decided not to continue SCRIPT FRENZY mostly due to a steadily decreasing number of participants and a lack of fundraising to support SCRENZY as a stand alone event. You can read the official announcement here.

Although this development is genuinely disappointing, what was most important for me about both NANOWRIMO and SCRIPT FRENZY was the idea of focusing for a month on writing something, which is something I would like to do. I’ve tried it a few times in the past; unfortunately (yet typically) I have yet to successfully complete a first draft of a script, whether as part of SCRIPT FRENZY or just on my own.
But it’s April again and I have some ideas for short films, a comic book idea and a feature film screenplay I’ve already begun last year that I’ve failed to complete. So, as I’ve done (at least) a couple times before, I’m going to try and write a first draft of a script this April. 

April 7, 2013. 

Yes, that is the date.
Technically, I’m starting this a week late. My late start is a result of both my being out of town for the first couple days of April in Boston (a really cool city, by the way). Then, for the rest of the week, I was… uh… just a lame-ass.
 
[NOTE: When I first wrote this post, it was at the beginning of April, so the whole horrible event of the Boston Marathon bombing two weeks later had not happened.]
 
But one of the triggers that finally motivated me to commit to this SCRIPT FRENZY venture is my recent meeting this past Thursday night (April 4) with another filmmaker who’s working on his own screenplay. His name is Joey S., and he’s a college freshman.
I first met Joey on-line over a year ago through a Facebook group either for local horror fans or for local filmmakers. He basically said that he had written a script for a film, but it was his first time doing so, and he was looking for anyone who might have advice regarding his screenplay and screenwriting.

Well, I figured: What the hell.

I’m always blabbering on and ON about writing screenplays and thinking about ideas and the writing process, and, I believe, just prior to Joey’s request for feedback, I had personally encountered some positive periods of writing on my own, surprisingly. The script I was working on then (and now, actually, but we’ll get to that), is a genre story that I’m calling HORROR MOVIE (merely a working title). So, basically, at the time, even though I had never written a finished draft of a screenplay before (and I still haven’t!), I was feeling pretty confident with my writing abilities based on the few scenes I had written from scratch and one I had re-written (HORROR MOVIE is based on an original short script/plot synopsis by Carter Soles, and Carter and I hope to start pre-production on this movie soon, like, perhaps starting this year. But first we need a finished script!).
So, I responded to Joey’s FB message and he sent me a copy of his zombie action screenplay and I read it. And I had some very specific feedback which I gave Joey in a long e-mail. And he responded positively, especially to some suggestions and observations I made about his first scene.

Well, in a nutshell, that’s how we met and that’s how we know each other: through the screenwriting process. 

Over a year later, he’s still working on the same idea. The difference is, he was a high school senior last year and now he’s a freshman at a local college and majoring in Film and Television Production. He tried to shoot his film last year but had a hard time getting various locations. I even tried to help him with a location where I work, and then that fell through, to my chagrin.
But now I think he may have a little better luck with his location issues.
In the meantime, he’s still working on his original screenplay, and he e-mailed me recently to see if I wanted to read his latest draft and share some thoughts.

So, we met at Hotdog Heaven on Williams St. and Harlem Rd. in the Buffalo area and we talked for a couple hours over dinner (Texas hots, baby!) about Joey’s screenplay.
I had fun. I always enjoy talking about filmmaking and this was especially enjoyable because it was a discussion about an actual project going on, not some armchair discussion about some Hollywood film. Joey seemed to enjoy himself as well, although I think I gave him a (good-natured) hard time about some of his writing choices, especially with regard to his main character. I’m charmingly obnoxious.
What was very gratifying for me was that he seemed receptive to some of my feedback, and whether or not he was going to employ any of my specific suggestions in the actual script, he at least recognized some of the issues I was bringing up. So, I felt it was a fruitful meeting of the minds.

Of course, the upshot of all of this was: “(Script) Doctor, heal thyself!”
Yeah, yeah, yeah! I know! I talk big about OTHER people’s projects, but what I have done lately on my OWN???

Which brings us to April 2013, and MY version of SCRIPT FRENZY, and my hope to “do a lot of shitty writing” this month in order to complete a first draft of a screenplay.

More to come!
 
 

 

 

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