Script Frenzy - writing with your hair on fire

Script Frenzy challenges you to write a script (screen play, stage play, radio play...) of 100 pages during the 30 days of April. It is no coincidence that it starts on April Fool's Day: several thousand creative people spend a month playing a joke on themselves.

It's actually a great experience to finish a script, even if it is a somewhat fuzzy and shaky one. A huge number of would-be writers never ever get to the last page of anything, so doing that from time to time is a great confidence builder...like having the next belt color in your preferred martial art.

Not so many days to go before Screnzy 2011 starts. Unless the outside world brings surprises that keep me too busy to write, I hope to create a romantic comedy ("romcom") currently called Seven Ways. Coming soon to a theater-of-the-mind near you...

If I have learned anything from last time, it is to do a lot of preparing. I am writing lots of notes, organizing the order of scenes, trying to figure out how the story lines weave together...trying to understand what, if anything, I have in the way of a conclusion.

Fortunately, my characters are already starting to come to life. They whisper pithy little dialog snippets in my ear when I am supposed to be attending to other things, and then I have to hurry to scribble down the gist of what they said. Four voices have appeared so far: the two main characters, an opponent to one of them, and a member of the 'crew' of the other one. I am going from dreading the prospect of 100 blank pages to fill, to wondering how I will squeeze their interesting stories into a single script..

I started capturing my notes in Mindomo, a good mind mapping program. But the map has gotten a bit out of hand:

(I know it's too small to read. I just want to give you a hint of how this goes, not give away all the surprises in the script. Not yet, anyhow...)

So I have opened up a Goalscape as well. I keep the undigested notes in the mindmap, and will use the Goalscape to organize what happens in each scene in the script. This is the first pass on the Goalscape; I will post it again just before Script Frenzy starts. Once the script is done, I will post part of the script and the Goalscape behind it so we can compare and contrast what I planned and what really happened..

Even at this point in planning, when I don't even know the names of half the key characters, I am starting to feel a lot more confident. These planning tools reduce my chances of getting totally lost and discouraged. Once the framework is in place, I can let the characters loose and, with luck, mainly just record what they say and do to each other.

Can't hardly wait!