Silver Screenwriting

Posts Tagged ‘Cash prizes’

No pressure or anything! But the final deadline for the Silver Screenwriting Competition is nigh. Like, super NIGH. It’s in one week.*

Give that script one more once over and scan it briefly for typos, dense action lines, etc. As the Psychedelic Furs once said, you can never win or lose if you don’t run the race. So give it a shot and see how you do. There is tremendous validation in placing on any level and let’s not forget the real possibility of actually winning. Somebody is going to win. Might as well be you pocketing cash prizes, setting up your new MacBook Air and enjoying lunch in Hollywood with Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang).

Toward that end, today between 3pm and 4pm PST I will be available for brief phone chats to answer any questions you may have about your script, the competition or the prizes.

Email me HERE to set up an appointment for today, May 25th, between 3pm and 4pm Pacific.

*Without a Box members have until June 11th

You know you do it. You compulsively tweak your script. A little here a little there, you can’t leave it alone. You go back through the pages and change dialogue. And change it back. And fix an action line. And fix it back. But then the real trouble begins. You tweak something on page thirty-two which necessitates changing something on page seventeen. And page forty-nine. Now you’re done. Time to send that script off to a competition, consultant, friend – whoever. But wait – one more tweak r-i-g-h-t here…

When does a writer know when to leave well enough alone? Make sure that every time you open your script you have an actual goal in mind. Maybe you are in the midst of adding new scenes, aka actually completing your script. Maybe you just got some notes and you’re addressing the pertinent sequences. Maybe you’re just rereading it one last time and OH LOOK there’s something to tweak.

The problem with tweaking ad infinitum is that you can’t see the forest for the trees. Yes, tweaking can improve your pages, but if you do it compulsively, sort of like chewing a fingernail, you can actually damage your script and/or just be wasting your valuable time. Because your time is very valuable, as a screenwriter. Anyone can go back through and rearrange punctuation, but what actually improved and shifted in your last session with your script?

So before you open your script for the day, ask yourself: what is the goal of this writing session? Am I tweaking here and there but ultimately getting the work done? Or am I stalled out in tweak-mode? In many ways, tweaking is the way screenwriters justify to themselves that they are working on the script so lay off! But – it’s a little lie they tell themselves because they aren’t actually being productive at all.