I found a sea shell and gave it to my 4 year old daughter
and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She
put the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab inside and it pinched her ear.
She never wants to go back! LoL I know this is entirely off topic but I had to tell someone!

mc

michaelcurtis.com

Loved this. I would add that you also need to ask yourself what your ultimate goal is. To win contests and respect/renown for your writing? Or to make a film?

Those two things are not the same. The percentage of Nicholl fellows whose scripts are actually made is very small. If your aim is to become a working filmmaker, alternate strategies might be better (eg. move to Los Angeles – difficult if you have a family, I know – find work in a production office; attend film school and learn a related practical skill such as editing or directing, in order to learn about the subsequent stages of filmmaking and what good writing means to those people who actually USE IT to make a movie… not the same as what it means to those who simply read and venerate scripts, as you’ll know, I’m sure)

Very best

Z

For me, if you care about the craft you are playing with, if you put your spirit in it, and if it is an important part of your life and days and weeks, you are a professional, recieving money or not (because, if i don’t take this as a standart, I would have to say Kafka, for example, was not a ‘professional’ writer).

Good Luck with your story!

One thing I want to add based on the last paragraph: If you write three pages a day for a month, you can churn out the 100-page script Christopher is talking about. Well, a rough draft, anyway. And I think that’s totally attainable given his other tips and advice.

A single deadline to finish 120 pages is fine but a big project requires smaller milestones too. Act 1 submitted by so and so meeting. Act 2, etc. The accountabilibuddy and the deadline with a meeting attached is the most important thing I’ve found to finishing a project.

My script is a case study of a femme fatale from film noirs and the inspiration for it came from getting heavily obsessed with a girl. She has a very intense presence and lethargic elegance in her every move. I wanted to take her character and put it in a dramatic situation but retain the integrity of all the aspects of her personality at the same time, so that it would to be a testimony of my love/lust/obsession for her and show it off. I consciously decided not to write about “That nice girl who works in the corner bakery waiting for love of her life” because it would neither justify my burning desire for her and no to her unique personality. It has to be something intense set in New York. Not the happy, busy New York in daytime. The dark, deserted, haunted New York, that comes alive in the night. Well I already have two interesting characters. The girl and New York. So I took a deep dive into writing without knowing where to go with these two. After producing 250+ pages (I always write the first draft in a book) of garbage for 3 months, I realized there was no way I am going to conclude. So I threw it aside. I happened to pick up this material few months back and it started making sense. The material is super pulpy and it lends itself into a nice pulpy, noir piece. Good for me. Its just a matter of being objective and picking up the good stuff that moves the plot forward and polish it. It took 1 month for the first draft and another 2 months to get the final draft. I have nt shared the script to the girl who inspired it. Its difficult to resist but it would be interesting to see if she would actually figure out the fact that she inspired it. If she does it would be more interesting to see her reaction when she sees it on the screen. I am hoping she would nt figure out. I am not planning to tell her the inspiration part either, because some genius once said that “A true artist tries real hard to cover his naked soul in his art”.