Screenplay in three weeks - am I crazy?

April 11, 2007 1:41 PM

So, I promised myself that this year I would write a feature-length screenplay and enter it for the Nicholl Fellowships. The deadline is May 1. I haven't started yet. Still doable?

I'm used to writing a lot, and under deadline. I count words, know how much I have to do, and get it done. But that's prose, not screenplays. I'd be starting from scratch to get this sucker written. Am I crazy to think that this is even possible to do in two or three weeks?

I'm not 'in it to win it', it's more of a personal challenge. But I wouldn't waste my time (or embarrass myself) by submitting something that wasn't up to scratch. At the risk of asking the length of a piece of string, how long would it take to write a feature-length screenplay? Any experienced (professional or otherwise) screenwriters care to chip in? Should I forget the deadline and begin on next year's effort, or is there still hope?

posted by different to media & arts (22 comments total)

I don't know anything about screenwritting.

If you don't have anything to do until then, go for it. If you don't finish in time, it will be a good start for next year. Begin, it is the first step.
posted by yohko at 1:58 PM on April 11, 2007

I've heard of people being struck by inspiration, and writing a screenplay in a few days. Do you have any developed situation or characters? That, in my opinion, is the difficult part. The actual writing would probably go quickly once you had a feel for what the film is about.
posted by amileighs at 2:02 PM on April 11, 2007

Is anyone going to know besides you (and now us) if you start but don't make it by the deadline?

My two cents: Really try for this year. If, on the last day to enter, you've given it your best and you've just got nothing, then you've still gotten a head start on next year (but don't procrastinate--do as I say and not as I do, 'k?).
posted by anaelith at 2:14 PM on April 11, 2007

Are you confident that you are a strong enough writer to reasonably get this done in two weeks? If so, give it a shot. If not, don't. Not a whole lot else we can say, here.
posted by cortex at 2:28 PM on April 11, 2007

The page you link to doesn't say if there's an entry fee. That would be something to consider. If it's free, of course you should enter. If it costs money, only enter if you think the writing experience is worth what you'll be paying.
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:43 PM on April 11, 2007

It's doable. I wrote my most successful play in three days.

But, man, it was twelve hours of writing all three days. And I knew exactly what I wanted to write. And the play was slated to open in a month.

My next most successful play took three years.
posted by Astro Zombie at 3:24 PM on April 11, 2007

Sure. Anyone can write a screenplay in just a day or two if necessary. Exhausting, but doable.

I think the question you need to ask yourself is what personal challenge you're actually trying to meet. If it's just 'write a screenplay', any screenplay, definitely you should do it. Your challenge there is largely about self-discipline plus mastery of the unique formatting. Solid story structure, theme, and character development are only incidental to that goal, so you can be proud for having pushed yourself through the experience from beginning to end, regardless of whether the end result is up to your usual quality standards.

On the other hand, if your goal has more to do with writing something of contest/agent caliber, then you'll need to budget time for learning screenplay format and story structure (don't underestimate the learning curve if you've never written for act breaks before), writing a treatment, writing the outline, 1st draft, getting feedback, 2nd draft, more feedback, polishing, making copies with the correct brads (no joke), and filling out the entry form. For an utter newbie this is a tall order for such a short timespan. But still worth going for. Get as far as you can. And tell us how it went.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 3:32 PM on April 11, 2007

You're asking two questions here.

If you're asking whether it's literally possible to write a screenplay in two weeks, the answer is: of course it is. A feature-length screenplay is about 100-120 pages (12 pt. courier type using standard screenplay formatting), so that works out to less than 9 pages a day. Solid steady writing, to be sure, but not impossible.

But there's actually the other part of your question: "I wouldn't waste my time (or embarrass myself) by submitting something that wasn't up to scratch." Think about it. There are thousands of applicants for the Nicholls every year, many of them from people who've been writing scripts diligently for years. Unless you are an absolute screenwriting savant, no matter how good a writer you are in general, the first draft of the first screenplay you've ever written is almost certain to be towards the bottom of the barrel.

The thing is, script writing is very different from prose writing (obviously); there are demands of structure and dialogue that simply do not exist in the same way for prose, and the only way to get really good at them is practice. Lots of practice. Which means lots of drafts of lots of scripts.

Why not just set the goal of writing the script -- for its own sake? Get a first draft out. It's fun and exhiliarating -- I remember feeling positively triumphant when I finished the first draft of my first script. But as awesome as it felt, and as awesome as I thought that script was at the time, the fact was: it was awful. Terrible. Door-stop quality.

So write a first draft, see if you find the process an enjoyable way to tell a story, then take a screenwriting class or two to see if you'd like to commit to the craft. But save your Nicholls entry fee in the meantime. It's a little like thinking you'd always meant to take up jogging, so you might as well sign up for a marathon. Work up to it.
posted by scody at 3:36 PM on April 11, 2007

I've written screenplays in five days flat. Decent ones, too. But you better be feelin' it.

Generally I find the longer they take to write, the worse they are.
posted by unSane at 3:37 PM on April 11, 2007

Totally doable!

During my two-year stint as a screenwriting student, we were expected to routinely produce 60-70 pages of script per week--from treatment to screenplay. A feature-length piece is about 120 pages; you have two weeks.

START HACKING!
posted by Netzapper at 3:44 PM on April 11, 2007

Also, professional tv writers routinely go from zero to finished 60 minute shooting script within 6-8 days. So your timeframe is demonstrably feasible for someone who understands the medium's constraints and is focused on hitting that deadline.

P.S. Jane Espenson's blog is geared to helping first-timers create an entry for the ABC/Disney Writing Fellowship. Even though she's talking about tv scriptwriting, a lot of her advice is pertinent to anyone exploring the structure for the first time and/or preparing a contest entry. Excellent reading for what you're trying to do.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 4:19 PM on April 11, 2007

That's infinitely doable, and an extremely casual pace. The last feature I had to write, I did in three days. I regularly write 5 shorts (50 pages) in twenty-four hours.

15 pages a day works out to:

Day 1 & 2 - First Act
Day 3, 4, 5, 6 - Second Act
Day 7 - Third Act
Day 8, 9, 10 - Revision.

Don't be scared by 15. 15 is freaking *nothing* with all the whitespace. You can do it! Get to work!
posted by headspace at 4:21 PM on April 11, 2007

A friend of mine once completed a 100-page screenplay in about three days to meet a deadline for a class she'd procrastinated in. I didn't get to read it, but she said she was kind of embarassed about the quality.

Can you do it? Yes. Should you do it? I don't really think so. In my opinion, the thing to do is to crank out the first draft in two weeks, then spend the next year revising it and submit a polished draft next year. Or, if there's no guideline saying that you can't submit different drafts of the same piece, submit your two-week rush job this year as a hail-mary, then submit your polished version next year.
posted by Alterscape at 4:36 PM on April 11, 2007

I've only written one successful screenplay, but I did the initial draft in 5 days and cleaning up took another three days.

However I had it reasonably well planned in my head beforehand, I knew the characters and the acts, and had some good ideas for specific dialogue and scene ins and outs. And by luck those things didn't change much during execution.

If you're going in cold it will be hard to get something you're happy with in two weeks, but if you've got your acts in mind then it's very doable.

If you've written prose you'd be absolutely astounded to the amount of blank space in a screenplay. The pages add up much faster.

(None of the above applies if you're one of those obsessive writers to frets over single words and rewrites every sentence a dozen times. On second though, if you're one of those then doing this exercise is exactly what you should do.)
posted by Ookseer at 4:49 PM on April 11, 2007

I've read for the Nicholls, actually. Can you write a screenplay and enter it? Absolutely, and you should as long as you keep your expectations within the realm of considering this a learning exercise (as first screenplays almost always are). Most of the Nicholl entries are obviously amatuer. The one-tenth of one percent aren't are usually pretty darned good - though not always saleable. Will yours make the cut to be a finalist? If it does, you've got a hell of a story to tell the fair-to-middlin' junior agent that hunts you down. But more than likely, you need to write a few more to get the hang of it.

Good luck.
posted by mrmojoflying at 5:09 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

As a professional screenplay reader/editor and as someone who's had a script reach the final rounds of the Nicholls fellowship, I'd say that the odds of you writing something in two weeks that will make it past the first round are very low. I'd worked off-and-on on my script for eight months and was on my third draft (and since then I've performed another rewrite).

If, however, this is a deadline that you need to set to force you to just sit down and produce, then by all means go for it. But do so knowing that it is an exercise. Sometimes as a writer, we need to set concrete goals to help motivate us.

The tricky part isn't writing 120 pages in two weeks, it's writing a polished, professional script that can hold its own against some fierce competition. I've read some really good first drafts but everything needs a rewrite and some polish to really shine.

And they do allow people to reenter their scripts in later years so feel free to submit it this year and then spend the next 12 months rewriting it preparing for the next go round.
posted by jaybeans at 6:10 PM on April 11, 2007

Don't waste your time on an arbitrary deadline. Not that I don't believe in contests or fellowships like the Nicholl, but if you want to be a screenwriter, contests and fellowships aren't the way to do it. Start writing scripts, start reading scripts, and start thinking about movies in terms of how they're written. Then you'll be on the road to starting at becoming a screenwriter eventually. Spend some time on figuring out what you want to write, work through how you'll approach it, and tackle it with some sense of excitement. Don't dally, don't linger, but don't think that just because the entrance deadline for some contest is around the corner means you should crank one out. We wade through enough awful scripts around town -- don't seek to add to that pile. Besides, if your script is good, then you can enter another contest -- the one where you try to get the movie sold. It's just as likely, percentage wise, as the Nicholl, if not more so.
posted by incessant at 7:29 PM on April 11, 2007

Incessant: I and most of the screenwriters I know got our breaks through the Nicholl. YMMV.
posted by unSane at 7:48 PM on April 11, 2007

BTW I've read a lot of Nicholl finalist and semi-finalist scripts and they are generally better than 90% of the studio scripts I read. So if you are placing in the semi-finals, you are good enough to work in Hollywood. Easily. The trick is getting in.

I don't know what the proportion is now but when I was entering, the semi-finalists made up about 5% to 2.5% of the entry.

So is your script the one in twenty?

Well, if you can read and write it is better than 50%.

If you know about structure, it is better than 75%.

And so on.

The math of the Nicholl always makes it appear daunting but for anyone who can actually write, and educates themselves about screenwriting, it is really not an impossible ambition at all.

As I said the real trick is capitalising on a place in the semis or the finals. The secret here is to do so BEFORE the winners are announced. Nobody wants to know you didn't win.

The other secret is to use a good entertainment attorney.
posted by unSane at 7:56 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

unSane is certainly in a better position to answer this question than anyone else in this thread, as far as I know.

That said, you if you don't know much about screenwriting, haven't written a screenplay before, and don't already have a very solid grasp of the structure of the story and the characters, your hastily-written screenplay is going to suck eggs.

Of course you can physically create a screenplay in that time, but that doesn't mean anything. Since you are talking about entering a serious contest in which you will be judged against people who actually have experience and know what they're doing, the quality matters.

If it helps motivate you, I am willing to bet an amount of money of your choosing against you making the semifinals. Best of luck.
posted by bingo at 10:13 PM on April 11, 2007

Thank you everyone for these responses.

I think I should mention that I'm not under the impression that I could produce a professional-standard screenplay on my first go, and I definitely didn't mean to put down anyone else's skills (as a professional writer, it drives me nuts when other people say, "Oh yeah? I'd really like to do that, if I could just find the time." Aaargh!)

I'll digest the answers a little later on today and make a firm decision. Thanks for taking the time to contribute. This is incredibly helpful info that I couldn't get anywhere else. I'll keep you posted.
posted by different at 12:36 AM on April 12, 2007

Definitely doable. Keep in mind that a finished screenplay of average length will probably contain on the order of 18-25,000 words. Some of which are the character indications preceding each line of dialogue. That doesn't make the creative side of things any easier, but the amount of sheer typing ahead of you is not nearly as great as if you were trying to turn out an equivalent number of pages of prose.
posted by staggernation at 12:31 PM on April 12, 2007