My First Feature-Length Screenplay
Recently, after dozens of false starts and various mental blocks, I finally completed a feature-length screenplay for the first time. I celebrated the occasion by heading over to Staples and printing it out. I wanted the full experience of writing a screenplay, from laboring over the outline to holding a physical script in my hands. You just don't get the same feeling from a PDF file on your laptop. Though it's only 86 pages and has many issues I need to address before I share it with others, it is a complete draft of an original idea completely written by me. I'm pretty happy about that.
Having said that, the whole experience was pretty unceremonial. I printed it out, barely looked it over, and headed home. The truth is it's hard to get too proud of yourself when you know there's still a ton of work to do. Even with the raw material in place, turning it into something that will really move an audience is going to be another formidable challenge in itself. I could go ahead and start the second draft right away, but I think it will be better to put it aside for a while and start outlining another project. Then I can return to this script with fresher eyes.
This might come as a surprise to some, but my interest in writing preceded my interest in filmmaking. As a child, I greatly enjoyed living out imaginary scenarios in my head and I generally received good grades on my writing assignments. Somewhere along the line I got the idea that I wanted to be a writer in some form, and I suddenly knew my path after becoming quite serious about filmmaking in high school. I wanted to be a Writer/Director like my filmmaking heroes.
Unfortunately, I haven't been successful at that. For one, I wasn't particularly good about finishing most of what I wrote. For whatever reason, I assumed that I would get much better about this when I became an adult, but I'm sure you can guess how accurate that assumption turned out to be. Even worse, as I entered young adulthood, I found myself spending more and more of my time online watching filmmaking tutorials and lurking on cinematography forums, operating under the illusion that this alone counted as working towards my dreams. In reality, I was neglecting the very activity that drew me to all of this in the first place: using my imagination.
I don't mean to imply that there isn't creativity in the various technical roles in film, there is. It has also been very beneficial for me that I have a relatively broad knowledge of "the technical stuff;" after all, it's what has paid my bills for over a decade now. But if you really want to be a writer, then you must make time to write. And if you want to be a good writer, you have to write a lot. Unfortunately, I've wasted a lot of time focused on the wrong things.
Now that I'm in my mid-thirties, I'm starting to grapple with the realization that most of my dreams just aren't going to happen. I don't say this to be a downer, it's just the truth. I was always a big dreamer as a kid with a wide variety of interests. I guess I just wanted a lot out of life, but I can't have it all, so I better figure out what I want most. I've decided being a writer is one of those things. I also finally recognize that if I'm going to achieve anything in life, I need to start now. Life really does get faster the older you get, and one day it will be gone.
So finishing this screenplay was about a lot more than what was on the page. It's about proving to myself that I can be creative again. It's about proving that I can finish things I set my mind to. And it's about re-acquainting myself with the real reason I'm doing all this.