I have written screenplays faster than 2 weeks, but who the hell cares? I know a couple of writers who did a FADE IN to FADE OUT race - all nighters. Hey, that's cool. Not sure when writing a screenplay in a weekend is ever really going to come up (might be good practice for TV, though). But congratulations if you managed to do that and end up with a great script - some people can. But *speed* and *accuracy* are two things professional writers need when crazy deadlines pop up... and they will. Nobody cares if you wrote a screenplay in a weekend if it stinks... and nobody cares if you spent 2 years writing your masterpiece and it was due 23 months ago. Both are problems. You need to be able to deliver quality work on a deadline, and sometimes an insane deadline. I know that I have mentioned before having to rewrite most of Act Three of an HBO World Premiere script *overnight* when we lost a location, because we were filming it the next morning... and because scenes are shot out of order, I needed *all* of Act Three rewritten by the morning call time.
In the interview I talk about a few times where I’ve had only 2 weeks to write a script (or less), that’s not how it normally works. Depending on the project, you are usually given a month to 12 weeks - sometimes more, in your contract. But just because they give you several months in your contract doesn’t mean they want you to wait until the last minute to turn in the script. I know a pair of writers who turn in their scripts at the very last minute... and I think their careers have suffered because of it. Just like anything else - you don’t want to wait until the last minute to do the work. Usually what will happen is the producer will call for a progress report, and though they sound happy and cheerful, what they really mean is “Where the hell is my script, slacker?” So even when you have a reasonable amount of time to write a screenplay, you don’t want to wait until the last minute...
And there may be times when you have an Unreasonable amount of time to write a screenplay, and it still has to be amazing. Because many of my assignments were for Made For TV or Made For Cable networks, we had an airdate *before* I started writing the screenplay. If that seems crazy to you - when are the next Marvel movies coming out? In this business they usually know when a film is coming out long before they have begun shooting it! A few of my projects were to fill a “hole” when another film dropped out at the last minute - and I had two weeks to write the script that went out to talent (who we were trying to get cheap - so the script needed to wow them). How do you do that? How do you write *good* and *fast*?
Prep time is your superpower - use it wisely!
I solve all of the basic story problems in the outline stage, including things like character purpose. Supporting Characters always serve the story. In the outline stage I make sure that the story is the very best that it can be - so I *work* my outline. It’s not just a jotted down list of things that happen, I go over and over it and make sure that everything happens in the best order. I want to find any story problems at this stage. Some of you don’t work from an outline because you think that it stifles creativity - but nothing is further from the truth. The outline is a *creative step*. For me the fun is writing for reader reaction within a scene. To lead the reader to believe A when B is true. Create emotions and twists and turns *within the scene* - so the outline is one creative step and the writing itself becomes another creative step. I focus on the story itself in the outline stage, and I focus on *telling the story* in the writing stage. That way I can perfect the way the story works, and I don’t have to worry about that aspect while writing it. If I have the story the best it can be in Treatment, I can focus on HOW I tell it within scene while writing. How to create impact, emotions. How to deepen character moments. I have more time for those things in in 2 weeks of writing because I have already figured out the very best way that the story can work in the outline stage, which is required for me to turn in a Treatment.
Treatment?
When you are working on an assignment, usually it works in steps... and that means you won’t have to do everything at once. The first step is a treatment, and on a normal project you may have a full month to write the treatment... on many of the crazy projects I’ve done, I’ve had a week or less to turn in a treatment. A couple were 3 days. That’s not much time to get the story aspect as close to perfect as possible, but there’s a loophole in “Reading Periods” which we will look at a bit later.
Much of your prep work will take place in that week (or 3 days). If you can figure out the basic story and characters and then do a beat sheet that you can turn into a treatment in a week, you’ll be okay. Most of the time they wanted about a 15 page treatment, and I could write that in a day from a beat sheet, so even if I only had 3 days, that was two days of “breaking the story” and figuring out the characters. Yeah, sometimes very long days, I can sleep later! Though you may need to compress some of your prep work to get that treatment done if you only have 3 days, and you may end up skipping some steps that you would normally do, and putting in some long hours. I think one of the things that helps me is having a working method to “break” the story, that I call the Thematic Method, and is in the Outline Blue Book.
After they read the treatment they’ll send you off to write the screenplay. Your contract will have a writing period for the first draft and a reading period for them to read it... or read the coverage... or have their assistant give them a 2 minute briefing on the way to the meeting. On a normal production there’s plenty of time... But my 2 week situations have all been about meeting an airdate or production start date or a window for a star or a funding source - and they need the script ASAP, so you need to get the rear in gear and write it. If there isn’t a hard deadline, and you’re just going by your contract - the producer will want it sooner rather than later - even though they may sit on it without reading it for weeks. Once they’ve commissioned the script, they want to see it as soon as possible. That doesn’t mean do a half assed job writing it - turning in crap on time is still turning in crap - but it does mean getting the work done as soon as possible.
So you have 2 weeks to write a feature length screenplay that is going out to stars... so it has to be great. How do you do that?
In addition to getting the outline the very best that it can be, I also work on characters in this week or two days or whatever. Again, the Thematic Method is a big help - I don’t write character bios as much as know the secrets and fears and goals and needs of my characters, plus have “dialogue patterns” - I make sure that every character has a different way of saying yes and no, hello and goodbye, I come up with their pet words and phrases and speech patterns and any mannerisms or physical actions that will help define them. One page per character. It’s easier to just write this stuff down, than to keep flipping back through the pages to find the last time the character said “Hello” and make sure that it’s consistent. All of these elements are *character related* - and are ways of showing the characters. I posted some lines of dialogue from PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN on FaceBook a few days ago, and all of Jack Sparrow’s dialogue is filled with sentences with lots of commas where he changes course in the middle of a sentence as he’s trying to figure out the best lie... or avoid actually saying anything. He’s a great bullshitter - and his *speech patterns* are a part of that. So finding the way that a character speaks that *shows* the character is a great way to write that character quickly.
The other way is having Folders Full Of Cheats.
Prep time is your superpower... Whenever I come up with a great line of dialogue or dialogue exchange, I have a folder on my laptop to put it in. It used to be a big spiral notebook that was divided up into sections for dialogue, actions, character moments, interesting scene ideas, plot twists, suspense scenes, car chases, shoot outs, fight scenes, and a generic section. I also jot down ideas on note cards and have a card file just filled with unorganized cards with ideas on them... which we will talk about in a moment. But the files on my laptop and the old spiral notebook are my Folders Full Of Cheats.
When I am on deadline, those files are gold. On DROID GUNNER (9 day deadline), I robbed the dialogue file constantly. Almost every funny exchange was from the folder, something that I had thought of years ago and written down. We all have those ideas - we come up with some funny line at work or in the shower, and if you don’t write it down... you may forget it. If you have written it down and are writing against the clock and look through the folder before you write the scene - there it is! That amazing line that you came up with 7 years ago! Or you need a plot twist while outlining the script, that cool twist that you came up with 2 years ago! You always want these things to fit the story you are writing, but if you have enough of them, something in there will either work or spark a line that does work. I saw DROID GUNNER at a screening with an audience, and lots of lines got laughs - some people told the director afterwards that they thought it was his best film. One of the lines that got a good laugh was one that I had come up with almost a decade earlier while watching ALIENS and Lt. Gorman modifies the number of combat drops he’s done with the word “Simulations”. I came up with a variation, where a character says they’ve had over 200 hours of martial arts training... on the simulator. Response: Fine, if we run into any simulated killers, you can fight them. I took that raw line from the file and put it in the character’s voices and... it gets a laugh! When you only have 9 days to write a screenplay, all of the work in those files was a life saver! There were a bunch of one liners and asides and funny dialogue exchanges... and one of the things that I had on my character sheets is one of the characters just wants to get paid... but something always gets in the way. That became a running gag in the story - the big chase scene at the end had him constantly running past a sign pointing out where the payroll office was. That scene was cut, but it was a great read even if the audience didn’t get to see it.
So you can be prepared just by writing stuff down over the years. Even if you don't use it in this screenplay against the clock, it’s a great safety net... and gives you some confidence when you have an insane deadline. If you are stuck, you have that treasure trove of stuff to rob from - all of those folders of cheats!
Another thing I’ve learned about writing scripts on a deadline - you find some specific skill you have that is “coasting” - something that you are really good at, and make sure the script uses that skill. Oddly, I learned from NINJA BUSTERS and DROID GUNNER that I am pretty good at buddy banter off the top of my head - so if I have to write a script fast, I want it to be a buddy action script so that I can use that odd skill to turn out some pages that everybody likes quickly. Not everything has to come from the Folders Of Cheats!
I’ve also learned that my subconscious comes up with some great things when I don’t have time to think - and I’m sure yours will, too. And you will also discover that you will be able to come up with some great ideas on the fly - I never thought I could come up with anything off the top of my head (except hair pulled from the approaching deadline) but I come up with some amazing things when I’m in the middle of a scene - one trick of mine is to come up with *details* that may later pay off (“soft plants”), and if they don’t - they are still good details. One of the great things about writing fast is that you have to remove all of the filters and often get more honest writing. You don’t have time for the bullshit that comes from thinking about it - there isn’t time to think!
Once you get the deadline, be it three weeks or two weeks or 9 days, it’s all about the math. If you have 9 days to write a 90 page screenplay, that’s ten pages a day. Simple! Okay, not simple to write 10 pages a day, but simple to figure out how many pages you need to write every day. I have a bunch of friends who keep saying that I write fast, but really I write consistently. Slow and steady wins the race. Though 10 pages a day may not sound like slow to you (and it’s not), the *steady* part is what’s important. If you are wildly erratic and write 20 pages one day and then 2 pages for each of the next two days, you will never be able to make your deadlines. I know writers who write a bunch of pages and then burn out and struggle for the next few days - and that’s the Hare who loses the race, not the Tortoise who wins it. You are better off writing a reasonable number of pages every single day.
So once you have your deadline, just do the math. A feature script in 3 weeks is 5 a day for 6 days. Gets you to 90. I usually end up with 100+ pages due to good days. On a 2 week schedule, I do 7.5-8 pages a day to get between 90-100 finished pages after 12 days of writing. If possible, I try to save a couple of days at the end of the schedule for emergencies - and we’ll talk about that in a moment. But figure out how many pages you need to write every day to make your deadline... then write them!
This is another benefit of working with an outline - you know exactly what tomorrow’s scenes are going to be, and think about them a little at the end of the day. Let your subconscious do a little work while you are sleeping. If you know what the next day’s scenes are, you can prepare yourself to write them. BLIND TRUST was a thriller for USA Network that I had to write in 2 weeks, and all of the research came from books on my shelves already - but the night before writing tomorrow’s scenes, I would read the section of the specific type of poison that my character needed to know about, or whatever - and be prepared when I woke up the next morning. Knowing what you need to write tomorrow at the end of the day helps you make the crazy deadlines.
An important part of being able to make a deadline is that consistent writing. Writing against a deadline is like running a race. If you wake up one morning and think it would be fun to run a marathon, you probably aren’t going to even get close to finishing. You need to *train* for the marathon. So I “train” for those insane deadlines by using self imposed deadlines on spec screenplays. I have a daily page quota that I write every day. My page quota is 5 pages a day. If I can write 5 pages a day for 6 days in a row without completely screwing up, and I am *used to that*, I can run a little faster to make my two week deadline. I know that I can do that. It’s just 2-3 more pages a day. I don’t expect that to be easy, but I know that it is *possible*. I know what I am capable of...
And I also know my limitations. If I were struggling to write 2 pages a day, I probably couldn’t write a screenplay in 3 weeks - I wouldn’t be in shape to run that fast. It might be possible, but I would always be afraid of screwing up, and those thoughts might cripple my writing. You don’t want to be the person who gets winded walking down the block who signs up for a marathon race. Hey, miracles can happen... but you don’t want to bet your career on them. So work to build up your daily page count - it’s about consistency. You can predict whether you can do something based on consistency, not based on that one time, in band camp... Writing every day turns it into a habit. If you can do 5 pages a day, you can do 7.5 pages a day. Of course, we all have bad days...
The worst part of writing on a deadline is when you get stuck. No matter how well you have outlined your story, how well you know your characters, how well prepared you are to go from 0 to 60 on a screenplay and have the thing done on time and amazing by the deadline, you are going to have one of those days... or maybe two. It’s normal. None of us wants it to be normal, but it’s going to happen. What do you do?
Keep moving forward. Writing on a deadline is like a shark - you don’t want to stop and get hung up on a problem. If I get stuck on a scene, I make a list of everything that the scene needs to do to move the story forward: the things that need to happen, the emotions that I want the audience to feel, the things that the characters need to feel, the big decision in the scene that changes the direction of the story, and everything else that needs to be in this scene in order to get us to the next scene and to the end of the screenplay. Most of the time, while making this list, I figure out how to write the scene and write it. Sometimes I just type up the list where the scene is supposed to go, so that I know what I need to do when I come back to it later... and go on to the next scene.
I mentioned the card files of random ideas that I have, and this is another resource for when I get stuck. These ideas are completely unsorted - there may be title ideas and dialogue ideas and car chase ideas and ideas on how to find a manager. Random ideas. I read through a bunch of cards. Hey, there may be something on a card that sparks an idea for the scene? Or it may just completely take my mind off the scene so that my subconscious can do some work behind the scenes and figure out the scene. But I find that random ideas can help me when I’m stuck.
Obviously I look at the Folders Of Cheats, too.
But if none of this works, I need to just leave that list of things that the scene needs to do and move on to the next. I don’t want to be stuck for days trying to write a scene when there are other scenes that I could be writing.
My first drafts have “Insert Funny Line XX” sprinkled throughout. I know that I need a funny line there, but at the time I was writing that scene had no idea what the line might be. Later I will think of it, search for “XX” and insert the line. But I want to move forward! My subconscious will be working on the “Funny Line” or “Clever Comeback” or whatever while I am moving forward on the story.
There are times when I put in a temporary line with an XX behind it so that I can find it later... and sometimes the deadline is coming and I haven’t thought of anything better, and the temporary line is what gets into that first draft. I try to come up with the replacement during the reading period...
Once you turn in your first draft or your treatment, there is a “reading period” - usually a week, or sometimes as long as the time you were allotted to write the treatment. That’s right - it takes them as long to read it as it took you to write it. Some of them probably move their lips while reading and have to look up “hard words” in the dictionary. But what this means to you - you have another week of prep for the script, or another week or more to get a head start on the second draft, if there’s time for that. While they are reading, you aren’t working on your tan in Mazatlan, you are doing all of the prep work that you couldn’t accomplish in that one week or less when you had to write the treatment. So you may turn in your treatment with a limited understanding of your characters and work that out while they are reading, or that place in the story you couldn’t quite figure out - so you faked your way through it in the treatment, you now have a week to figure out how to make it work.
None of this is leisurely. Whatever writer said that their spouse didn’t understand that when they were looking out the window for an entire afternoon - they *were* working... well, that writer isn’t going to be spending as much time looking out the window if they have to turn in a script in two weeks. You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to inspire yourself. You have to work your butt off. The good thing about writing on a tight deadline - even though you may be pulling a lot of all-nighters and might become a stranger to friends and family, it’ll be over before you know it!
One of the issues you will run into when using the “reading period” to work on your screenplay prep or coming up with all of those great lines of dialogue to replace the temporary lines in the first draft, is that it might be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Though the WGA MBA says that a producer can’t reject a treatment, nothing says that the can’t give you notes that end up changing everything about the story at the end of that reading period, right before you go to script. There *will* be notes on the treatment, that’s the purpose for the reading period, but usually the notes will be changes that are easy to incorporate into whatever you are figuring out during the reading period. But sometimes they have some crazy note that changes everything... and it’s scary if there’s a deadline. But I have found it’s better to be prepared - if you have an outline that you can change, you are ahead of the writer who has to rethink everything in their head... and accidentally forgets the changes for a big chunk of the screenplay. When something like this happens on a tight deadline, I take a day of my writing schedule to figure it out and rewrite the outline and treatment.
By the way, that treatment can be imported into your screenwriting program, (if it isn’t already a part of it) and insert the sluglines and you have a scene by scene outline that can be expanded. I have snippets of dialogue in my treatments that end up being the temporary dialogue... unless they are great lines. This will help you get the screenplay done on those 2 week deadlines. You may have to redo the math to figure out how many pages you have to write per day, now - 5 pages might be 6 pages, 7.5 pages may be 8 pages, but it’s not going to be a crazy increase in pages per day that you need to write. As I mentioned earlier, while I’m doing the math I always like to leave a couple of days at the end of the schedule, just in case....
It’s always good to know that you have a day or two extra on the schedule, just in case something goes wrong... because it will. There’s a temptation to look at 2 weeks and schedule your writing so that you finish at midnight before you have to turn the script in... but that’s a great way to screw up. On a 2 week writing schedule, I write 6 days, take a day off, then write 6 days... with one day left before I need to turn in the screenplay. On 3 weeks I give myself 2 extra days. The extra days can help if I end up behind, but I still try not to get behind. I try to make up for a bad day on the next day - and usually I can. I want to end the first week on a 2 week schedule with the screenplay half finished (or more), and take a day off and relax. This works better for me than writing straight through. I need the “pit stop” in the middle of the race to recharge my batteries. And I might need that day off at the end of the schedule to either finish the screenplay or to do a quick rewrite.
The "two extra days for rewrites" thing is one of my tips in the SELLING: BREAKING IN Blue Book, because the last thing you want is a really rough first draft leaking, or even being delivered to your producer. I *have* delivered rough first drafts before, and regretted it. You want them to think you are a creative genius, not someone who writes the same level of first drafts as everyone else. On a 2 week screenplay, that extra day at the end of the schedule is required - because some of the writing might be a little rough, and having one (maybe really long) day to go over the screenplay before you turn it in can smooth over the rough spots and add ideas that you have come up with along the way.
On BLIND TRUST once I finished, I realized that I needed a lullaby that a man would remember his mother singing to him as a child, and a handful of other details that would really make the screenplay great. So that final day I came up with a creepy lullaby and several other details and really worked on replacing every “temporary line” with the very best line possible - and turned in a first draft after 2 weeks that impressed everyone. Which is why that film never got made. They thought they had a chance to sign an Oscar nominated actress to their Made For TV movie based on the screenplay (certainly not the money) and they did! And then they thought they could skip the whole TV movie thing and make it a theatrical or sell it to HBO, and they began looking for a male lead of equal stature as the Oscar nominated female lead... and the project eventually fell apart. Screenplays aren’t the only things that are like sharks and need to keep moving forward!
The main thing to do is not worry. Okay, worry a little. The first time you have to make some tight deadline, you may think it’s impossible - and you may go crazy getting the work done and panic every other day... but once you’ve handed in the draft on time, you realize you *can* do it. It’s like sky diving or bunjee jumping - the first time you are sure you will die. Once you survive, you have the confidence to do it again. You figure out how to adapt to whatever the situation is.
Most of the time you will be given a reasonable amount of time to write your first draft. The producer does want the script as soon as possible, but they also want a good script. This *is* a business. There are deadlines. You need to be able to write on a schedule and get work done on time. You’ll get the hang of it.
Even if you don’t have a deadline to write a screenplay now, it’s a good idea to train yourself to write consistently, so that you know your limitations... and what you are capable of doing. Though most contracts are going to give you 12 weeks or even 6 to 8 months to write a screenplay, in the low budget and cable world where it’s more like television than big studio features you will have to write on a deadline that is often 3 weeks for the first draft... and on some occasions only 2 weeks, and once for me was 9 days! I had 2 weeks to write the treatment *and* the screenplay that was filmed! And I did it. And it’s now playing on TubiTV, embarrassing me.
You can write fast. You just have to be prepared, and have a consistent page count.
Good luck and keep writing!
- Bill
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