Writing Tip: Writing Weekend
For 48 hours, nothing but writing. No Internet. No phone calls. No TV. Just you. And your story.
For 48 hours, nothing but writing. No Internet. No phone calls. No TV. Just you. And your story.
The other day, I presented the one page per day approach to writing. That’s for those who have enormous patience and daily persistence. Call it The Tortoise Method. For all you Hares out there, here’s an opposite way to write: The Writing Weekend.
You prep your story, preferably a solid scene-by-scene outline. You review it several times to make sure the story tracks. Then you pick a remote location at least a 2-hour drive from home (so you’re not tempted to scoot back during the weekend and family members won’t be tempted to bother you). You clear everything off your calendar from Friday through Sunday. You drive yourself, your laptop, and your story to said remote location. And you write. For 48 hours, nothing but writing. No Internet. No phone calls. No TV. Just you. And your story.
This is a terrific way to jam through a first draft of a script. You know my mantra about first drafts: Get the damn thing done!. You know Ernest Hemmingway’s famous quote: “All first drafts are shit.” You’re not expecting perfection. Rather your goal with a writing weekend is simply to pound out as many pages as you can.
I’ve heard many stories about writers who have knocked off a script in a weekend. I’ve never finished an entire draft myself in a writing weekend, but I’ve written 60+ pages a few times.
There are all sorts of residual benefits from this approach, too. For one thing, by taking away all distractions and focusing solely on your writing, you can really immerse yourself in your story universe. Second I’ve always learned a great deal about my story when doing a writing weekend, gaining new and deeper insights into characters and themes. Plus that energy you feel as you’re pounding out pages can translate onto the pages themselves.
But the main thing is the obvious one: You make a hell of a lot of progress in writing your story in a short time.
By the way, writing every day and writing weekends are not mutually exclusive. I do both. I’ll bet some of you do, too.
So when you feel like a tortoise, there’s the one page per day approach. When you feel like a hare, the long weekend. But perhaps the biggest single key to your success in writing a script is what I’m going to discuss tomorrow: Break your story in prep.