A Power Outage Cost Me 8 Pages Of My Screenplay. Good or Bad?
January 24th, 2011 | Posted by in Screenwriting
Fellow screenwriters,
You know when you get into the zone and completely lose track of time while you blast through the pages. Those special moments when your fingers can’t keep up with your creative outburst. When every line leaps off the page and you smile ear to ear because you love every word you type.
That’s the zone I was in the other day until the unthinkable happened.
One of the draw backs of these ‘black out’ stretches is I frequently forget to stop and hit CTRL-S to save my work.
It backfired.
The power went out!
I wound up losing just about 8 pages of my new feature screenplay. Technically, they were sample scenes to try and nail down some themes and an overall style but it still counts!
I was devastated, deflated and demolished… It sucked.
Still, it happens to everyone from time to time but I felt like I wouldn’t be able to get those magical sentences back. Then I started thinking about it another way. Perhaps the power outage was a good thing. They were sample scenes after all.
I decided to challenge myself to tackle the scenes from a different perspective.
How can this scene be more interesting?
The result wasn’t nearly as good as my first attempt but there were two specific ideas that made my original attempt a million times better.
2 sentences made all the difference in the world. So I got back to work a few days later and rewrote the scenes again. I was happier than ever.
Thank you power outage but I win this round.
Read more about The Screenwriting Black Out at my new Squidoo lens.
Related Posts
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback.
