A good writing day

I made a deal with myself this week. I had 30 pages, and knowing I would be off Thursday I did some calculations and determined that I could get to page 50 by Sunday night if I spread my writing out the right way. That relied on two pages Wednesday night and six pages Thursday. Today I have to write two pages, and Saturday and Sunday I have to write five pages each day. Completely doable when you break it down to short-term goals.

I met my Wednesday night goal, and then Thursday I just had a terrific writing day. I wrote my six pages, but they were really great pages. I was in a good mood all night.

When I started this script I had a hard time pushing through because the first 21 pages were garbage. I decided to trust myself and my outline and keep going, knowing that eventually I'd figure out how to break through and write the good stuff. Then page 22 was pretty good. I told the scene to a couple of friends. They chuckled, so I knew I must have been getting somewhere.

So yesterday my objective was to write a date scene between my male and female leads. This script is more romantic comedy than anything I've ever written, so this is the first real date scene I've ever written. In my outline I just wrote that they were on a date, envisioning it in a restaurant like a normal date, but when I started writing I thought about how boring a restaurant is for a date, so I moved it to a more interesting location.

As my characters talked and played a game, my guy catches my girl in a lie and gets pissed. In order to get out of it, she tells a bit of emotional truth embedded in a bigger lie, which moves him to kiss her.

But as I wrote her little speech I started to question why this was so true for her. She talks about wanting to help people, but her job isn't helping people at all. I just chose that job because it was something with which I was familiar, and I felt like she could be invisible working there. But after she gave that big speech I realize that was not the place she should be working, so I envisioned her changing to a job that reflects the theme of the story better.

Then as I made him touch her hands to show her how to play the game, I saw the cliched scene I was creating, and suddenly made him do something unexpected.

So after all that, I was just so pleased with myself. Through careful planning, thinking, and pushing myself, I managed to meet my goals, write solid pages and improve the script as a whole.

Plus if I knew this male character I created, I'd totally hook him up with one of my friends. He is AWESOME.