Mid April: Seven Goals Accomplished

One more goal down! That's seven! It feels like a "Finally" moment, but it's been less than a month since I accomplished my last goal and began working on this one. The "Finally" feeling comes from fact that I began this project a while back and left it on hold for some time.

The goal that I accomplished in Mid April is the finishing of the rough draft of my script, "The Mermaid Outside the Window." The goal wasn't to start and finish the script. It was simply to finish it, because I had already started it many, many months ago, got about halfway through, and then put it on pause. Not what I typically like to do, but it sort of just happened. I worked on so many other projects and I kept telling myself that I had to get back to this one and finish it. I kept telling myself I couldn't leave an incomplete script sitting there. Yet, I did. Not until I wrote it down on my list of goals did I then feel like I needed to follow through. And how funny, I finally got back to it and wrote the second half in less than a month. I agonized over how long it would take me, but it took me far less time than I imagined. And there it is! Completed!

I think when I first started writing scripts I didn't commit enough time to them and I wasn't focused enough. I thought I was committing a lot of time to my projects, but looking back I realize it was a fraction of what I do now. I knew writing a script took me a long time... in terms of the calendar days passing by. But obviously if you spend more time each day, that full amount of time shrinks. I was thinking to finish a second half of a script would take me so long and I did it in just a few weeks. It was easy enough though. I had everything outlined and I knew exactly what needed to happen. I just had to write it.

I've realized this more and more about myself, oftentimes I think something is going to be worse before I actually do it, and then once I begin, I realize it isn't so bad. In fact, when it comes to writing, it's almost like I forget that I enjoy it until I dive into it. And it really doesn't take that much effort to crank through a script in a decent amount of time. An hour to an hour and a half a day, 4-6 days a week, no lollygagging while writing, just doing actual writing, actual work, that sucker gets churned out pretty quickly.

Clearly.

That's not to say the outlining and preparing and character development doesn't take time. It does. But once I do that, the writing goes by like a breeze because I've done enough preparation.

With that being said, I'm also proud of the type of script I wrote. Most of my completed scripts are comedies or action-comedies. I did write one that's a thriller-drama, and though it has funny parts here and there, you'd never call it a comedy. But it was the lone non-comedy script I had completed. I felt I needed another. Especially if I was lucky enough to have someone read that script, like it, and then say, "What else ya got?" I didn't want my answer to be, "Buncha comedies." So, I needed another one in the thriller genre. This is that. A thriller-horror, again, some humorous parts, but not a comedy. It felt good to get one more non-comedy done. Feels like my repertoire is a little more well-rounded.

And yes, it's just a rough draft. I do have a goal on my list to go back and reread and revise and polish and create a second draft of this script before feeling completely confident in it. However, since I had left this script alone for so long before going back and finishing, I had to go through what I had written to remind myself of everything, and I did a good edit on the first half that I had already written. I feel like when I go back to this script once more, the editing will probably be fairly quick since it already received a good once-over.

But in the meantime... one more rough draft of a script done.

One more goal accomplished.

Success.

Celebration ensuing.