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[Outcast Orange]

Sounds fun... I'll try it.

I'll be writing a (possibly?) non-ironic story involving high-school drama which culminates in murder. So original.

We've already got one of those.

YOU SHUT UP

This is not about being original or being the next goddamn big thing in screenwriting. This is about words on pages. If that's the kind of story that will best help him get those words on that page, then that's the story he does. Here's a pro-tip: Originality is over-rated. It's the execution that matters. Who cares if it's a story as old as time, it's how you do it, how you put your own unique voice and spin on things that matters.

And then I was in a bad mood.

Not for a moment was I suggesting he not do it.
It was just an informative bit.
Maybe if he knew there was a similar story,
 he would change his mind. (and it seems he has)
 
YOU CAN TAKE YOUR EXECUTION OF MATERIAL AND SHOVE OFF

While I'm here:

And that's kinda the point of Script Frenzy. Successful writers aren't successful because they're constantly feeling inspired and good. They're successful because they write, no matter what.

I disagree.

Quality before quantity.
Quantity is only good for practice.
If you write a hundred books a year,
 then I won't waste my time reading them,
 hoping that one will be good.

If you write one hundred books,
 and one of them is good,
 then you probably got lucky.
99% of your books are still bad,
 and writing one hundred more isn't going to change that.

Just food for thought.

Expect a contribution from me soon.

[Dasleah]

Quality before quantity.
Quantity is only good for practice.
If you write a hundred books a year,
 then I won't waste my time reading them,
 hoping that one will be good.

If you write one hundred books,
 and one of them is good,
 then you probably got lucky.
99% of your books are still bad,
 and writing one hundred more isn't going to change that.

See, all I'm hearing is 'I'd rather write one good page a year and never finish anything than risk actually completing anything and having people think I'm not good at this.'

Which is a god damn cop-out.

Here's a fun fact - you will never be happy with what you write. Never. Not in a million years will you ever write something and say to yourself "You know what? That's perfect. I don't need to change that at all." and mean it for any longer than it takes the buzz to wear off. You will like some things, sure. You may be proud of a few lines. But if you aren't critical of everything you write, you're not taking it seriously. This is what Script Frenzy is about. It is about output. It is about content. You are entering this competition a damn writer, not an editor. It is not your job to say 'this is good' or 'this is bad'. It is your sole purpose to vomit vaguely coherent words onto pages in an order that describes events happening over time. That is the end-all and be-all. The entirety of the entire planet that you care about revolves around that one purpose for these 30 days.

I think that's an important distinction to make. You are not an editor. It is the editor's job to tell you 'hey, these 99 books you wrote are crap, but this one here is alright.' It is your job as the writer to just write those 100 books in the first place. Let someone else tear them apart, strike through great swathes of character description with a red marker. Let them introduce those 99 crap books to the shredder, but the important thing is to just write them in the first place. If you are releasing 99 crap books a year, then you need a new editor. You do not need to stop writing.

Everything you write is practice. Everything you do will be terrible. Everything you do you will hate and think is crap and will never want to introduce into the light of day because oh god someone might judge me. Script Frenzy - fuck, deadlines in general - is about cutting the bottom out of the excuses you've got for not writing in the first place. I would rather write those 99 crap books to get me that one good book. That's 99 books worth of learning. Of mistakes made so you don't make them again. That's 99 damn books. The average writer doesn't get past the first chapter of one.

Understand that most writers are failures. For every book that goes published, a hundred or more don't. The important thing is that when you do get to that point where someone actually gives a shit about the words you've put down, you've got those 99 shit books out of the way. You can turn around and say "I am a fucking writer. Not because I write good books, but because I write bad books. Because I will work and work and write and write until I am finished. And then I will do it again, and again, and again, until one of these comes out right."

YOU CAN TAKE YOUR EXECUTION OF MATERIAL AND SHOVE OFF

EXECUTION IS EVERYTHING. This is the number one mistake I see every new writer make. They spend months agonizing over coming up with the 'next big thing' - something no-one has ever seen before and the very concept of which will thrust them above the rabble and hurl them into the stratosphere of 'good writer'. Something so new and bold that forever will all work into the future be seen as mere re-tellings of this one, bold, new idea.

There are no new ideas. There are only new interpretations of old ideas.

This is a hard thing for people to get their heads around. A lot of people don't agree with it. Surely, they say, that new ideas are being made all the time! Everyone is an individual and everyone sees things differently! Yes, precisely. Everyone interprets things differently. Everyone has their own perspective. But the ideas themselves don't change. Humans just don't have a large enough external frame of reference to think of anything truly new. We have been telling the same stories over and over and over again for tens of thousands of years. But what we do have is interpretation - applying our own endless layers of bias, prejudice, experience onto these few core ideas we have into something that's different.

And it's this interpretation that matters. It's your interpretation that's the only unique thing in the world.

This is called the Monomyth (and / or post-modernism, but that's a whole 'nother rant). All this theory and reasoning isn't really that important to you as a writer - it's your job to write, let others interpret the meanings and structures behind your words later. But it's important to know that you don't have to be original. You can have the guy-meet-girl, guy-lose-girl, girl-realises-she-loves-guy, guy-gets-girl-again. No-one is going to think any less of you. But you will be judged on your execution of the tropes.

Fuck, I think I could turn these rants into a NaNoWriMo project.

[Kagus]

Interesting project.  And, indeed, a great way of getting beyond (or at least partially around) the blockage we seem to enjoy setting up for ourselves.

However, for as much as I think this is an interesting idea, and for as much as I really need this kind of push, I'm afraid I won't be signing up.  I'm entering into a particularly tricky period of my life right now, and I need to focus my efforts elsewhere in order to play a truly fantastic game of catch-up.

Plus, April 4th's my birthday.  Woo.


I also think that people need to chill down a little in here...   There were a couple jabs and jokes that were taken entirely the wrong way, and now everyone's getting s'damned worked up about nothing.  It'd be a crying shame to see this thread shut down before it even got started.  And...

Ah, to hell with generalized comments.  Dasleah, I know you're pumped about getting this thing going, and I understand that you take it very seriously.  But for crying out loud, calm down.  I understand, heck, respect the ideals behind this effort, but your manner is a bit too on-edge.  Tone it down.

Outcast Orange, I understand your viewpoint as well, as I believe it's one that I share.  However, I also believe that you're not expressing it clearly.  If I'm not mistaken, you're talking about the finished product, which is (interestingly enough) completely irrelevant to this project.

It doesn't matter if everything that's written for this thread gets burned, trashed, rewritten, or locked in a basement somewhere in Ohio.  All that matters is getting beyond the personal mental roadblocks we have so that we actually get around to writing the damn thing.  The process, not the product.


Now, please...  Can we all continue this project with some level of chillness?

[Dasleah]

Ah, to hell with generalized comments.  Dasleah, I know you're pumped about getting this thing going, and I understand that you take it very seriously.  But for crying out loud, calm down.  I understand, heck, respect the ideals behind this effort, but your manner is a bit too on-edge.  Tone it down.

I follow the Warren Ellis School of Writing - if you don't feel like you're about to punch out Godzilla and molest his corpse, then you just aren't into writing enough yet. This thread is as much about psyching myself up as much as everyone else. It's about getting people so pumped that they'll cheat, start early, and finish with 150 pages of finished script. So should I tone it down? Probably. I'll try. But I'd rather explode from passion than let myself fizzle out before even starting.

[Kagus]

I can understand that, it's just that when that psyched-up energy bubbles over into a snap against another forum member, it starts getting worrisome.  There's nothing wrong with exuberance, but you do need to watch where it's directed.  That's all.

[Outcast Orange]

See, all I'm hearing is 'I'd rather write one good page a year and never finish anything than risk actually completing anything and having people think I'm not good at this.'

Everything you write is practice. Everything you do will be terrible. Everything you do you will hate and think is crap and will never want to introduce into the light of day because oh god someone might judge me. Script Frenzy - fuck, deadlines in general - is about cutting the bottom out of the excuses you've got for not writing in the first place. I would rather write those 99 crap books to get me that one good book. That's 99 books worth of learning. Of mistakes made so you don't make them again. That's 99 damn books. The average writer doesn't get past the first chapter of one.

Understand that most writers are failures. For every book that goes published, a hundred or more don't. The important thing is that when you do get to that point where someone actually gives a shit about the words you've put down, you've got those 99 shit books out of the way. You can turn around and say "I am a fucking writer. Not because I write good books, but because I write bad books. Because I will work and work and write and write until I am finished. And then I will do it again, and again, and again, until one of these comes out right."

EXECUTION IS EVERYTHING. This is the number one mistake I see every new writer make. They spend months agonizing over coming up with the 'next big thing' - something no-one has ever seen before and the very concept of which will thrust them above the rabble and hurl them into the stratosphere of 'good writer'. Something so new and bold that forever will all work into the future be seen as mere re-tellings of this one, bold, new idea.

There are no new ideas. There are only new interpretations of old ideas.

This is a hard thing for people to get their heads around. A lot of people don't agree with it. Surely, they say, that new ideas are being made all the time! Everyone is an individual and everyone sees things differently! Yes, precisely. Everyone interprets things differently. Everyone has their own perspective. But the ideas themselves don't change. Humans just don't have a large enough external frame of reference to think of anything truly new. We have been telling the same stories over and over and over again for tens of thousands of years. But what we do have is interpretation - applying our own endless layers of bias, prejudice, experience onto these few core ideas we have into something that's different.

Basically, everything I've separated out into that quote is something I disagree with,
 and am willing to battle over.

If you take your time, plan well, and try wearing the shoes of your characters,
 you can write something good the first time.
Sure, editors are good for weeding out the rambling bits,
 but there is only so much they can do for you.

There is no motivation like self motivation.

--------------------

On another note,
do we have to write scripts?

That seems rather limiting to me.

[Willfor]

Basically, everything I've separated out into that quote is something I disagree with,
 and am willing to battle over.

If you take your time, plan well, and try wearing the shoes of your characters,
 you can write something good the first time.
Sure, editors are good for weeding out the rambling bits,
 but there is only so much they can do for you.

There is no motivation like self motivation.

I have a feeling you don't quite get professional writing... Time is an extremely valuable resource, and people who take their time when writing are (often) people who are left behind in favour of people who can get material to the market on time. You have all the time in the world to do it, of course. At the start. But when you get your first deadline, and the writer's block kicks in hard, you are going to regret not being able to turn off that voice inside your brain that tells you that you are a hack and have no business writing for the National Inquirer, let alone whatever you are trying to write.

Your enemy during the first draft of writing is your internal editor. He/She/It will gladly stick a fork in whatever you're trying to do because it sucks. And it does suck. It honestly sucks no matter how perfect you think it is. Sorry to have to tell you that, but it does. You will look back on it, and cringe. There are lots of ways to beat this, and a big ego is one of them. That's why you see so many writers equipped with them. I kind of wish I had a big ego, because it would help a lot. Except I suck so bad that it would be somewhat hard to have a big ego. At any rate, if you are somehow blessed with the lack of an internal editor, you are somewhat screwed, because he becomes your best friend in phase two which is revising your trainwreck into the gem it can become.

Script Frenzy is phase 1, and it leaves to second draft until after the month is over. If this is not how you operate, cool, find a different motivation. Writing in drafts is a standard writing practice, and it is used for a very good reasons: It is extremely difficult to write everything to perfection on your first time through. Your first run in with an editor/copy editor could give you a heart attack.

On a different point, what makes you think you can't walk in the shoes of a character while writing quantity? I've been practicing that so long that it is second nature to me to write from the character's minds while also maintaining speed. The trick is to keep practicing. Experiment, learn your style, figure out what you enjoy writing. Only you know what you like to write, and you will only write it by writing it. There's a quote out there that your first ten games you make will be utter crap, so get them out of the way as fast as you can. The same thing applies to writing.


Anyway, I am close to giving in to the urge to cheat here just to get the first few crappy scenes out of the way so I can have some extra time to revise. Writing for TV is an entirely new concept to me, even though I used to be a major TV buff. Plus, generally the character come to me on the fly, and I'd like to have them pretty solid once April comes.

[Dasleah]

Basically, everything I've separated out into that quote is something I disagree with,
 and am willing to battle over.

Way to quote my entire damn post. See what Willfor said, and if you want to actually argue something, then argue about it, instead of just flagging entire paragraphs as 'I don't agree with this for reasons I don't feel like articulating" Also, what's up with the
odd way you
write your posts as its
quite annoying

On another note,
do we have to write scripts?

That seems rather limiting to me.

Well seeing as it's Script Frenzy, that's kinda the point. If you want to write prose, then that's NaNoWriMo territory. But NaNo won't be until November or something this year, and SF starts in two weeks, so it's just a matter of convenience.

Anyway, I am close to giving in to the urge to cheat here just to get the first few crappy scenes out of the way so I can have some extra time to revise. Writing for TV is an entirely new concept to me, even though I used to be a major TV buff. Plus, generally the character come to me on the fly, and I'd like to have them pretty solid once April comes.

Cheat away! Use these two weeks to get down as much information as possible. In the perfect world you'd hit April 1st with a full plot outline with dialogue and character notes. There's nothing in the 'rules' to stop you from doing that - anything that's not the finished script is just prep work, and no-one's going to bat an eyelid if you already have a few of the core scenes fleshed out and ready to slot into place. Like I keep saying, the point of SF is to get you treating every month like it's SF - just getting you into the habit of writing every single day.

And I did screenwriting all through Uni, so feel free to fire off any questions you have about the format.

[Outcast Orange]

Ugh...

So am I to assume that B12 is the mecca for good authors?
Is everybody here going to tell me how very little I "get" writing?
I didn't post here to be bashed on,
 and I hope you don't mean this as maliciously as it reads.

----------------------------------

There used to be flaming here.
I have removed it.

Good day.

[Willfor]

I don't mean to bash you, really. It's simply that you are disagreeing with the advice given by nearly every published author that I have read any advice at all from. Including the people who are very good at what they do. It also disagrees with a lot of my personal experience. I'm perfectly willing to live and let live though, so I'm not going to escalate anything.

[LordNagash]

Yeah this is not making up some sort of bullshit, it's writing advice given by pretty much anyone who does it for a living. The reason behind it? It's possible to edit average stuff into at least a passable story, but no matter how you edit nothing there is still nothing.

[ThreeToe]

Outcast Orange, Dasleah, knock it off - you are giving me a headach.

Try to keep it on topic.  Have fun.

[Outcast Orange]

Outcast Orange, Dasleah, knock it off - you are giving me a headach.

Try to keep it on topic.  Have fun.

Sorry Threetoe!



Everyone else:

I didn't know that this was commonly accepted stuff,
 so it seems a little futile now to argue.
I still disagree with some of it, but I am willing to let it die.

I will try to ignore provocation next time, and not get worked up.
I'm still a little angry with Dasleah... oh well.
Maybe PM's?

EDIT:

Oh my orange...
I hadn't realized it, but I directly quoted ThreeToe...

Can we do that sort of thing?

[Makrond]

Oh my orange...
I hadn't realized it, but I directly quoted ThreeToe...

Hurf durf.

Walls of text are much more preferable to 'short paragraphs' which aren't actually paragraphs. Here's a tip: a paragraph is a complete train of thought broken up into sentences to separate the individual sections. Half a sentence does not make a paragraph, and splitting a single sentence over multiple lines makes even less sense than splitting a single paragraph over multiple lines.

Here's another tip: this isn't a typewriter (haha like you even know what that is). You don't have to hit 'Carriage Return' when you reach the end of the very small text box you're entering text into, because these forums use wonderful features of HTML that actually cause the words to wrap onto the next line if they get to the edge of the screen. This also makes your 'walls of text' much more readable for those of us who don't run their monitors at 800x600 since the text stretches all the way across the screen and doesn't - obnoxiously and I may even hazard to say rather arrogantly - force us to scroll down through a wall of useless words.

tl;dr, and I know you're not going to read my impenetrable walls of text because that would be too hard: You're not writing a poem. Don't use linebreaks unless you need to.

Have a nice day.

[Supermikhail]

I told you about off-topic discussions... I immediately think about some forums, where you can be put on probation for this sort of thing...

Back on topic. This thread is simply chewing on my pride, and while I know that I win nothing if I enter and I feel like I am quite set on writing, and I have another writing thread here, where my output has stalled to a couple of pages per week, and I am desperately falling out of the university... aaalet's say, I'm gonna be a lurking entrant for a time.

But Dasleah said to come here with problems, and I've got a problem. Lately, I've been trying to become a good writer, and to introduce realistic characters into my stories (and a kind of screenplay). And basically, when there is an introduction, everything's fine, but when the craziness of the plot starts kicking in, the character stops, and I don't know what he would do. The sources of the problem I see as my identification with the character, so, I am an antisocial person, who is used to relying on others' decisions in difficult situations, and the character is the same. Or I have a suspicion that it's just my anti-sociality, and so I know very few people to base may characters on. Am I right and what should I do?

Half a year ago I was very heavily into learning screenwriting and I found a couple of very useful books about it and moviemaking in general at my library: Kevin Conroy Scott, Screenwriters Masterclass; Clifford Thurlow, Making Short Films. I think they can be as useful for quality writing, as for low-quality, first-draft writing.