WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SOME UNJUSTIFIABLE WHINING.
"Sidney, uh, how many pages do we need to have done by next week?"
"Oh, just enough to get an idea of the main character, get to the first turning point, so, say twenty or thirty?"
(gasps from several of us.)
"Come on, people, this is a writing class - you should be writing. At least 15 to 20 pages a week! And don't forget - I need your samples before Wednesday so I can read them and make them available to the class beforehand."
"How early?"
"ASAP. Now would be good."
"What's the LATEST?" (ever the procrastinator)
"Say...Saturday. At the LATEST!"
So by Saturday morning - actually Friday night since we're going to Houston Saturday morning - I need to have at LEAST the first 20 pages of my screenplay done. Let's see, if you subtract what I already have, that leaves...20 pages. I do have 20 or so pages written from last semester, but I've changed how I want to start it, so right now most of those do me no good.
So, okay, somehow, between work, meeting my cousin this evening in town to watch her daughter play basketball at Concordia University (a cousin I only get to see once or twice a year, if I'm lucky), and the usual eating, sleeping, laundry, kids, critters, husband stuff, I've got to come up with the 20 pages by tomorrow night. And after that, I need to churn out 3 or 4 pages a day until it's finished.
If this was a novelization, I wouldn't have a problem (easy for me to say right now, since it's not a novelization.) But I'm still just getting the feel for screenplays - what to leave in, what to leave out, when to capitalize, indent, what all the acronyms stand for...
"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." ~ Thomas Mann
It's only been in the past couple of years that I've been able to work out a balance that meets my spiritual, physical and mental needs almost every day. I'm going to have to throw it all out of kilter to get this done. But this is something I want to do - NEED to do - and so I'm just going to do it. Somehow. Some way. And hopefully without losing too much sleep.
By sheer coincidence (or was it?), today I came across this revelation by Franz Kafka from a blog called Daily Routines: "As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted time."
The truth can be cruel, can't it?
