12 Scripts in 12 Months

Coming up with ideas has NEVER been my problem.

Getting the idea to the page … well that’s a little more complicated.

Which is why I’m attempting the impossible – or what I consider an exciting challenge with a ticking clock – to write 12 full length feature screenplays in the year 2016, one for each month, for the next 12 months.  

This year will be the year when I look back years from now, as the turning point, the year where I attacked my greatest fears and unloaded my heaviest burdens, the year I went from the longest and coldest winter of my life, into spring.

No longer will these stories weigh me down.

I must write, on average, 3.7 pages per day.  But that’s not how I’ll be doing this.  I have a strategy.  Like my mom would always say, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

The goal is to dump the initial spark, that first draft.  Some have been marinating inside me since before I attended film school, and some have only crept in over the past few months.

Not everything will be planned out.

This will be an intuitive journey.

I am savvy.  I can pitch.  I can sell.  (I sold my first script on a pitch to a major studio.)  But this will not be the focus of this diary.  The focus rather, will be the soul of the matter, a record for me to stay in tune with the lady who’s up there in the attic of the darkest corners of my mind, smoking her cigar (Thank you Stephen King, On Writing) whispering me her best ideas.

What burns you, gets you going, boils your juices, and motivates you to do hard things, impossible things?  That’s what I’ll be focusing on, the heart of writing.

Each story is quite special, something I hold close.  They’re not just high concepts or pitches, they are fully imagined worlds, filled with rich moments and characters bursting to come out.  I did not create them yesterday.  They have been with me for YEARS.

And so it’s about freaking time I get them out of me don’t you think?!

Come with me as I enter #theimpossible.

This month is …

THE UNTITLED MIND BENDER

Write on!

AEJ

 

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