Week 2 - Laying the Groundwork

This week, I continued studying the medium of screenwriting and made detailed plans for my three episodes of writing. I started by reading guides on the specific formatting of screenplays, which forced me to confront my own unfamiliarity with the genre. While I am an experienced prose writer who rarely finds writing advice given to beginners useful, many aspects of screenwriting advice for beginners was news for me. Even the formatting itself challenged my initial assumptions of screenwriting being basically similar to writing prose, such as the way scenes and settings are usually denoted. 

I also started making detailed plans for the episodes I will be writing, including brief character sheets for original characters I wanted to introduce. I stuck to my usual style of plot planning that I use, first writing a large paragraph long summary for the overarching plot, then splitting it into three episodes and writing a paragraph long summary for each individual episode. I also wrote sentence long summaries for a few scenes I wanted to include in each episode, but left plenty of space in between to provide flexibility and fill in gaps. I also made loose notes for my ideas about my worldbuilding for the story, filling in gaps left by the canon material and making modifications in places to fit the story I want to tell. Normally, when I write, I enjoy using my plans as a guide but will often deviate from them as I write. Because of this, while I do make plans, I don’t make extremely detailed plans to afford myself this flexibility.

Next week, I will begin writing the first episode, working at a pace of approximately four pages a day, equivalent to about four minutes of runtime a day. While I anticipate potential problems with keeping up the writing pace, I have come to understand that when it comes to longer writing projects, discipline is more important than inspiration.