Most of the time I feel like I'm being pulled physically, mentally, and emotionally in a hundred different directions. This often makes me feel like there isn't enough time in the day to really do anything. Once you start one thing, oh shit! You have to go do another thing. Forget about making time for showers and eating and stuff like that. I often feel like there's not even enough time for the essentials. You wake up in the morning and all of a sudden it's 11pm and you're tired and you have a bunch of half done tasks sitting in front of you, screaming at you, competing for your attention.

I feel like writing my senior project script is going well because I'm actually writing something that I would want to read. I'm having fun writing it. My workshop script kind of got away from me because I was trying way too hard to give it some kind of Indie vibe that just wasn't really there to begin with, which made my characters and situations seem contrived. This time around I feel like I have strong characters. I'm writing the script according to what they would do rather than just forcing the plot forward. I have high hopes for this one.

Back Into The Swing of Things

This is my first term back at Drexel after six months of co-op in Los Angeles. I'm used to the 9-5 lifestyle (9-7 actually) and I'm having a little bit of a tough time readjusting to life as a student. I'm trying to re-learn how to effectively manage my time in order to get all the work done that I must do. It is especially difficult to stay on top of a class like Senior Project or SCRP Workshop becasue we do not meet regularly like other classes. It is easy to prioritize other classes when you are constantly meeting. The material and assignments stay at the front of your mind. Though I am readjusting atthe moment, I am confident that I will pull through and end up with a great Senior Project script. It seems like everyday I improve my time management efforts.

Near the end

The end of the term is close, and I definitely learned my lesson when it comes to sticking to deadlines. I barely have a week and a half to do some major rewrites. I'm gonna do my best, but I just wish I had like four more weeks. I think this needed to happen because my approach to my senior project and making deadlines will be radically different.

Wow. I definitely underestimated how difficult it would be to finish a first draft. I should have worked on it more over Christmas break, but it's hard when you're constantly visiting family and all that shit. I was also going through a terrible break up over the Christmas break which physically and emotionally crippled me. I was a mopey piece of shit for a long time. It also doesn't help that I've had pneumonia for the last week and a half.

I'm not making excuses here. I'm simply ranting. It's actually kind of helping too.

writing stuff

In the process of writing my first act, I realized that I deviated a lot from my treatment. I'm realizing things as I write and making changes, hopefully for the better. I got a comment from Professor Kaufhold about one of my secondary characters actually seeming like the main character and I think I'm beginning to see that as well. It's funny how writing is such a learning process. I couldn't imagine laying down a treatment and following it beat for beat.

Treatments

I really do appreciate the necessity of writing some kind of treatment before attempting to dive into a story. I made the mistake of not doing this in Screenwriting 2 with my sixty page script. I was essentially flying blind and the story took turns that I did not anticipate. I wrote myself into more than a few corners that were extremely hard to get out of while still doing the story and the characters some kind of justice.

That said, treatments also frustrate me. They are a necessary evil in my eyes, but they really make me pull my hair out. Sometimes I like to fly blind into a scene ad see what happens. I can always cut it or take the core of the scene and incorporate that. No matter how closely I follow a treatment, I always find myself deviating from it in some way because character information and plot drivers occur to me as I write. Also, I find myself using "sequence" a lot in the actual writing of my treatments. This is probably because I have not fully envisioned an important enough scene yet to put in that place.

Just the act of getting through the writing of a treatment helps to expose obvious plot holes and inconsistencies with characters.