Eh, never mind the previous. After hemming and hawing, I finally told myself that it's just money, and submitted them both. I mean, what else am I gonna spend it on? Probably crap I don't need. So.

Ha, so, two weeks ago I was looking for something under my bed and pulled out this book: How To Write a Movie In 21 Days. I must have either bought it for a class at USC and never read it once it became clear that we would never be asked about it (I learned my lesson and quit buying books until an assignment actually showed up on the syllabus), or someone, probably one of my mom's friends, gave it to me as a gift. To say I never read it is an understatement. Anyway, I sat down and flipped through it, laughing, like, write a movie in 21 days? Come on. That's unpossible. It takes me at least three or four months to write a movie; I'd be lucky to come up with the outline in just three or four weeks.

But I kind of kept thinking about it. That sounds like a challenge! That sounds like that book is questioning my honor! I read the first part. Right off the bat, there were exercises - write for eight minutes about your movie's theme, write for three minutes about a location and everything in it, write for ten minutes about meeting your main character for the first time - and I would just read past them, and then later on the page would be an admonition to not just read! If you haven't done the exercise yet, do it now!! And I started to feel...guilty. Like the teacher was at the front of the classroom, giving an assignment, and I was just doodling in the back. Then I told myself, I just finished a screenplay! I don't have any ideas ready to go! It takes me a long time to prepare; I have to profile characters, and outline plots, and come up with scenes, and maybe even research.

And then my brain reminded me of my aborted NaNoWriMo project from two years ago, that I had continued to sort of spin around in my head on and off - meaning, on about once a month or so - since then. So I sat down and did the exercises, and remembered some things, and made up others. And when I got to the page that told me to start writing the actual script - ten pages in two hours, no less (it takes a week to write ten pages! what is this book thinking?) - I decided to go for it. What can it hurt? It'll just be a crappy first draft, but it'll be something I can look at for revision, and any scripts in my back pocket, no matter how rough, are good things. Two days later, I have the first thirty pages.

It's kinda weird, writing like that. I'm not used to it. I'm used to sitting down with my notebook and carefully writing three or four scenes over the space of an afternoon, writing by hand, measuring out each scene, really thinking about it, only writing after I've conceptualized each scene in my head - played it out like an internal movie, seen how my actors move through it, heard the dialogue. To just sit down and go for it? I mean, I've done it before, when I reworked an entire draft in a single day for a class, which meant rewriting the first act and writing the rest of the film from scratch, but that was different as I'd had two semesters working on that project already, so I knew a lot about the characters and plot, et cetera.

But you know what? It works. Not for anything other than a first draft, mind you - you just have to plan more than that if you're going to work in subplots and foreshadowing and have scenes that start late and end early - but for just getting something there? Something that you can then later look at and evaluate and rewrite? It works. And it's actually kind of exciting.