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Script Frenzy is looking for someone to do 20,000 words. I am at 3779 words at the moment and starting page 20. So they are asking for 100 pages. That’s fairly easy, especially since you don’t really need much of a plan. That’s only 3 1/3 pages a day. I find I can do an easy 4 pages in about an hour.
We always impose these fears on ourselves when it is actually quite easy to write. The trouble is that we want to write perfectly, right off the start and that is next to impossible.
I blocked myself for the last four months because I was trying to write perfectly on a second draft.
That’s why I am loving the Peter Elbow Challenge: Write the script four times, almost allowing for a shitty first, second, and third draft.
There is another version that I might take up from his book “Writing Without Teachers” (Writers: Have you bought this book yet?) that he calls Desperation Writing.
You write and keep writing. Then you go through it and find all the assertions, thoughts, feelings, images, or events/plot points (my addition) that come out of it and write it on a 3x5 card. Accept all of it and don’t waste your time struggling with it. Then just shuffle through them, over and over, finding patterns, dropping them into piles. Then, gather each pile into one assertion and write it out all over again. Do this over and over again.
The beauty of this is that you don’t think in your head. You think on the page and most importantly, you are writing.
(Originally posted on 8secondsofawesome.com.)