Me and Pål are currently working on the first draft of a new project. We’re excited about the concept, the story and the characters, and thus the writing becomes very pleasant. We’re also getting ready to start a treatment or first draft for a second project. You see, we don’t want to stop writing…
In my experience, it is very easy to stumble into the trap: Whether you write on your own or with a partner, life throws you any number of curveballs, and it’s easy to get sidetracked. When a project looses momentum, months and months may go by without any work being done. We think that we have come up with a potential safeguard:
Always have 2 projects going!
That doesn’t mean you’re writing 2 scripts at the exact same time. But it does mean that you can spend two or three months doing a first draft on project A, and then put it in a drawer. The next couple of months you spend on project B, doing a draft. When that’s done, you place it in the drawer and take out the first project for a second draft.
Advantages: 1) Getting your distance to a draft before reworking it, without spending two months picking lint out of your belly button. You’re constantly working. 2) You stand a much better chance of actually doing two screenplays a year. 3) You have that good feeling inside, a sense of intellectual and artistic surplus, because there is always another project you’re excited about getting to, and it’s waiting for you in the drawer.
Pål
This is definitely the way to work for us. Other writers even manage to juggle more than two projects at a time. But for us, two is perfect right now.
Of course, this requires us to hoard story ideas like squirrels collecting nuts. You need to build a virtual bank account of ideas that you can draw upon when it´s time to start a new project. Sometimes an idea consists of a sentence or a simple image, other times an entire storyline. The important thing is to pick the ideas that makes your heart beat faster.