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.