Screenplay in three weeks – am I crazy?
As a professional screenplay reader/editor and as someone who’s had a script reach the final rounds of the Nicholls fellowship, I’d say that the odds of you writing something in two weeks that will make it past the first round are very low. I’d worked off-and-on on my script for eight months and was on my third draft (and since then I’ve performed another rewrite). If, however, this is a deadline that you need to set to force you to just sit down and produce, then by all means go for it. But do so knowing that it is an exercise. Sometimes as a writer, we need to set concrete goals to help motivate us. The tricky part isn’t writing 120 pages in two weeks, it’s writing a polished, professional script that can hold its own against some fierce competition. I’ve read some really good first drafts but everything needs a rewrite and some polish to really shine. And they do allow people to reenter their scripts in later years so feel free to submit it this year and then spend the next 12 month
I’ve only written one successful screenplay, but I did the initial draft in 5 days and cleaning up took another three days. However I had it reasonably well planned in my head beforehand, I knew the characters and the acts, and had some good ideas for specific dialogue and scene ins and outs. And by luck those things didn’t change much during execution. If you’re going in cold it will be hard to get something you’re happy with in two weeks, but if you’ve got your acts in mind then it’s very doable. If you’ve written prose you’d be absolutely astounded to the amount of blank space in a screenplay. The pages add up much faster. (None of the above applies if you’re one of those obsessive writers to frets over single words and rewrites every sentence a dozen times.
