After Ten Thousand Years I'm Free: Time to Conquer Summer

As of today, I took my last final for the semester. Leading up to this week, I was freaking out quite a bit because I have anixety, blah blah blah, and sometimes that anxiety tells me things that aren't true. For example, "If you fail this final which is only 10% of your grade you will fail the class and have to take it again." Anxiety is like playing a game of Operation except you never know where the buzzers are.

i too emerge from my trash can at the end of the semester to wreak havoc

Anyway! I took my last final, which means that my summer has officially begun. Last summer, I did a lot of writing over the summer break--not all of it great, but to get good at something, you have to practice! (And if you have not read my previous blog post about practicing, I recommend you do so!)

I'm glad to have completed something. There's something about finishing things that's really rewarding, you know? Check the box, turn the report in, what have you.

This summer, I have quite the extensive project I will be undertaking. This semester, I took a writing for feature films course--basically it teaches students how to write screenplays and the correct format--and for my final project, we had to write the first 25-30 pages of a screenplay and pitch the idea to our professor and be graded accordingly.

I had an idea, and I submitted it, and I honestly felt like a dumbass. My brain was telling me it was a dumb idea, and no one would like the script or even consider making a movie out of it, so what was the point of even trying?

me submitting my script

So I was feeling preemptively disappointed, when my professor came up to me in class and said, "So, I read your project, and I've pitched your idea to a few of the other professors here, without mentioning you name, and they said that you need to finish this screenplay and get it out there. Submit it to Netflix, Hulu, whatever. It's really good, and you need to finish it."

So my project for the summer is to finish that screenplay, and submit it. And the hope is to have it be picked up for production, have it turned into a film. Or a Netflix series, if they want to do that; after they buy the screenplay, it'll be out of my hands.

The prospect of really creating something to be produced and air in people's homes and have it be my idea is a little scary, and different than what I originally envisioned. When my professor first told me, I kind of scoffed at the idea, because I want to write fiction, not screenplays. I hated most of the process in the class because I felt it was so rigid and had so many rules.

But I think part of my problem is that I felt like it wasn't my dream initially for the story to be in novel form, not screenplay form. I mean, every author wants their novel to be adapted for screenplay, I think, but I think I thought I was skipping a step of me being a novelist first.

I think now I've come to terms that the story will be better told as a screenplay than as a novel. Maybe I can write the "novel adaptation" later, since it's my idea--who knows, they adapt movies to books all the time, and since it's my idea, I can be the one to do it right.

That's my summer plan, though; finish my screenplay and try to market it to be picked up, and (hopefully) be published, in some weird roundabout way.

Wish me luck of course, and I wish everyone else luck in their summer plans.