Two month ago, I had a reading of my screenplay Twig with a couple friends.  I think it’s important to let your work be heard by a trusted few who are not afraid to tell you what they think.  It’s not much of a benefit to have someone read your work and say, “Yeah, it was good”.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I want people to love my work, but sometimes I need to be told what doesn’t work.   And sometimes I recognize during a reading what does and what does not work.  I find that when you hear your work read by others, you remove yourself from the writing and thereby are able to zone in on the scripts strengths and weaknesses.

I am just finishing a re-write of Twig and in most cases a re-write involves chopping down the page count.  In Twig’s case, I actually added 10 pages.  To be fair, Twig’s last draft ran 99 pages and it felt like parts were missing and characters were poorly defined.  Having said that, I did end up cutting down chunks of plot because I believe in any re-write something has to be cut.

In the last couple months I’ve been sending my screenplays Home and Walk  out to various screenplay festivals which include:  Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, Page International Screenwriting Awards, Austin Film Festival, Act One Screenwriting Competition, WriteMovies, Screenplay Festival and BlueCat Screenplay Competition (for which I am awaiting 2 critiques regarding my script Walk).    I will be doing another re-write on Walk once I get the critiques from BlueCat and will be sending that script off yet again to the Kairos Prizes in the fall.

I recently held auditions and will be embarking on another Christmas production come the fall.   I have been in re-write mode for the past 3 months on Walk, Home and Twig.  I look forward to writing something new, this time for the stage.  And I have opportunity to write some songs and work closely with musicians creating original  tunes.    As I have said in the past, these seasonal productions have a quick turn-around as I write the play during the summer; we begin rehearsals in September and perform the play in December.  I like the immediacy of this kind of work and it gets me to exercise a different muscle, that of, putting a production together.

Okay, back to some writing.  I leave you with this quote which should encourage anyone out there who has this crazy desire to put words down on paper.

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”
Richard Bach