Dave's Rickety Bridge

Christina at Development Hell asked what my crossing the chasm story was. And since I take requests, here goes.

Dave's Skinny Butt Crosses the Chasm -- Part One

When I got serious about writing screenplays I decided to...

Lock myself in a room.

For two years.

My plan was to allot two years and crank out as many scripts as I could. The idea was to rid my system of 1) all the "important"/therapy scripts, and 2) all the crappy scripts.

I succeeded on the former and failed on the latter.

The other part of my plan was to emerge from my cave with 3) a general idea of what the hell I was doing, rather than a fortunate one-script accident, and 4) a backlog of scripts to show agents and/or managers when they uttered the inevitable "what else do you have".

On those counts I more or less succeeded.

And then there was the part of the plan where I forced myself to crank out pages on a daily basis. Seven days a week (I believe that's the definition of daily). To work my ass off. To not baby one script for more than three or four months. To treat writing like a job even though I wasn't getting paid for it. To pound slabs of beef with my bare hands that were actually ground beef patties on my kitchen counter because I don't have a walk-in cooler.

Sure, I make it sound all hardcore Viking, but it was really just a guy sitting at a computer for a couple hours everyday. With a Viking hat on. And ground beef between his fingers.

So that's the way I handled it. It's different for everyone. But when I came out of the self-imposed exile, I had a script I felt good about. And a couple others that, while not as solid, I felt had decent concepts behind them (remember the WB Hallway Test)

And then I went about pursuing a manager. More to come...