Welcome
Welcome to my website! This place started as a blog where I wrote a logline every day, and I still somewhat keep up that habit, but the name isn't quite as literal these days. I also sometimes turn loglines into screenplays, which are all available to read, including some earlier drafts.
Whatever brought you here, I hope you find what you're looking for; if not, feel free to contact me!
Why do people share excerpts of their script for feedback?
Just a quick rant.
So often, people online will share tiny portions of their script - single scenes, whatever - to get targeted feedback, as though that little chunk of story exists in a void. I don't often give feedback to random scripts on reddit, but it's really frustrating when I want to, but the bit they give me isn't enough to give them the advice they want.
Sometimes I want to be able to skim what came before to see if an issue is repeating in their work, or if it's just showing up here. Sometimes it depends on information that they think is obvious because they came up with everything, but is actually completely baffling without some earlier bit of context. Sometimes it's what comes next that's important, as we need to see how a given event plays out over the course of things.
I get that it often comes out of a place of wanting to be polite and not waste time - "I don't want them to think I expect feedback on the whole script, so I'll only share the relevant parts" - and I appreciate that, I really do. But just give me the whole script anyway, and tell me you're only asking me to read pages X through Y. I promise that even if I do read more, I won't hold it against you.
Editing Treatments
So, I've written a couple treatments by now, and on the whole I like it. I can see how doing this over time is going to make coming up with stories faster and easier.
However.
I think I'm missing something by just churning them out. My loglines are a little "just churned out," but that's fine for them because, despite the blog, I'm mostly writing them to get ideas down, not for presentation. Editing them and cleaning them up might be good practice for pitching or something, but it's not gonna help me write better screenplays.
For treatments, though, when I just churn one out and post it, I feel like I'm missing something. Yes, I'm getting practice coming up with stories, and this is going to help me be able to flesh out ideas easier and faster. But if I'm not revisiting them and editing them, is it going to help me flesh out ideas well?
First New Treatment
Wrote a new treatment, kind of a hack job but it's alright. When I used to write treatments I'd spend a full week of effort on them, but for this one I was still kind of figuring out if I wanted to do it during the week, so it wound up a bit of a rush job.
I am okay with that in general, but it does have me questioning things. I'm thinking back to why I stopped my screenplay-a-month process, and how what inevitably happens is that when I abbreviate the writing process, I don't have as much room to flesh out the real depth and the good parts. Writing this treatment alone, I didn't just bang it all out start to finish; I'd keep coming up with threads I'd need to reweave back into the beginning, and some of them made it in, but others I just didn't have time to include.
Thinking about Writing Treatments Again
UPDATE:
I went ahead and gathered all my old (short) treatments and posted them HERE. If I don't wind up writing new ones in the next month or so I may take them down, or more likely find a clean way to add them to the Other Writings page.
ORIGINAL POST:
Quick history of this website. This started as a writing exercise of, believe it or not, writing a logline every day. It worked great! Whereas before the website I would sometimes struggle to come up with ideas for new screenplays, after a couple months I already had more ideas I wanted to write than I'd ever get around to, and was in good enough practice coming up with ideas that even if I lost everything I'd posted, I'd be able to come up with new ones no problem.
But I didn't stop there; I was also writing a short (~3 pages) treatment every week, and a longer (~10 pages) treatment every month. The idea being that I'd then pump out a full first draft every two months or so, and then polish that into a final draft over the next few months. So in theory, once I was up to speed, I'd be writing six screenplays, twelve long treatments, and fifty short treatments a year.
Obviously, that never quite happened.
How I Write: Music
Music is a big part of my writing process, in a pretty structured way. When I started, I'd just kind of listen to music (or not) as I wrote without thinking too much about it - maybe I'd listen to something I liked, maybe something instrumental to not distract me, whatever. But when I was working on War of the Bands, where music was such a huge part of the script and the tone, I got kind of serious about it.
For War of the Bands, I had a handful of albums that I'd bounce back and forth between depending on what part of the screenplay I was working on, with a few specific exceptions for the battle scenes. The main two bands were Linkin Park and Motion City Soundtrack, but there were sections that were Skrillex, Jay-Z, Charlie Daniels Band, and even more in earlier drafts.1) I had a couple playlists put together in Grooveshark (remember Grooveshark?) that I'd bounce between, and it really showed me the power of music for getting into the right headspace.