smartgrrrl's guide to stuff

I signed up for Script Frenzy. It’s the lesser-known sister of National Novel Writing Month, during which participants race the month of November to complete a 50,000-word work of fiction. Script Frenzy takes place in April, and the goal is 100 pages in 300 days. The script can be for stage or screen, or it could be a graphic novel.

No, I’ve never written a script before. But then, I’d never written a novel before November (I still haven’t — I haven’t gone back to look at the draft I wrote for NaNo but I’m pretty sure I just tacked THE END onto my 50K+ words) and lord knows I’m not doing much of anything else at the moment. (No, I’m not bitter.) (Much.)

But I’ll tell you something — I secretly think I’m going to be better at scriptwriting than I am at fiction writing. I’m not sure why, I could be delusional, but the very first idea for a novel I ever had, the first year I attempted NaNo (and got about 2,000 words in before I quit), I opted to write a story about an incident that initially struck me as something that would work well on the stage. Without knowing why, I saw it as a play and not a novel. It’s possible that that’s why I didn’t get far trying to write the novel version; I was writing the novelization of a play that hadn’t been written yet.

Well, that and I hadn’t outlined a damn thing. I’m not making that mistake again.

I’m not saying I’m going to be a natural at this . . . but then, hell, maybe I will be. I’ve never done this before; I could be a genius at it. I’m excited to find out.

Mostly because I HAVE AN IDEA, and I think it’s a good one. I’m taking that original idea, which is loosely about sexual politics and power and violence, and mashing it up with something that I’ve actually been trying to write as a blog post, but it’s not coming out the way that I want it to. That topic is also about sexual politics and power, though in vastly different ways, and hopefully ways that will complement each other. Both topics are autobiographical, one indirectly, and together make up a fairly crucial moment in the development of my feminist sensibilities and politics.

I don’t know how it’s going to start right now, or whether it’s going to be a stage play after all (right now in my profile I have it listed as a screenplay), but I know who my two main characters are and I know how it ends — EXACTLY how it ends. Right now, the last line is “Yeah.” Yes, really.

(I hope that wasn’t too vague up there — I’m not ready quite yet to share specifics with the Internet.)

Considering the burst of energy that occurred just after signing up and arriving at MY IDEA, I think Script Frenzy is just the thing I needed to drag myself out of the rut I was in. New project, new challenges. Yeah.

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