The Big Picture

Oh do I feel like a doofus. What a gulla-bull...

I've been working on this script for months. And months (it's not been the best year grindstone wise). I've been forging away and checking back to my little breakdown of what happens when, looking up at my notice board to get the big picture.

'Big picture' my jacksie.

I was writing away just now and I thought, OK, I've got to the mid point. I reckon I can blast on to the end of act two tonight (since I'm in pretty good spirits). Then I thought, 62 pages - wow. That's a long way in for a mid point on a fifty minute drama.

So I had a look at some other people's scripts for similar length slots.

What do you know, they're all around sixty-two pages. That's nice but there's a lot of stuff I'll cut, this is a rough draft after all. Although, there's a lot of notes I've made about things I want to expand on or add in during the redraft, this is a rough draft after all.

Then it hit me like a train, in a moment of complete clarity, an epiphany you might say: my scene breakdown is for two episodes, not one.

Of course I doubted myself. I said 'You're just saying that so you can tell yourself it's finished.'

'No I'm not,' I replied defensively.

'Yes, you are,' I insisted, 'I'm you, and I know how fed up of this first draft you are.'

'Still no actually,' I answered cockily, 'look at the structure, it's three acts. You're breakdown is six acts.'

'Shit,' I said, 'it's finished and I've got episode two planned already.' Then I gave myself a high five.

I badly needed an epiphany on this one and there it is. I'm happy. The draft is finished. Now I can legitimately go back and tidy it and stick bits in, draw stuff out and generally beat it into shape (which I was fighting the urge to do already), and I've got episode two ready to draft if I like what shape it turns out to be.

That's a nice big bucket of awesome.