Last night, I mentioned to my writers’ group that I’ve been having difficulty writing without a hard deadline. I’ve been taking an online TV writing class, and I have to produce about 10 new pages every week by 8:00pm on Wednesday, and I generally end up writing most of those 10 pages on Wednesday, rather than doing them earlier.
But this week, I wanted to finish my spec script before going out to L.A., and that meant I had to write about 20 pages. So I set out to work on that Monday morning. And I just could not focus. By the time I left for writer’s group Tuesday, I had only finished writing part of one page.
So when I got up this morning, it meant I need to write nine pages by 8pm to fulfill my class assignment. I’ve written ten pages before 8pm in one day before, so that wasn’t an impossible task, but it required me to push myself.
At 7:45pm, I finished the script. I wrote 19.5 out of the total 51 today.
Having a day this productive is a great relief to me. If ten pages in one day were my top limit, I would have to push that limit almost every day to write a 50-page script in a week. Now I just need to learn to be more productive without a hard deadline.
And I need to get packed and on the road.