14 Scripts in 14 days

I wrote 14 scripts in 14 days and here's what I learned...

Not long ago I found myself in a writing slump. After months of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions here in the UK and with every boring, monotonous, excruciating day playing out the same again and again, I decided I needed to make a change. That's when I found The Literal Challenge, an organisation bringing together a global writing community through various writing challenges and prompts.

The challenge I signed up to was called 'Scriptly Writing' and consisted of daily emails offering a theme or prompt for that days script. There were two routes available, the casual route or the timed route. Rather cockily, I took the timed route meaning I had to submit a script every day by 10am. As you can imagine, this was actually incredibly hard - I don't know what I was thinking. That said, I DID IT.

As someone who can be very self critical about their writing and cringes at the idea of any first draft, I knew this was the challenge for me. It forced me to actually submit work, unfinished or not, and be at peace with the fact that it was probably utter and complete shite. Actually, there was no probably about it... they were shite, but that's the beauty of it.

My shite babbling brain was kicked into gear and regardless of whether or not my scripts were good, they were full of fresh ideas and perspectives. I was writing Thrillers, romantic comedies, gothic horrors, TV sci-fi, historical drama, and heist films staring late, great drag queens. There were no limits to my storytelling! I went to bed after receiving that evenings prompt thinking about all the possible ideas I could explore. I woke up thinking about my characters. And I spent my days either writing, or thinking about writing.

Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't all fun and games. The first week flew by as my naivety and excitement took hold, but as seven days turned into eight, things began to get tricky. I remember the burn-out. The late night packets of Wotsits and the hopelessness of staring blankly out to the vast openness of the sea without a single idea or thought in my head. But it was all part of the process. Writing a script with no dialogue helped me to focus on my action. Writing a one-page film demanded I be concise, cut the bullshit and simply write a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Writing in new genres pushed me to think outside of my comfort zone and try things I hadn't thought of trying before. Every day I was thinking on my feet and testing my limits.

Not only did I learn to not be so precious about my work but I feel like this challenge really helped me to be creative in a way that allowed me to pluck stories out of places I didn't think to look. I realised that writing something (anything) about a thought or a memory or an observation I might have floating around my brain, regardless of whether or not its a good story idea, helped me in unlocking characters and dialogue that I could apply to other ideas. Essentially it made the storytelling part of my brain kick into overdrive to a point where I had an abundance of characters, situations, environments that I could pick and mix from and be creative.

And believe it or not, some of my short script ideas were actually quite good and are probably worth revisiting at some point. Maybe there's a setting or a character that deserves it's own television series. Who knows?

I think sometimes you just need to write and write and write until you've spilled everything in your head onto a page to make space for new ideas to form. And it worked. I finished the challenge with a great sense of achievement in my heart and an absolute repulsion to ever seeing another script again... but a week later my head was full of new ideas and I started writing and developing a new idea which I'm positive I wouldn't have thought of had I not reactivated my brain the previous week.

So, to anyone in a writers slump, I really recommend spending two weeks writing nonsense because the likelihood is that whatever follows will be genius.

Find out more and support The Literal Challenge here: https://www.theliteralchallenge.com