What wonderful writing weather – luckily writers are not weather dependent creatures we can write anytime anywhere!
In fact, I was headed for LA a few weeks ago and wanted to have the opportunity to do a read through of my new screenplay ‘Last Days of the Empire Hotel’ with the producer of ‘The Olive Sisters’ while I was there. Unfortunately I was so busy coming up to the trip that I hadn’t finished the last ten minutes (one page = one minute of screen time) however fate stepped in - the flight was delayed by two hours and I managed to finish it in the departure lounge. Nothing like a deadline to focus the mind!
Lucky that I did finish it because I had the chance to read it and there would have been a very awkward silence at the 90% mark. If you think writing a novel is difficult, writing a Hollywood screenplay is that times ten. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would be writing one. Actually practically everyone in LA is writing one, last year over 50,000 screenplays were registered with the Writer’s Guild of America. That’s a lot of competition.
We had three days of 6-8 hours script meetings to get the Olive Sisters from the 13th to the 14th draft – cutting out 35 pages in the process. I was completely worn out by the time we finished.
It makes writing a novel seem like a peaceful, restful activity one would do for pleasure. Which it is.
