Screenwriting Blog
Posted on by Courtney Meznarich

“Flashes of Brilliance” As Screenwriter Kaylord Hill Wraps Up Week 3 of SoCreate’s Screenwriter Stimulus Challenge

As part of SoCreate’s Screenwriter Stimulus, we promised screenwriter Kaylord Hill that we’d pay him $1,000 per week each week in December if he promised to write 20-30 pages per week, emerging from 2020 with a finished script and $4,000 in his pocket. So far, he’s beating that deadline, with hopes to finish draft one of his feature-length script this weekend so he can focus on draft two before month-end. He’s been able to take some time off work to get the writing job done, and we couldn’t be more proud of him or happier to support his screenwriter journey.

This week, it’s all about taking notes, and not the kind of screenplay notes you’d think. Kaylord explains how notes to himself help him capture “flashes of brilliance” while he completes his first draft.

"Good morning, good morning. At least I am shooting in the morning. I don’t know if you’ll get this in the morning, but if you don’t, good evening, good afternoon, all that stuff in between. Folks, it’s week three of the SoCreate Screenwriter Stimulus challenge. It is Friday, and I have a couple more days to go before my deadline for this third week is in front of me.

Folks, all I have for you today is marching ahead. I have moved, obviously, if you watched the last blog, you know I have moved my deadline up for the script. So, my goal is, because I did that, I am really, really pressing myself and put a little bit of pressure on myself to finish early. What’s most important to me is getting a very good rewrite done. That’s where I’m at my strongest. And so, right now, we’re just marching ahead. I’ve written about ten pages this week, and I’m about 25-30 pages away from my goal where I can feel comfortable saying “the end.” So, I’m about 25-30 pages away. I feel good about thematically where the story is. I don’t know my characters entirely well, I know parts of them, I know certain aspects about them, but I’m looking forward to the second draft next week because I will have four to five days away from work and responsibilities to really figure them out. And I’m hoping to really put together what we call a real working first draft, where the bones, maybe you don’t see all the nuance, maybe you don’t see all the sort of special things I’m trying to accomplish in the script, but what you do see, you see the structure, and you see the bones.

And so, for the second draft, that’s really my goal for next week is really, really polishing off the structure and bones so that people can galvanize that a story does live here, and they may not quite know the characters, but they know that there’s something interesting going on, right?

My biggest takeaways from these last couple days, especially this week for me, has been taking notes during my rough draft. I think that they’re going to be … I think writing, it’s tough, right? Ya’ll know that. I think there are going to be flashes of brilliance, or, hopefully, you know it’s all brilliant, but there are definitely going to be some flashes of brilliance in your rough draft. And I think it’s important to not ignore them. And sometimes you don’t have, maybe you don’t have the time, maybe you don’t have everything there to sort of put it all together. But you know something’s bubbling with the thought that you had or whatever you wrote, and take that note. Take notes. So, there are a lot of times throughout this drive where I’ve written something, and I’m like, oh, that’s good. And so I’ll make a note of it. I’ll write notes on it, so then going into the second draft, I know this is something I want to capitalize on. This is something that I want to be a bigger piece of the story.

The rom-com I feel like it’s in a good place right now. It’s more rom than com. So, it’s romantic, there are some notes of comedy, not as many notes of comedy as I would like, but that may be something I have to sort of look at as a year-long trajectory. I may have to look at that as, you know, how am I going to infuse comedy. That may be a challenge or a learning milestone that I take away from this is, you know, right now this is a romance drama, how do I infuse comedy into it? And so sometimes there are going to be things that are going to come up that, they won’t be easy fixes, they won’t be quick fixes. It’s definitely a marathon when it comes to creativity when it comes to writing. And so I may have to fix the comedy part of this on the backend of things.

That’s all I got, folks. It’s Friday. Good morning. I’m marching ahead. I hope you’re marching ahead in your writing journeys and your scripts as well. Until next time, until I see ya’ll Monday, pages going down. See you soon. "

—SoCreate's Screenwriter Stimulus Winner Kaylord Hill
Courtney Meznarich, Director of Community Outreach
Courtney Meznarich Director of Community Outreach
@courtonthecoast

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