Only My Scriptwriting

Back to the Drawing Board

Back to the Drawing Board

Thought that I had at least half of my spreadsheet for my Water Wars scriptwriting project completed. Unfortunately, it looks like I’m wrong about that. It’s worse than that, though. Not only am I wrong about halfway being done with this spreadsheet I also need to start it almost completely over again sort of.

I’m not starting it over completely just yet, but I do have a lot of new problems with it. Problems I’m not sure how I’m going to figure out yet. I still have the basic layout for this spreadsheet, but even that needs a little bit of tweaking. It’s not as bad as it reads, though.

The way I had my spreadsheet set up before today was with a single character starting and ending the Teaser Act and the Tag Act. Two characters beginning and ending Acts One to Four with the same character beginning and ending each Act. That had to be changed because of my rule of no two characters being back-to-back characters.

I don’t even like them one Act back from each other, but I can live with that. Next to each Act with the same scene number, I don’t like and won’t use. The same is true for only one character before I use that character again. Even if that one character almost starts a new Act.

That wasn’t too hard of a problem to fix. Instead of two characters starting Act One to Act Four, I went back to only one character starting and ending an Act. This helped to solve one problem, but it also created a new problem. A problem I don’t know if I will be able to figure out. I think I can still do it, but I may not be able to do it too.

What I’m trying to write is that I thought I was almost ready to start writing my single sentences and paragraphs for the Act Breakdowns, Story Outlines, and Scene Outlines for this project. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon if it ever happens at all.

Of course, I may have had a better chance of figuring these problems out if I had more time to do it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have as much time as I thought that I had to work on this spreadsheet. My brother and I had a lot that we needed to get done today. As a result, I didn’t have as much time as I thought to work on this project.

There are a couple of other things I could try for this project. One thing is I haven’t given up on my fifty minutes per Part or Episode yet. I prefer to do the forty-five-minute format, but I still might have to check into that too. In a way, I have already started thinking that way.

The other thing I could try is ending my Acts with a different character. Up until now the same character began and ended each Act, but it doesn’t need to be that way. As with the forty-five-minute format, I would prefer to do it like I have been doing it, but I may have no other choice but to end these Acts with a different character.