Only My Scriptwriting

I Have it, But I Don't Have It

I Have It, But
I Don’t Have It

The good news is that I have my spreadsheet partially done, but the bad news is that I had to compromise myself to do it. No matter how I tried to finish it, I couldn’t do it. This is the only way I could think of to finish this phase of my Water Wars scriptwriting project. It’s not as bad as it reads, though.

What does compromise mean? It means that the only way to finish this spreadsheet was to make all the Acts seven and a half minutes long aka fifteen scenes for each Act. That will equal nine pages per Act and fifty-four pages per script with the new fifty-five lines per page Industry Standard. The old way only saved a page.

Only one page per Act, that’s not too bad. Fifty-four pages are still within the limitations for all of the contests and professional sales. That’s not the compromise I’m talking about, though. It’s not the reason why I finally finished my spreadsheet. It is one of the reasons, but it’s not the main reason for my compromise.

Before this compromise, my Teaser Acts and Tag Acts were ten scenes long. My Act Ones and Act Threes were fifteen scenes long and my Act Twos and Act Fours were twenty scenes long. Now they are all fifteen scenes long. That’s why I call it a compromise. I don’t want to do it, but it doesn’t look like I have any other choice.

It's not as bad as it reads, though. I could have continued trying to do it the other way, but I don’t think I was ever going to find is solution to my problems. This was the only way I think I could move this project forward. I’m still not ready to start writing my single sentences and paragraphs for my Act Breakdowns, Story Outlines, and Scene Outlines.

I still have a couple of things I need to do before I’m done with this spreadsheet. One thing is to decide which compromise I’m going to make. I’ve narrowed it done to two, but I don’t like either one of them that much. After all, one limits my secondary characters to one or two scenes per Act. The other one is either two or three scenes per Act.

The one with the two or three scenes per Act for Reen, Voonc, and Kiirra I like better than the other one. There is one drawback I don’t like though. One of my main characters has a five-and-a-ten scene in their Act. I don’t like that. It would be a lot better if one of the other main characters had one of those scenes.

Unfortunately, that can only happen with the other choice I need to decide upon for this project. The other thing I need to do to finish this spreadsheet is to write the other five Parts or Episodes for it. Luckily, I only need to do two more. After all, I have already done the ones for Chaad. Now all I need to do are the ones for Suuri and Hoolle.