Writing 29 pages of a screenplay per month #3: Working my way up to a film

Evening good reader, hope you are well. For anyone who’s been reading the blog for a while, will have noticed that it’s been quite a while since I’ve done some screenwriting. For some reason a wave of determination hit me over the Easter weekend and on Saturday evening and Sunday morning I finished Stuck on You!

Stuck on You (which is a working title) is about a couple who reunite after 40 years and go on a European road trip with their grandchildren who are 18 and about to head off to university. The road trip is all thanks to a football sticker album completed by the couple when they dated in their twenties, which turned out to be worth a fair bit of money. Its 60 minutes in total, so an ideal length for a TV film.

I’m quite proud of myself for completing the screenplay as I’ve started a few that I haven’t got round to finishing. Of course first drafts are rarely any good, I can already think of a list of things to improve on it. But I’ve finished it and actually sent it to a friend to read which is a first.

It’s funny how people close to you can interpret a plot in different ways. For me it was inspired by collecting football stickers last year. However when I told my guy about the plot, he told me it was semi-autobiographical because of my close relationship with my granddad and my collection of film posters. Both points I didn’t even think about when writing Stuck on You. It’s interesting how stories can be interpreted in different ways by different people.

What I also did differently with this screenplay from other ones I’ve been writing is I didn’t do a beat sheet or develop characters in depth as I’ve done before. A beat sheet is where you write out what is going to happen every minute of the screenplay. It can give you guidance, but undecided whether it stops your mind thinking of ideas.

So I’ve completed one unfinished screenplay, and I’ve got two more incomplete. Time to visit old stories and see where they take me. One is sports based, and the other is about plan b, which one should I complete next?