I am starting from scratch

Hello and welcome back. For this week's update, we have a pretty big one, as you already saw in the title, and no, it's not clickbait. I am really changing my story, with only two months left to get a full draft out. Let me tell you why.

So, as you know, I had been struggling with my story for the last month. I was struggling with setting a time to write and sticking to it. But what is worse, I had lost all excitement for my story. This realization came a few days ago when I had a problem in act one, where the murder mystery was really convoluted, with lots of unnecessary or weird info. So I went back to check how I could fix and simplify it, and in the process, I found myself asking the question: What is the point of the story? What is the important or the nucleus of why I am writing this? in hopes that answering that question would give me a little clarity on how I can fix my first act. However, what I found was that I really didn't like what I was writing at all. To me, it wasn't so much a problem with the story because I thought it had cool interesting characters with good and stong conflict, but rather that I had found myself writing a thriller police investigation. A genre that I didn't feel like writing at all, with characters I didn't really connect with. Nothing about the movie was working for me, and I was the only one to blame. So ultimately, I decided that what I needed to do is change the story.

Where am I currently at?

Honestly, I am a bit of trouble. I am supposed to hand in a first draft in one month and a half approximately. Obviously, my tutor wasn't really happy about this change, and the general advice is that I am not going to have enough time, that I simply should go and rethink my original story to make it fit.

And I can see where they are coming from, and honestly, they are not wrong. It is pretty crazy for me to attempt to write a new story from scratch when I have been struggling with writing this one for months. But I feel like I have to do it. Honestly, I think I ended up with the wrong idea because I was making questions regarding how strong the conflict was, how layered the characters were, and if it had a good chance of being bought and produced. And that is the wrong mindset.

I forgot to take a look at myself and ask what I really felt like writing, what would actually excite me about writing. So would I tell you to go and abandon your screenplay for a new shiny idea? Probably not. So why do I do it? Well, because I don't think it is a matter of it just being a shiny new idea, I think it is a matter that there is something that never truly connected with my story, I was writing it for the wrong reasons. I was being too caught up in trying to make it "good" that I forgot to make it interesting and worthwhile writing for me. Ultimately, if you happen to be in a situation just like my own, you have to make the decision. It is something that only you can know.

This effectively gives me around 2 months to go from absolutely nothing to a complete and revised and rewritten screenplay that I am going to present.

How am I approaching the challenges?

Obviously, I am heavily against the clock, but I have faith in what I am doing, whereas before I was focused on making a story that was "good" or interesting, and I was being as a result a bit of a perfectionist. Now there is only one thing the story needs to be. And that is a story that I enjoy writing. In addition, when writing the full draft, I won't care about quality, just about putting as many pages out a day as I possibly can because then I will have something to correct. It is okay if what I write isn't perfect or even good.

Aside from the change in mindset, I will set a time to write every day, and I will do my absolute best to stick to it.

I’ll keep you posted

Well, so if you are just joining in, this is a perfect time; I am gonna redo my entire wtory just with a lot less time in between. So welcome aboard; you are experiencing either my most brilliant decision in months or my most stupid; only time will tell. I will see you next week.