I’ve been working on my screenplay lately.

I started this thing almost a year ago. I took a 10-week screenwriting class last spring, and I actually started and finished a first draft during those 10 weeks. My instructor had never had a student actually finish a first draft before, but I decided I was going to do it. I took it as a challenge, I think. So I finished it the night before the final class, and I’ve been working on the script intermittently since then.

A standard movie screenplay is between 90 and 120 pages. My first draft was 151 pages — too long. In my second draft I managed to cut out 50 of those pages. My most recent draft is 104 pages, which is more where it should be.

It’s a story I’d always wanted to write. In fact, I’d tried several times before. I tried it as a short story; I tried it as a novel. Those efforts went nowhere, because I kept getting bogged down in descriptive, flowery prose.

Then I tried it as a screenplay, and the story just flowed out of me.

Doing it as a script enabled me to get on with the damn story. It feels so much more alive, and it was more fun to write. The dialogue just flowed down the page, plunk plunk plunk. I’m good at dialogue — I wrote my own three-week cheesy daytime soap opera when I was 14 (gay much?) and wrote a bunch of scenes during a yearlong playwriting class in college. The screenplay I’ve been writing actually flowed out of one of those extended playwriting scenes.

I presented about 40 pages of my first draft during my screenwriting class, and I got really good vibes from both my instructor and the other students. Now my script is nearly at a point where I’m ready to start showing it to friends so I can get feedback from them. And then… I try to get it out there into the world.

And if this screenplay doesn’t sell just yet, that’s OK — I’ve already got some other story ideas.