Could you write 14 short scripts in 14 days?
I signed up for the Scriptly Writing Screenwriting Challenge for the first time on 8 September 2020 during the lockdown. I saw an ad for it on the BBC Writer’s Room Twitter feed. It asked the question, “Could you write 14 short scripts in 14 days?” I didn’t think I could, but me being me, decided that I could not leave the gauntlet just laying there. But it turns out that yes, yes I can.
I confess it was a stressful couple of weeks, where I got up and wrote until I finished a script. Even when I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about what I might write. Everything I did write I thought was rubbish. I was tired and grumpy by the end of the two weeks. But it was an amazing experience.
I wrote 14 short screenplays between 10th to 23rd October 2020. Not all of them… No, none of them was great. I wrote one script a day between 9 am and 10 pm, for goodness sake. I wasn’t going to write my masterpiece. But, by the end of the fortnight, I had 14 screenplays that I would never have had otherwise.
Plus, prior to the challenge, I had never written a screenplay before. The only script I had written was for the stage that relied very much on dialogue. I didn’t even have any idea how to format a screenplay or write so visually.
The wonderful thing I found afterwards though, was that as first drafts go, not all scripts were half as bad as I had originally thought. The sometimes bizarre themes and prompts had forced me out of my comfort zone and made me write things I would not have considered had I not taken the challenge. And there are a few I would definitely like to re-read and work on further in the future. These are the scripts I wrote during the 14 day challenge.
