The Screenwriter's Journey

an online odyssey chronicling one writer's efforts to sell a screenplay

TM

Season 4

The Daily Blog

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Welcome to the Blog! This is the heart of our journey into selling a screenplay. Here you will find daily postings about the projects I am currently writing, rewriting and rewriting again. I'll explain my process and and the mechanics of screenwriting, incorporating all revisions into the samples located on the Projects page. But in addition to the writing, we'll delve into the business side of screenwriting and unravel the mysteries of writing query letters and developing pitches. Then when it's all put together, we'll set our marketing plan into action and see what kind of response we get. Hopefully, it won't necessitate a trip back to the drawing board.

But the blog isn't all work and no play. I'll be taking you to film festivals, workshops and pitch fests for an insider's looks at all the action behind the scenes. If you haven't attended one of these events in the past, this will be a good opportunity for you to understand how they work and what to expect when you get there. And you are going to attend, right? You're on a journey, after all.

The blog will also feature interviews with fellow screenwriters, actors, directors and producers, giving you valuable insight into what they've experienced and what they expect when working with writers. The blog will be an indispensible font of information for you as you begin the journey to sell your own screenplay. You can begin that journey right now by subscribing to the blog using the form below.

You can also follow The Screenwriter's Journey on Twitter (William Gilmore #ScriptJourney), Facebook (The Screenwriter's Journey) and YouTube (The Screenwriter's Journey) using the links at the bottom of this page.

So check out a blogcast and then get back to writing. Remember, the journey to a successful screenplay begins with a single keystroke.

Watch the thumbnail versions of the blogcasts by clicking the images below, or to view a larger version and comment on the blog, click the title or the 'Read More' button.

Day 61: October Wrap Up

All in all, October was a pretty good month. I achieved 56 pages of new material plus all the written and video blogs. 28 new articles were posted to the News Page and a new ScriptTalk™ interview went up. I also ended the month with 49 new Twitter followers despite pulling back on my online presence during the last week and a half of the month. On the negative side, however, I did not write the second episode of Everyday Clowns that I had hoped to complete. I have a reading f

Day 57: Uh-oh! A Setback for Come Ups

Things were going so well. I felt good about the story, the formatting was just about perfect and I spent three days of intense rewriting to clean and polish the characters. What could go wrong? Well, it wasn't so much what could go wrong, as it was what was already wrong. The issue I've had with Shep in my screenplay Come Ups has finally reared its ugly head. I thought I had worked around the problem, and that was a problem in itself. You can't work around a problem; you ha

Day 56: Come Ups Format and Polish Draft

It's been a few days since I've posted, but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy. In fact, it's been about 4 days of really intense writing, rewriting, formatting, some more rewriting, a little cutting, a lot more cutting, some new writing and then finally another round of rewriting. Whew! What I thought was going to be a fairly simple process has turned out to be a lot more complicated than I anticipated. I began with the formatting. I spent Friday reviewing David Trottier'

Day 52: Come Ups Draft Complete

Let me state up front that my math sucks. I've accomplished 42 pages of material so far this month, not 52 as stated in the video. Even so, that puts me well above my minimum daily average for the month, but still about 10 pages short of the goals that I set out for myself at the beginning of the month. I still owe an episode of Everyday Clowns with 9 days left. If I can complete that, I will accomplish all my stated goals and maybe even squeak out a few pages more than I did

Day 50: Come Ups Cold Reading

Tonight saw the continuation of Come Ups being read at the Tuesdays@9 writers’ workshop. I submitted the middle half of Act 1, which was a challenge for a cold reading due to the significant amount of action contained within that section. I streamlined things a bit by reducing the bulk of the main action, the gun battle between the boys in the boat and Reydel’s crew, to about six lines. This kept the audience abreast of what was happening without becoming ‘storytime.’ The fir

Days 47, 48 & 49: A Roundup

This is that time when everything you’ve been working on catches up with you, and you just don’t feel like doing anything else. You burn out – temporarily. You can’t stop doing everything because it is too hard to get it going again. You can back off a bit, but you’ve still got to keep moving forward. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. There is no time to pause and take a break just because you don’t feel like doing something. That’s not to say you can’t ta

Day 46: A Rambling Rant

It's been a couple of days of building frustrations. I seemed to be pleased with my progress on Come Ups a few days ago and had a decent reading of Everyday Clowns on Tuesday, but since then I've had a bit of a set back as I started looking at the third act of Come Ups. It's been weighing on my mind since I discovered it, and I'm not quite sure how to address it. Basically I've ignored it and turned my attention to catching up on the website and social media networks. However

Day 45: ScriptTalk Done - Yay!

I finally finished the ScriptTalk™ interview with Joey Adams. It took another 4 hours of solid editing. There is a lot of detail work that has to go into each one of these. If yesterday's editing was the mindless part, today was the precision surgery. There's alot of smoothing out the audio and trimming up the pauses, downloading B Roll and transcoding it, covering up the jump cuts and applying a graphics pass. I'm trying not to go overboard with the details, but I don't want

Day 44: ScriptTalk plus 3rd Act Issues

Wow, I was tired today. The late night on Monday and the early day on Tuesday has worn me out. Instead of going to bed last night, I pulled out the third act of Come Ups and started reading. I probably should have gone to bed. I discovered that I have a stronger ending to Act 2 about 7 pages later than where I thought I was ending it. So right now my second act is overwritten and my third act is under written. I've tried to convince myself that this is just a bend of the rule

Day 43: ScriptTalk and Clowns

Today was a busy, full day of activity. After a late night of reviewing the work I did on Come Ups, I rose early to do some rewrites on the latest Everyday Clowns episode to prep it for a reading tonight at the IAWTV writer's workshop. I was hoping to cut it down a bit from its nearly 16 pages and ended up adding material to make it 17 pages. It raised a few eyebrows at the reading, but they went through with it anyway. If the previous episodes hadn't made such a good impress

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