For a while now I’ve wanted to try my hand at writing a television spec but I didn’t really watch TV so I never found a show I was comfortable diving into until I caught TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES.
Soon after the series kicked off, I had a kernel of an idea for a script but I couldn’t break the story. Everything I hashed out didn’t fit the tone of the series and speccing TV is all about writing with the show’s voice. It was always “on again, off again” until May 12th. That day I received an email from the Austin Film Festival informing me that they’d extended the deadline for their teleplay contest to June 8. Okay, that gives me a deadline but I still hadn’t figured out the story. Then one morning as I was in the shower, BAM–I cracked the story wide open. That was May 17th. May 18th, Fox cancels the show.
This is the point when I should have thrown in the towel. But I kept hearing Brian Peterson saying that “TV writers get 2 weeks to write a script but sometimes they only get 3 days so if you can’t write fast, you don’t belong in television.”
Suddenly I had something to prove to myself.
By May 26th I had a 5-page outline. By June 1st I finished my first draft of the script. I took 4 days for the first rewrite and just 2 for the second. June 8th I rushed down to the WGA to register the script. 15 minutes later I was in line at my local post office.
For a recap:
I know that isn’t a world record (you all know the ROCKY story, right?) and writing shouldn’t be a race but sometimes it is and it feels damn good to cross the finish line.
Now, time to sleep.
No, wait, time to sync hours of footage.
No, first some sleep.
Tags: Screenwriting, Television, Terminator
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