Sunday, October 30, 2022

Don’t Stress About Finishing An Idea (You Can Add Later)


We had yet another useful question last year so I thought I’d share the answer to that one as well.

A writer ran into the issue of having more to write but running out of time because of the deadline at noon and needing to stop and just post what they had.

They were wondering if it was OK to add to posted scripts after the fact.

The answer is, of course, yes.

Submit something by the deadline but if you want to add more later to the same idea still in progress you certainly can.

(To clarify, this doesn’t mean you can keep going back and revising the same five or six pages or lines day after day.  That’s re-writing.  The challenge is about creating significant new material each day - writing new words, new lines, new pages.)

Now, if you also want to get credit for that new material, to fulfill the writing quotient for the day whether it addresses the new day’s challenge or not, you can also do that, but you should submit it as a whole new submission for a day, not just refer us back to an older post.

Many writers did a version of this already, continuing to add on to a script that they’d worked on in previous days.  And they either just sent the new stuff, or sent the whole growing script with a marker of where the new material for the day began.

I did this a lot during the writing challenges that were run by Red Theater in Chicago.  

An example:

If you scroll to the bottom of this post (apologies for the sex scene at the beginning, shield your eyes), you’ll see a note, (to be continued)…

Then, several days later, after writing other scenes, I returned to continue this one, starting by tacking on the last few lines of the previous post and then continuing on from there with more scene…

Any variation on a theme like this is fine, just keep pushing forward and creating new stuff.  If it’s building on previously submitted stuff, that’s fine, just indicate where the old ends and the new begins (again, many writers did this instinctually without any prompting.  For new folks contemplating such a strategy, yes, by all means, do.)



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